Agnes Callard: evaluation

Transcript context

…The late Derek Parfit, or at least some time slice of the late Derek Parfit, toyed with the hypothesis that if we had a weaker belief in the continuity of self, we would fear death less. There’s a paper I read recently that suggests, at least based on poll evidence, that Tibetan Buddhist monks — who have a pretty weak degree of belief in the continuity of the self and poll as such — that they fear death more than people from other religions. What’s the best philosophical way to think about this question? It seems to me the first question is, ought we to fear death? Because then we can ask, under what system will we fear it less? I think it’s rational to fear death, but I also think that the rationality of that is bound up with the demand for courage in the face of death. We ought to fear death, and we ought to, in some sense, fight that fear. One thing that the fear of death can lead you to is to thinking that dying is the worst thing that can happen to you, and that there’s no fate worse than death. People can do terrible things if they think that. So it’s important to see that one’s life is valuable and has meaning, and therefore to fear death, but it isn’t the most important thing that there is. In terms of which metaphysics of personal identity we adopt, I don’t know. But if we were just going to let our ethics drive our metaphysics, I would say we should adopt the one that would make death worthy of fear on the one hand, but on the other hand, also make people see that there’s more to the value of their lives than, so to speak, just biological life. Let’s turn now to your new book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. There’s a sentence from the book. Let me read it, and maybe you can explain it. “Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.” What’s a proleptic reason?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.