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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The separateness of persons objection to utilitarianism is not serious, because the metaphysical distinction between persons that the objection relies on is not a deep fact.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The separateness of persons objection depends on a hard-and-fast metaphysical distinction between persons (i.e., the non-identity of different persons).
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    • 2.The non-identity of different persons depends on the further fact of personal identity.
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    • 3.If reductionism about personal identity is true, personal identity is not a further fact — it is not a deep metaphysical fact.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's reductionism entails that personal identity consists in overlapping chains of psychological continuity, not a further separately-existing fact.
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    • 2.If personal identity reduces to psychological continuity relations, then the boundary between persons is a matter of degree, not a discrete metaphysical divide.
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    • 3.A moral constraint that presupposes a discrete divide between persons inherits the instability of that presupposition, undermining the separateness objection's foundational premise.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Utilitarianism aggregates welfare across time-slices within a life just as it does across persons, and if intra-personal aggregation is permissible, the asymmetry the objection relies on requires a robust self/other distinction.
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    • 2.Reductionism about personal identity, as developed by Parfit in Reasons and Persons, dissolves the deep self/other distinction by showing that what matters in survival is psychological continuity, which admits of degrees across persons as well as times.
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    • 3.Without a deep self/other distinction, the separateness of persons objection cannot generate a principled asymmetry between aggregating welfare within a life and aggregating welfare across lives.
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