The Table Video

This paper explores an ethics of love, the idea that all of morality hangs of the two great love commandments. The specific focus is on the second commandment, the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. Can this commandment solve the non-identity problem, the question of whether we do wrong in producing less than the best people and in making the world a worse place for future people, whose identity in part depends on our choices? Love seems to be an attitude that is directed at a particular person and so suggests that we do not do wrong in these non-identity cases. Is this a vice or a virtue of the theory?

Transcript:

Hello. So, there’s a hand-out. Unfortunately, I don’t have a power point. My paper is entitled, An Ethics of Love and Future Generations. And Jesus say to him, “You should love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment, the second is like it, “You should love your neighbors yourself.” On these two commandments, depend the whole law and the prophets.

And this idea of all the law and the prophets, depending on the two commandments is one that I find very attractive and I have explored in my old presentation and at least one other paper. Yet, this idea of the whole of morality somehow being grounded in love. And, perhaps a slight over simplification would have the first commandment summarizing this to God and the second commandment summarizing our duties to our fellow human beings.

Now, I’m not suggesting that these two commandments would provide a decision procedure because love is often clueless and it’s hard to know how to act on love, but the idea would be to provide a theoretical grounding, right? A couple of questions arise, of course, What is love? And I think, we just heard a great, Tom gave a great analysis of love. I thought the quote you gave was lovely too.

So, I’m not gonna say too much about that. The primary, I mean, I think love would involve some sort of appreciation of the beloved and some sort of desire for union, but probably for our purposes, the main focus will be wanting to promote the well-being of the beloved. Secondly, a question that came up in the gospel was, “Who is my neighbor?” and for our purposes, I think our neighbor has to be pretty much everyone, or at least everyone we encounter because otherwise, if my duties to love my neighbor is myself, and my neighbor is my literal, personal live literally next door to me then I don’t have any obligations towards people across town or across the world.

And that would be a pretty inadequate morality, so in some sense, it’s gotta be everybody. There are some definite attractions about such morality, I think it can make sense, a lot of common sense morality, if you love someone, you’re not going to kill them, I mean barring, really special circumstances, maybe your Uncle Skittle will be an example.

Or you know, killing and defensive, and stuff and genocide, but you know you’re not, barring specifically, but you’re not gonna kill, rape, steal, lie to somebody you genuinely love, and you’re gonna help, you’re gonna be charitable towards them.

I do actually think that this ethics could answers some tough questions, perhaps questions about homosexuality and refugee crisis and so on. And I think there gonna be some areas where the ethics and love would count for the disagreement. For example, the abortion debate, there are some people think that the fetuses are someone, and hence is a neighbor, and hence not to be harmed.

And other people think of the fetuses just a mere part of the woman’s body or some thing less than a person, but, when I think, love can say, yeah, we expect that to be a divided, divisive issue. But there are some challenges for an ethics of loved one. Ones see the challenges to the completeness of the ethics, and one part of it is, well if you love someone that doesn’t really tell you exactly what their good consists in.

So, the example about your uncle, would be a good example. Another challenge is the challenge of, you know, if I love two or more people, how do I adjudicate conflict between them, so there’s an issue of justice. I have tried to address both of those questions in paper, on these hang along the wall, the prophets and the faith and philosophy. I tried to come up with an answer that came out of an ethics of love.

But also, another challenge to an ethics of love would be worries about its correctness and one worry, I think a big worry, is that it might be really, really too demanding. But, it might depend exactly what you mean by love.

If you mean something like in a real emotional connection, seven billion people is literally impossible so that will be either reason to reject an ethics of love, or a reason to take a slightly more attenuated of love. I think as a complete moral, you might leave out the animals although maybe we can include our poodles as our neighbors as well.

Ethics of Love and Future Generations

But the issue that I wanna talk about today is the issue of love and future generations. It seems to me that we have some obligations to future generations particularly now in the world that we live in where we can make a difference, we can harm our environment in really serious ways that will affect people and future generations. This may not been a problem back in Jesus time, I presume only few people, it couldn’t affect climate change back then.

But we can, and this is gonna presumably make the world, could make the world a really horrible place for people in 200, 500 years time. Maybe even cause the- demises the whole human race. And it seems like we have some kind of moral obligation not to do that, and my question here is the question of whether this can be made since of in the context of an ethics of love. So, I’m gonna talk about, first, what I call first worry is, future people, [inaudible] if you love someone it seems you have to, so this is something that someone might say, I’m not necessarily saying this myself. If you love someone, it seems you have to know her or at least have some sort of casual interaction with her.

