Yale Philosopher Shelly Kagan on Death, Deprivation and Rational Regret

it is my pleasure to introduce our keynote this evening professor Shelly Kagan who goes by Shelly otherwise he wouldn't you know know that we're talking about him so Shelly received his first degree from Wesleyan University in 1976 and his PhD from Princeton in 1982 under the direction of Tom Nagel he has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago his currently Clark professor of philosophy at Yale and has been teaching there since 1995 he's the author of a number of books the limits of morality Oxford 1989 normative ethics by Westview 1998 the geometry of desert Oxford 2012 death Yale 2012 and how to count animals more or less Oxford 2019 the lectures from his course on death available online viewed millions of times around the world and they're especially popular in East Asian nations such as China South Korea and Japan the Korean translation of the book death based on the course was a national bestseller in South Korea for months given a solemn topic of tonight's lecture here are some fun facts about Shelley that he has kindly provided he has been described as the most popular foreign professor in China one reputable source described him as a youth idol you can see it it's there due to the popularity of his videos Shelley has been recognized on the streets in both Korea and China as well as at airports here including Boston so Peter singer once wrote in an otherwise favorable review of the limits of morality that quote shelly kagan apparently the scholarship is not one of Kagan's strong points in a television show featuring Shelley talking about what else death in Korea there were 3,000 people in the studio audience and 12,000 had requested tickets the TV show had built a wooden desk sized box for him to sit on as his known for sitting on a desk while he lectures as well witnessed tonight the geometry of desert took Shelley 20 years to write from conception to publication the book has some 200 or so diagrams making a way to long book even longer Shelley's lectures on death has inspired a few thousand emails from forest rangers painters housewives high school students and firemen in fact there was a fire station in Florida where they apparently listened to the tapes on slow nights one patient recovering from brain surgery said that he used the lectures to flex his mental muscles some of these emails thanked him while others argued with him Jennifer Beals you remembered of movie Flashdance in 1983 said in a Time magazine interview that she enjoyed watching the death videos the Yale Daily News and undergraduate newspaper once described him as being one of Yale's most colorful professors and Shelley's wife happily translated for him as meaning dresses poorly and needs a haircut all right so tonight's lecture Kino from Professor Kagan is death regret and what is it deprivation okay very good yes I'm glad that he remembers it all right so it's death deprivation and rational regret and let us welcome Shelly Kagan [Applause] I gave those fun facts to me and after I was done doing that I realized I'd left out actually the weirdest of all the fun facts was that the death of lectures became sufficiently popular that there was an I kid you not it was an off-broadway play called philosophy 176 death which was a one-man show and it literally consisted of the agent of the actor giving my lectures each night he what he would get up and he would give a different one of my lectures and that was I mean there was those a set and so forth and so and I went to this play and this is I guess this is absolutely the weirdest experience you know I'd ever had because you know there I was you know over there somebody was you know being me giving my words and I would listen to them and my and and them and the main thought I had other than how weird this was was I really put that well didn't I all right so it you know it is after dinner and I suppose I should do something humorous but other than that I got nothing humorous to do with you I'm gonna talk about something coming out of the death issue that has intrigued me for a number of years now and maybe someday I'll get a satisfactory resolution of it and write it up but haven't yet ever done that Gus start with the deprivation account so the deprivation account of death of the badness of death basically holds that the central way or one of the central ways in which death is bad for the person who dies consists in the fact that you're not getting the good things that you would get if you were alive right if you know I got hit by a truck tomorrow then the various pleasures I would have seen my kids come home for Thanksgiving and and the publication of my next book or whatever it might be those good things don't come you so you're deprived of them and that's why death is bad now there are various classical puzzles about that some of you know about Lucretia some of you know you know Epicurus there's worries about this I'm not going to get into any of those unless somehow they end up being relevant one of the advantages I mean in addition to having a plausible story about why death is bad is that it allows us to say intelligible things like oh we can see why it's worse to die at 25 you know a whole lot or that's tragic you know if somebody dies are 25 whereas if they die at 90 that's you know that's not tragic after all they're whatever that was 65 more years of life that they were deprived of the deprivation significantly greater so the deprivation accounts got a lot going for it okay so but there are problems with it and I want to mention one or two related problems so so one is although at first glance it looks like it gives us plausible answers at second glance it gives us some implausible answers so for example it gives us wrong views about how bad it seems to give us wrong views about how bad death is I mean I said a moment ago that it's obviously it's a lot worse to die 25 than it is to die at 90 but under the hand you know you could live forever right and so if you live forever or even if just made you could have lived for a million years the difference between having died at 25 versus having died at 90 instead of being this huge difference is a trivial