Agnes Callard: commitment

Transcript context

…Let’s say we felt the world had 30 days left. An asteroid was coming, a supernova, whatever. How would or should we behave then? Are the people who are good — do they have a better time than the people who are not good? Yes, for slightly different reasons, I think. Virtue — the more virtue you have, the more difficult the circumstances can be in which you still act and live well. If you’re in relatively easy circumstances, even just being an OK person is enough. But when you start being in a position . . . Let’s say it’s similar to being in a position of power. I think having power of any kind — wealth, political power — makes life more difficult in the sense that you need more virtue to live well. I think in the case where there’s 30 days left, you would need to be a good person to not give in to very human and very understandable panic in order to live well for the remaining 30 days. It’s different but not that different from the case in which you find that there’s 30 days left of your life. Similar issues are going to arise. I think it’s worse in the case where there’s 30 days left for everybody. We often describe people in those situations as having courage or being admirable, and it’s because the situation calls up the virtue that’s in them. I have an acquaintance who does high-energy physics, and he told me just about a week ago, “There’s a 98 percent chance the universe is infinite, and there are an infinite number of near copies of me.” I don’t believe that, actually, but he knows more about physics than I do. Let’s say that were true. Does that, or should that, in some way change the kind of meaning I give my life? In the background here, I have Samuel Scheffler’s argument, which you know very well. You studied with him. That for our individual lives, the notion that civilization continues after us has a truly major significant impact on what we do now, even though we’re gone. If future civilization matters that much, these near copies of me out there — I’ll never be in their light cone. Does or should that matter at all?…

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