We have the knowledge of casual interaction with people 200 years from now. So you might say, well, it doesn’t even make sense to talk about loving those people, and ethics of love can’t give us obligations towards them. So, I wanna take this in two stage, first, I’m gonna talk about future people who will exist, let’s suppose in some sense, it’s fixed who’s gonna come into existence. Maybe got a bunch of souls lined up coming, or gonna come or maybe, it’s somehow determine who is gonna come into existence. And there’s nothing we can do to make a difference to who they are. But we still haven’t met them.

Will existence gonna be a problem for future people? If the mere fact that we haven’t met them or casually interacted with them, then there’s gonna be a problem for distant people. ‘Cause I haven’t met people in Somalia or Australia. And of course, if we don’t have moral obligations to people in Somalia and Australia then the whole ethics of love would be undermine. But I think, I can make sense of loving people that I have not met, I mean, I love Shakespeare, just about as much as anybody and maybe I love Nelson Mandela and Malala, and there’s other people.

And of course, I haven’t interacted in some sense they’ve been some casual interaction there. But I think I can make sense of loving people in distant places like, I don’t know but love exactly, but I maybe its my fault, but when I think about that little boy, washed up on the beach, that little refugee boy, I can feel some sort of empathy and I can feel very sad about what happened to him and want to do things for other children like him.

So, I think we can make sense of loving people who are far away, that we have almost no interaction with. And in the same way, I think, we can think about future people and think, will there gonna be human like me? Are they gonna be created in God’s image? And they’re gonna have various needs, so I can care for them and If I am the perfect loving person I could actually love them.

I wanna focus- I wanna talk now about a second kind of promise, would be my main focus here. This is where I’m gonna call uncertain people, but this is gonna be slightly technical term, Gustaf Arrhenius, has written a lot about this stuff, he calls them, “uniquely” realizable people, but I find that phrase a little confusing, so I’m using this other phrase, these are people who will exist if you make one choice but will not exist if you make the other choice. Well most of our choices in life, and the philosophers talk about in philosophy classes are about choosing between two ways of treating people where if you treat them one way, they’ll be worst or if you treat them the other way, they’ll be better off.

So if you think about the trolley problem, you know, if I turned the trolley one way, it will kill this person, if I don’t turn the trolley, it won’t kill that person. So this, the one person on the track one is kinda be made much worse off, if I turned the trolley in and will be harm. Should I push the fat man off the bridge? Should I pick up the drowning refugee out of the sea? Should Mary do drugs while pregnant?

Each of this, the victim or patient will be made better off from one choice or worse off on the other. We might even say that the victim won’t be harmed with one choice. I think this is true, even in a case of pregnant Mary, even if you think that the fetus is not a person, because the fetus is suddenly gonna grow up to be a person and let’s say if Mary’s choice of doing drugs makes the child have some serious disability because of that then she has harmed the future person that a child would become. But now, thinking about Mary, change the story a little bit, she’s not yet pregnant, supposed that she’s been taking some medical drugs for some medical condition.

There’s nothing bad about her about this point but the doctors want her not to become pregnant in the near future. Because if she does, her child will have disability, “Wait six months.”, they tell her. And I wanna use this example that comes from David Burn’s book, it involves a woman called Wilma and a child called Pebble, I’m not quite sure why he chose a cartoon example, but I’m just using it ’cause it is famous text, I’m not trying to make light of this issue.

Okay, so if Wilma conceives right now, her child, call her Pebble will have a disability but if Wilma waits, she will conceive a different child without disability. The second child, call him a Rocks, will be better off than Pebble would have been, ’cause Wilma have a moral obligation not to conceive right now. Not to conceive Pebbles. And on the phase of it, most people are inclined to say ‘yes’ to this. At least to say that she has a strong moral reason not to conceive right away. But on the other hand, Wilma would not be harming Pebbles, because Pebbles is not made of or made worse off than she otherwise would have been.

Unlike the fetus whose mother uses drugs. This is because, firstly, Pebbles disability is not so bad unless, let’s stipulate that she would not be better off never having existed if we can make sense of that contrast. So, she wouldn’t be better off if she didn’t exist and most importantly, Pebbles is what I’m calling an uncertain person. Pebble is of a person who would not exist if Wilma had acted differently.

