Agnes Callard: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. And these other copies — my valuing isn’t predicated on them because I didn’t even know about them until a couple of minutes ago, so I couldn’t have been. But you can still ask, should they matter? I hadn’t thought about that, but I thought about a related question that comes up with David Lewis’s philosophy. David Lewis makes a similar point in the field of metaphysics as opposed to physics, saying that there are these possible worlds that are real, though they’re not actual. We live in the actual world. And I have these counterparts in the other possible worlds. The part of his theory that I always had the hardest time with is the ethical part because it looks like, if I do a good thing, then in a sense, I know my counterparts — because all the other possibilities have to be, so to speak, saturated — my counterparts are going to do the bad things. So am I just keeping my corner of the possible world space clean? How could that be? How could you make sense of the motivation if those worlds are real? There, far from thinking that I ought to take my counterparts into account, I kind of think I’m actually morally obligated not to because I go down a chain of thought that says it doesn’t matter what I do because all the possibilities will be real in any case. 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?…

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