This month in Recent Ethical Theory we are reading Thomas Nagel’s very interesting book, The Possibility of Altruism. Professor Korsgaard enjoys seeking a classroom laugh from time to time as a means of determining that we’re still listening. She therefore substituted “Larry Summers” for “G. E. Moore” yesterday when recounting Nagel’s famous hypothetical involving an unsuspecting pedestrian and an oncoming Mac truck.
The reference to Summers’ recent mishap illicited the predictable giggle from the audience, but I noticed that it could be taken in at least two ways. Either 1) tenured female Professor Korsgaard was expressing her ire regarding Summers’ comments by placing him in the path of the truck, or 2) she was characterizing the feminist reaction to his remarks as the Mac truck, and was amused that Larry had been blissfully unaware of the dangerous ground on which he tread.
Korsgaard is a sufficiently complex woman that, though I’ve been in her class twice a week all year, I can’t call this one.
By the way, special bonus points are available for convincing me that we owe a duty to our past selves.
Here, I’ll take a stab:
Suppose we’re obligated by past agreements, even those some distance in the past. That is, if I made a contract two years ago, you did your part, and now it’s come due for me to perform, I’m bound by that contract. Suppose over those two years you’ve actually changed a fair amount, such that your interests are different–maybe even such that you’d not make such an agreementnow, possibly even regret it. Call you two years ago M1, and you now M2. Suppose again we think the other party, P, has a right to your performance of the agreement. He has it by virtue of M1′s consent; absent that you’d have no duty to P. But that can only be the case if M1 is entitled to obligate M2; you couldn’t be under a duty just because any old person had agreed on your behalf, and you’re not obligated to do just ANYTHING, but only what M1 agreed to. So it can only be by virtue of a duty M2 owes M1 that the duty that M2 owes anything to P.
That’s pretty off-the-cuff, so I’m not sure it follows. Though if it DOES follow, maybe it’s just a reductio of the premise that we’re bound by past agrements.
Hmm, I can actually think of a decent way around that argument, but it’s a little convoluted and maybe you can come up with the same way around it–or a better one.
I think it’s reductio, but the application gave me pause. It’s intuitively persuasive. So, we think we can justly can bind our future selves to contracts. But why do we think so, and what are the ramifications for other antique reasons?
Nagel would say that our conception of ourselves as temporally extended beings justifies prudence: acting in furtherance of reasons we think will belong to our future selves. Many prudential acts will limit the options our future selves have to those our past selves could predict wanting. Perhaps this slows our rate of change.
We must regard ourselves as somewhat temporally extended in order to get anyhting done at all – even cooking dinner. But at some point, we may find we have little in common with some of “us” who have gone before. In a sloppy effort to reconcile these two impressions, we may from time to time evolve into different “people” who nonetheless cooperate to produce a single narrative: a life.
Viewed this way (whimsically, as a sort of group project), it may make sense to say that M2 has a duty to reciprocate M1′s cooperative effort by finishing off, integrating, or otherwise honoring past projects. After all, I couldn’t have a life without her.
And, of course, we do tend to do this. We visit graves and old high schools, tell childhood stories and keep souveniers. Sometimes, we do something only because we know that we once would’ve lept at the chance.
Notice that economics acknowledges no such value! I looked, wide-eyed, at the guy who said this and responded, “I won’t tell anyone in the econ department. They would encourage you to ignore sunk costs!”
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