So if Wilma wait six months, she conceives a different child. Although that person would be better off, that person is not identical to Pebbles. This is what’s called the famous- this is a famous what’s called handicap child case. It was made famous by Derek Parfit, Josh Parsons and David Bourget and many others. And it’s part of the non-identity problems so the non-identity problem, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a problem about choices where our actions make a difference to who exist. So, it’s a very same person if I choose A or if I choose B. I would like to focus on what if anything ethics of love would say about this, and whether an ethics of love is better off or worse off with respect to this problem then as a moral theories.

So, lots of examples have been offered to illustrate this issue, I’m gonna say quite a bit about this handicap child case but I’m also gonna talk about a case called depletion. This also comes up in Parfit and Arrhenius talks a lot about this, so here’s the depletion case. Imagine a society, maybe, it’s our society, choosing between two different environmental policies.

One called it the Green Policy is environmentally good, with solar, wind energy, conservation, text and carbonate, The other called it the Gray Policy is pretty much releasing SAR or least, maybe is allowing things to get very bad in terms of its environment. So, the people and animals, 200 years hands full will be much better off on the Green Policy than the Gray Policy, let’s just stipulate that.

However, because identity is so fragile, because who you conceive depend on, you know, whether you have sex today or tomorrow or whether a year on, because I didn’t see so fragile, even modest changes on our behavior will lead to different people being conceive. Compare the green world and the gray world in 200 years time. None of the people that exist then will be the same in those two worlds.

The green people are better off than the gray people, so the green people stand to the gray people just as Rocks, the kid conceived in six months after stands to Pebble better off but not well-made. So here’s an outline of this arguments that Boone has layout in his recent book. This is in your handout about the middle of the first page. Wilma’s active conceiving now does not make Pebble’s worst off than she would otherwise have been. Premise two, if A’s act harms B, A’s act makes B worst of than B would otherwise been. P3, A’s act does not harm anyone other than Pebble’s. P4, if an act does not harm anyone, it does not wrong anyone, P5, if an act does not wrong anyone, the act is not morally wrong.

So, conclusion, Wilma’s act of conceiving Pebbles is not morally wrong and you can think of these five premises and the denial of the conclusion as six things of that you may think is plausible and hence as an inconsistent [inaudible]. Can’t have them all. Few things was noting here, I think the word ‘harm’ is multiply ambiguous.

One use that I wanna rule out here is the use of harm to mean, I positively making worst of reasons we contrast harming with allowing to suffer, I don’t wanna use that in that way I wanna allow that you can harm someone by letting them die, letting them suffer. Because if we didn’t, if I didn’t make that stipulation then P4 says, if an act does not harm anyone then it is not wronged anyone. I certainly wouldn’t wanna say that if I leave a child to drown in a pond, I’m not doing anything wrong to that child.

So I wanna allow, so roughly the definition of harm that I’m gonna be using here is, so behaving that a person is worse off than she would’ve been, had one behave differently or maybe significantly worse that she would have been, to allow for Mill’s distinction between men and offense. Mill’s wants to say that really minor harms like kind of annoying someone, an odd actually harm, minor making them worse is not harming.

I also don’t wanna say that harm is always sufficient for wrong, ’cause I think there are cases were we can harm someone by being a competitive business owner, you know, make them go out of business ’cause we got such a great product, or maybe harm someone in self-defense or in the defense of the innocent and those wouldn’t be wrong. But this is sort of presumption if you harm someone that’s a moral reason against it.

But I wanna allow that there could be cases where you just fight harm. So going back to the arguments of just briefly some discussion of the premises then we’ll come back to talking about what ethics of love says and I’ll probably use some of the same points. So premise one says that, Wilma’s active conceiving now does not make Pebble’s worst off than she otherwise would have been.

People say that whether you think that, who non-existence would be worst for her or if you think there’s no sins to which we can compare the value of which it doesn’t exist for her. I know of only one person who’s really, disagrees with this, and this is David Benetar whose written a book on which he argues it, but basically what he argue is we all paired time there, we’ll make the children worst off by conceiving them because children are always, you know, they’re gonna die, they’re gonna suffer various things and whatever goods we give them don’t compensate.

But this seems like way too extreme of a conclusion to try to fight premise one because if it means that every parent does wrong and having a child then that’s well, I just think that it’s kinda been an absurd conclusion. So, premise two, if A’s act harms B, then A’s act makes B worse off than B would otherwise have been.

