Indeterminate survival: in draft (x-post from TnT)

Update: I posted this over at Theories and Things, but I feel for it's MV posting I should give the Wordle Abstract for the draft paper:

On with the post:

So, finally, I’ve got another draft prepared. This is a paper focussing on Bernard Williams’ concerns about how to think and feel about indeterminacy in questions of one’s own survival.

Suppose that you know that you know there’s an individual in the future who’s going to get harmed. Should you invest a small amount of money to alleviate the harm? Should you feel anxious about the harm?

Well, obviously if you care about the guy (or just have a modicum of humanity) you probably should. But if it was *you* that was going to suffer the harm, there’d be a particularly distinctive frisson. From a prudential point of view, you’d be compelled to invest minor funds for great benefit. And you really should have that distinctive first-personal phenomenology associated with anxiety on one’s own behalf. Both of these de se attitudes seem important features of our mental life and evaluations.

The puzzle I take from Williams is: are the distinctively first-personal feelings and expectations appropriate in a case where you know that it’s indeterminate whether you survive as the individual who’s going to suffer?

Williams thought that by reflecting on such questions, we could get an argument against account of personal identity that land us with indeterminate cases of survival. I’d like to play the case in a different direction. It seems to me pretty unavoidable that we’ll end up favouring accounts of personal identity that allow for indeterminate cases. So if , when you combine such cases with this or that theory of indeterminacy, you end up saying silly things, I want to take that as a blow to that account of indeterminacy.

It’s not knock-down (what is in philosophy?) but I do think that we can get leverage in this way against rejectionist treatments of indeterminacy, at least as applied to these kind of cases. Rejectionist treatments include those folks who think that characteristic attitudes to borderline cases includes primarily a rejection of the law of excluded middle; and (probably) those folks who think that in such cases we should reject bivalence, even if LEM itself is retained.

In any case, this is definitely something I’m looking for feedback/comments on (particularly on the material on how to think about rational constraints on emotions, which is rather new territory for me). So thoughts very welcome!