Do you agree that it's obvious that we should revive coma victims?
How about reversing brain-death (prior to biological death occurring)?
In each instance, the obvious reason is just that it would be *good for the beneficiary*. I agree that there can also be reasons to bring new people into existence for this reason. But we might think tha…
Do you agree that it's obvious that we should revive coma victims?
How about reversing brain-death (prior to biological death occurring)?
In each instance, the obvious reason is just that it would be *good for the beneficiary*. I agree that there can also be reasons to bring new people into existence for this reason. But we might think that there are especially strong reasons to benefit those who (do or did) exist independently of our action, since we can more readily (i) latch on to *that individual* and perform the action *for their sake*, and (ii) take the failure to benefit them as a comparative harm (whereas we can't say the non-existent person is harmed by failing to bring them into existence).
I think the case for reviving coma victims is stronger. There's a case for them still having implicit preferences to be revived or whose satisfaction is promoted or frustration reduced by their revival. Their preferences are still somewhere in their brains, whether (now suppressed) dispositions or actually stored or represented. (The same would apply to preventing people from dying in their sleep.)
I'm less sure about brain death, and it might depend on how badly their brains are damaged and what exactly is damaged. If too much is gone, would we even consider them the same person if revived?
I suppose reviving the dead would generally require preserving structure or information to reconstruct memories, personality, etc.. If someone is preserved via cryonics, that might be like a coma. If someone has their brain mapped to enough detail and that information stored somewhere, that might count, too. And all of that could still be causally connected, so the case for their identity being preserved is stronger, instead of, say, if matter randomly arranged itself to manifest a representation of your brain that can be used to revive or upload "you".
I am also pretty sympathetic to your points (i) and (ii); I just don't find them (personally) obvious, because the arguments don't seem extremely compelling, and I'd find it counterintuitive to let the interests of the long dead together outweigh the interests of the living. But maybe there are other ways to address that problem, e.g. not count certain interests of the dead, or consider the interests of the dead to be relatively weak and limit aggregation.
I find claims related to identity and death generally non-obvious. I am both sympathetic to the Epicurean view that death isn't bad for the person who dies, and to the view that death can be bad for them because it frustrates preferences/desires. I haven't been very sympathetic to deprivationism, but I'm somewhat more sympathetic recently. I used to be very reductionist, e.g. empty individualism, experientialism, and have mostly moved away from those positions, but they're not totally ruled out to me.
Do you agree that it's obvious that we should revive coma victims?
How about reversing brain-death (prior to biological death occurring)?
In each instance, the obvious reason is just that it would be *good for the beneficiary*. I agree that there can also be reasons to bring new people into existence for this reason. But we might think that there are especially strong reasons to benefit those who (do or did) exist independently of our action, since we can more readily (i) latch on to *that individual* and perform the action *for their sake*, and (ii) take the failure to benefit them as a comparative harm (whereas we can't say the non-existent person is harmed by failing to bring them into existence).
I think the case for reviving coma victims is stronger. There's a case for them still having implicit preferences to be revived or whose satisfaction is promoted or frustration reduced by their revival. Their preferences are still somewhere in their brains, whether (now suppressed) dispositions or actually stored or represented. (The same would apply to preventing people from dying in their sleep.)
I'm less sure about brain death, and it might depend on how badly their brains are damaged and what exactly is damaged. If too much is gone, would we even consider them the same person if revived?
I suppose reviving the dead would generally require preserving structure or information to reconstruct memories, personality, etc.. If someone is preserved via cryonics, that might be like a coma. If someone has their brain mapped to enough detail and that information stored somewhere, that might count, too. And all of that could still be causally connected, so the case for their identity being preserved is stronger, instead of, say, if matter randomly arranged itself to manifest a representation of your brain that can be used to revive or upload "you".
I am also pretty sympathetic to your points (i) and (ii); I just don't find them (personally) obvious, because the arguments don't seem extremely compelling, and I'd find it counterintuitive to let the interests of the long dead together outweigh the interests of the living. But maybe there are other ways to address that problem, e.g. not count certain interests of the dead, or consider the interests of the dead to be relatively weak and limit aggregation.
I find claims related to identity and death generally non-obvious. I am both sympathetic to the Epicurean view that death isn't bad for the person who dies, and to the view that death can be bad for them because it frustrates preferences/desires. I haven't been very sympathetic to deprivationism, but I'm somewhat more sympathetic recently. I used to be very reductionist, e.g. empty individualism, experientialism, and have mostly moved away from those positions, but they're not totally ruled out to me.