So this philosopher name Molly Gardner, who objects to this because she says, she thinks about over determination cases where you, maybe, you should someone, just as about they’re about to die, in some other way. Maybe you’re a member of firing squad and you should have jump in first because you wanna be the one to do the killing. you might say, well, you know, you killed her, you killed the person, or you might say, you harmed her but she wasn’t any worse off because she was about to be dead anyway no matter what you did. I think that this is, perhaps, going back to that other definition of harm that I say I wanted to set aside which is harm versus allowing to harm.

And also, I think, it partly, some of the examples she uses might be kind of including something about intention here because somebody who wants to be the one to do the killing seems to have some sort of malevolent intention but if you think about the case where the killer is motivated by something good like, you know, if you, somebody is about to be stoned to death, your friend is about to be stoned to death, apparently, absolutely hideous way to die and you go out and shoot them, you are presumably benefiting them because you’re preventing them from suffering a really, really excruciatingly painful death.

So, obviously intention has a big part of this and of course, as you were saying love involves whatever, but will come back to that later, I completely agree that love would involve intentionally benefiting and intentionally not harming. So, on premise two, there are some people who wanted to find harm as bringing about a bad state for a person. And so, if Wilma knowingly makes it a case that Pebble has a disability then she’s harmed her.

But I think we have to be careful because I think maybe there’s a sanction between local and global harm, and we don’t wanna say, or maybe we do wanna say, so if you, if a doctor does chemotherapy on a cancer patient and saves the patients lives. Let’s say that the patient would have died and then doesn’t, like my husband had chemotherapy 15 years ago and he’s still healthy. Let’s say that chemotherapy made a difference. It was pretty unpleasant what he went through so the doctor put him into a bad state, but it was definitely overall beneficial and I think it weren’t as pretty was that’s not harming, or else, if we do wanna say that it is harming is suddenly that kind of harming is not objectively wrong.

So I wanna said that’s premise 3. Premise 4, sorry, premise 3, Wilma’s act does not harm anyone else. So, the obvious candidates here would be Wilma herself or Wilma’s partner if she has one, or the state. and I think that obviously in typical cases where somebody conceives a child and has lots of needs, there’s gonna be some burdens on other people but we can kinda stipulate things that that’s not the case with Wilma.

Wilma is quite happy to have her child and she’s a, let’s say, wealthy single woman [inaudible] or if she’s married, her spouse is quite happy too. She’s not imposing on a mistake but I think, you know, it’s typical, we would have say, what Wilma did is fine, there’s no more reason to do what Wilma did. You might still think that in many ordinary cases of people will have reasons not to do what Wilma did. So, premise 4 says that if an act does not harm anyone and does not wronged anyone.

And some people object to this one saying that there are other ways of wronging a person, you can treat them with disrespect, violently, right. But I think the simple response to this is to say, “Yeah, there maybe other ways of wronging, but I don’t think those apply in the case of Wilma, she’s not, I mean, it might not be her intention, I mean, if she’s got something weird indistinctive intention in conceiving then that’s one thing but if she does it out of either neutral or loving kinda attitude, she’s not treating Pebble with disrespect.

Premise five says, if an act has not wronged anyone, then the act is not morally wrong. Now, you tell Terrence, like partial objective is by saying, there are cases of harmless wrong that if you do wrong by failing to maximize utility even you don’t harm anyone. But this has some pretty weird implication, I mean, it would imply that, you know, you have an option of having a child or not having a child and you think that every estimation is that the child would add to the overall happiness involve, and you have an obligation to do that, but that’s neutral.

Anyway, so the conclusion here is that, what was act of conceiving Pebble is not morally wrong and after a lot of reflection, I still come around thinking, maybe that a lot of people coming at these from different angles say that this is right. So, Robert Adams has this paper called Must God Create The Best in which he argues that perfectly finding God to create butterflies and perfect people and literally, he said the same about us. It would be perfectly finding Wilma to create Pebble.

Disability activist are quite open arms about this argument, maybe, I don’t know, perhaps there’s something offensive about my giving it, but they worried that this kind of argument, well, this kind of debate kind of suggest that people with disability issue shouldn’t exist and that’s one represents his point of view. David Brunnan has some good examples of motivation. So, I think you know, accepting the conclusion here wouldn’t be so bad.

