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Parfit on Pains, Pleasures, and the Time of their Occurrence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Dan Moller
Dan Moller*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ08544, USA
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Extract

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Derek Parfit which I will paraphrase as follows:

You are in the hospital to have an extremely painful but completely safe Operation for which you can be given no anesthetic. In order to ease recovery, you know that the hospital will give you drugs that cause you to forget your Operation as soon as it is completed. You wake up, not remembering having gone to sleep, and ask the nurse if your Operation has been completed. She tells you that there were two patients for this Operation and she cannot remember which you are: either you already had your Operation and it was the longest such Operation ever performed, lasting ten hours, or else you are the other patient in which case your Operation is imminent, but will last only one hour.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 67 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2002

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References

1 I wish to thank Sarah Broadie for comments on a version of this paper and Derek Parfit for conversations on this subject.

2 See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 165.

3 ‘Bias’ sometimes connotes an asymmetry in attitudes which is unwarranted. Since part of what we will be investigating is whether our asymmetrical attitudes are unwarranted, we should try to hear ‘bias’ without this connotation.

4 I am passing over various controversies here. Since some philosophers deny true akrasia exists, clearly it's not obvious that the bias toward the near involves or can lead to akrasia. In this kind of ‘diachronic’ case it is particularly tempting to suppose that the choices involved may merely be the result of a failure of the imagination — that we aren't fully aware of what the later of the two outcomes of our choice involves.

5 But see Frederik Kaufman, ‘Pre-Vital and Post-Mortem Non-Existence,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1999) 1-19, for an argument that it is conceptually impossible for us to have an attitude toward pain and its timing significantly different from the one we have.

6 criticism of Parfif s view of death and its relation to bias, see Christopher Belshaw, ‘Death, Pain and Time/ Philosophical Studies 97 (2000) 317-41.

7 This argument is loosely modeled on considerations Parfit brings to the fore in sections 62-4 of Reasons and Persons. I will again emphasize, however, that if s unclear Parfit could endorse the revisionist's arguments at this point. The point of sec. 62, for instance, is that though it would be helpful for the self-interest theorist, in order to explain what's wrong with the bias toward the near, to be able to claim that it is irrational to take into account the mere timing of an experience, our bias toward the future shows that this is false, since we don't think the bias toward the future is irrational. ('Is this preference [to have pains behind us] irrational? Most of us would answer No’ [167].)

8 This distinction is rarely made, and consequently discussions of the bias toward the near are usually unclear in this respect. Parfit, for instance switches back and forth between language of concern and caring and language involving choices and action (see e.g. sec. 62).

9 It is important to recognize that to resist the first premise of the revisionist's argument, as I am attempting, it is necessary only to cast doubt on the revisionist's assertion that the bias toward the near is irrational. I don't need to show that our bias is rational. (It's not obvious whether, for any X, if X isn't irrational X must be rational. If so, the comment just made is superfluous. If not, my comment shows that in this context I nonetheless can safely ignore the question of whether our bias is rational.)

10 Here the first two kinds of claims described earlier, (a)-claims concerning whether there are reasons for our bias and (b)-claims as to whether our bias is unreasonable, come together: in order to deal with a (b)-level objection to our concern, we must find an (a)-level reason for our attitudes toward pain and pleasure.

11 Though it is acknowledged that our sense of time's passage may only be an illusion, for reasons discussed by Donald Williams in ‘The Myth of Passage,’ The Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951) 457-71.

12 The points I've been making are not purely hypothetical in their application. For an instance of the kind of mistake I've been discussing, see Kamm, Morality, Mortality vol.1, 28.