June 27, 2007

Schedule for Kamm Reading Group
By S. Matthew Liao

The Kamm Reading Group will kick off in about a week’s time. Each Friday, a commentator will provide a summary of a chapter and some points for consideration. The post will then be open for discussion. We have a very nice line up of commentators. So do join us for the discussions and let your colleagues know about this event.

The schedule is as follows:

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Posted on June 27, 2007 at 1:16 am in General Announcement, Kamm Reading Group, Normative Ethics, S. Matthew Liao's Posts | Leave a Comment

June 18, 2007

My future self or myself in the future
By Nick Shackel

In discussing issues such as, for example, whether prudential reasons can be accounted for in terms of desire based reasons, we sometimes contrast our present self with our future self. It’s possible that some arguments turn on whether my present and future selves are distinct or whether talk of these selves is just a misleading way of speaking of me now and in the future. 4 dimensionalism (4D) accounts for persistence through time in terms of temporal parts, and if it is true then my future self is not identical to my present self, but both are temporal parts of me, whilst I am a space time worm that is the fusion of all my temporal parts (for short, a maximal space time worm). Jim Stone has recently offered a refutation of 4D in Analysis. Here is my condensed version of his argument:

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Posted on June 18, 2007 at 11:28 am in Metaphysics, Nick Shackel's Posts, Normative Ethics | 8 Comments

June 5, 2007

Unbearable Pain, Death, and the Rational Self
By Guy Kahane

1. I don’t especially mind death, but I’m scared of pain. As Epicurus reminds us, death doesn’t hurt. Epicurus may have been mistaken to think that this was enough to show that death isn’t bad, but it is good to know that death is at least not bad in this one important respect.

There are paradoxical sounding remarks by David Velleman that seem to imply that even pain itself, when it is as its worst, may not be bad in this one respect. In his paper ‘A Right to Self-Termination’, Velleman writes

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Posted on June 5, 2007 at 11:24 am in Applied Ethics, Guy Kahane's Posts, Normative Ethics, Value Theory | 7 Comments