I’m sort of running out of time, so I wanna hurry up a little. So thinking about the ethics of love in this problem, I think probably, I think essentially an ethics of love can agree with most of the premises definitely, I disagree, with Parfit’s view that maximizing utility, I think love is really essentially focus on individual, it’s very day ray, and this idea that love will give us the promulgation to produce more happiness, more on, you know, happiness is not embedded in particular people. I think that’s not really part of the ethics of love.

So I think maybe an ethics of love can accept most of, which will part of this argument might disagree, and can embrace the conclusion so you might think, what’s the problem of, I think that’s fine, but there are other case. And in particular, there is this completion case that I really, where that we as a society has a choice between how to treat our environment and to one way will have the Green world, this much nicer world, which people that much higher than the Gray world, which people, doesn’t [inaudible] not so curable that you’ll say, it will be better that they never existed but still fairly lessons of life.

And I think this is, but also reality versus I said this, about identity is fragile than the dark choices will make a difference to who it is. So, if we have a policy exist, you know, don’t drive that might make a difference to when people have sex and when people conceive children and frequently, you’re gonna have a totally different sets of people in the Gray world as oppose to the Green world. and I think it’s much harder for an ethics of love to likable on this one. I think where the handicap child case you conditionally say, “Yeah, I like to embrace this child and love them as much as possible.”

But it seems, if not, doesn’t fit very well in ethics of love [inaudible] makes up the world people turns it is. [inaudible] So, you don’t have to think about these cases, depends on that scenario that I discussed earlier, according to which the identity of future people is somehow fixed. So, if the future people are fixed then we could say that we could identify, well not identify, particular people would be around and our choices can make a difference to how good their lives are. But of course, I would imagining that people in the future would be understood. But there are things like in different scenario that some of the people of the future would be fixed and some would be understood and all we can think about, is the possibility that some of the people will be fixed relatively to me and some people will be fixed relative to you. What I mean by this is my action, my choices, make a difference to the identity of some of the future people and your choice of making a difference to some of the other people.

So, for example, Wilma’s choice about whether to conceive in that choice, on whether to conceive, she choose between the existence of Pebbles and Rocks simultaneously a woman in choosing between conceiving now and conceiving later, choosing between Johan and Inca. Supposed that we go ahead and conceived right now, let’s say Pebbles and Johan can conceive then relative to Pebbles is onto and Johan is fixed, so if the existence of Pebble is somehow gonna make Johan’s life worst then Wilma’s decision is harming Johan.

So, it seems like that what’s going on between generations that each of us can make a difference to our descendants and maybe some others nearby but not it depends to the whole world. And so, relative to me, most of your descendants are fixed and so, if I choose to make the world, choose to use the Gray world, then I’m gonna harm those people that you choose to produce the Gray world that you’re gonna make and harm, maybe my descendants.

And so, there are ways which we can harm people. And so there are-, there is a place where we can get a grip and you know, we shouldn’t make the world that much worse. So, I think, our action makes a difference to the whole population, but my action makes a difference just to some other people. Cause we don’t know which of the people are gonna be fixed and which are gonna be relative. I’m talking about, we have a reason to quite make the world a better place.

Now, of course, one worry that I might have here as well, you know, in a thousand years time, maybe everyone in the world is gonna be uncertain to me. As what I tell to my students, to think about, how many generation, how many take, will it be conquer and will look back a thousand years, how many descendants does will be conquered at, you do this little calculation, will this be 40 generation, with the average two children per generation in the next two to the 40th.

What is that? It comes out to a trillion obviously there’s gonna be a little bit of intermarriage. So to me, people that will conquer ahead, has a fill in descendants, but so, he’s action made a difference to those people, and obviously indirectly in a lot of other people. So, you might think, well in a thousand years time, my choice about whether to conceive is gonna make a difference to, you know, the entire population.

So everyone, thousand years from now is uncertain world with me but I don think that has to be so much a prob because even if we say ethics of love doesn’t have- don’t give us a reason to make the world a much better place, thousand years from now, it does give us a reason to make the world a better place, 2-300 years from now, so, it’s not that likely we will be able to make the world a much better place in 200 years time.

But at the same time, makes it worse in a thousand years [gibberish] We could probably imagine some falls off the whim coming out with that, but basically, if we have an obligation to conserve, or treat the world properly now, its gonna keep on going, and people 200 years from now on will have their own obligations to keep that going. So, I think when thinking about the ethics of love, we can respond to this and so, I think, this problem about articulation doesn’t have to be a special problem for an ethics of love. Thank you. [applause]