you know decimal point difference and so the the deprivation account seems to give the wrong answer on the size of the badness of death as it happens I don't think immortality would be a good thing but as a certain thing I couldn't use myself for 10,000 years against any significant life span that we could imagine us I was having the deprivation account looks like it's going to give the wrong answer also gives that's the size problem it also seems to give some false positives I mean if the basic idea is that you know death is bad cuz of good things that aren't coming your way and that's why it's a misfortune that you didn't get these good things then consider some good things that didn't come my way today didn't come your way today Bill Gates did not write you a check for a million dollars right that would have been a really good thing to have happen today and it didn't happen and so it looks as though the deprivation account has to say well look you know you were deprived of this potential good that could have come your way that's that's a real misfortune except it seems very irrational to be upset about that an example of making the very same point from hi Draper as I recall was you know you didn't find a Ladin's lamp today but that would have been really great thing to have found right and so you were deprived of that potential good so we've got two problems we've got I call it the existence problem cases where it doesn't seem like deprivation certain deprivation czar bad at all and we've got the size problem measuring how much of a misfortune it is to have been deprived seems to come out wrong as well now we might think that if we could solve and I think I do think if we could solve the size problem that might take care of the existence problem because if we could figure out why certain things were small then maybe the the false positives are just vanishingly small and it's okay to think of them as very very minor misfortunes or something like that so the real issues going to be the size problem but any rate that these two related problems and and the this very obvious I think fairly obvious at least promise about what was a promising strategy here for solving this problem or dealing this problem has to talk about likelihoods or unlikely hoods or how how how how likely was it that something would happen I me thinking about the Aladdin's lamp case there is no Aladdin's lamp and so the possible world to use the familiar philosopher's jargon the possible world in which I get Aladdin's lamp is so remote that that seems like why I shouldn't be so upset about it not having come my way it's it's not literally inevitable but virtually inevitable that it wasn't going to happen and the same thing with Bill Gates right you know Bill Gates isn't in the habit of just Randi writing cheques to random 4 million bucks to random strangers and so the world of which you know I would have gotten such a cheque you know so remote it doesn't make sense to be upset about that's the basic thought and of course if we push the thought a bit further it's not likely that it's going to be a on/off matter it's probably going to be some sort of function of degree and that's the point I'll get to in just you know a minute or two you know we'd feel rather differently about it if Bill Gates had announced that he had suddenly taken an interest in philosophy and he'd gone on the internet and discovered about the northern New England you know philosophy Association and was going to give a million dollars to you know all but one person you know attending and you're the one person who accidentally didn't get the you know because that's grounds for being upset because it's no longer than this remote possibility it's this near miss okay so there's the thought and and as I say this is a not difficult thought to come up with in the wonderful gotta find my quote here someplace in the wonderful article on death if I called death by my adviser and former advisor Tom Nagel he notices this problem and here's a line says we still have to set some limits on how possible a possibility he hasn't mind good possibility how possible a possibility must be for it's non realization to be in this fortune so that was his thought I should say by the way if you have not read nagels paper on death get up and leave and go do that now because that's it it's it's an absolutely wonderful piece of philosophy so there's the thought that there's some kind of threshold or something it's got to be sufficiently possible if it's too remote then it's not a miss for and not to have it and what I want to do basically in the rest of today is explore this thought now there's different ways of expressing it I mean on the one hand you could talk about you know how inevitable was it that the good thing wasn't going to come your way or how remote a chance was it and so you might say the more inevitable it was a kind of the farther away the possible world the less likely than other things being equal the less of a misfortune it is the less it makes sense rationally speaking to regret or be upset or dismayed or what have you that's why in the title have got the word about rational regret I'm not making any particular claims about the psychology of you know is our regret proportioned in this way though though it might be but it seems reasonable thing that it ought to be so so one way of looking at it is you know the the farther away the world knew which it happens the less it should matter or the less likely it is to be the actual world the the less you should care about it unless you should be upset about it or the less of a misfortune it is so that's how it works I think for goods that don't get actualized and a similar point presumably holds in you meet artists meet artists for Bad's that don't get actualized right this is an example of Tom her cos here's something else that didn't happen to me today while I was busy not getting the check from Bill Gates I was not and I assumed none of you because you're here now was not kidnapped by intergalactic aliens and taken back to their intergalactic torture chamber right now that would be really really bad thing to have happen to me because I had these responsibilities for being here tonight and but I'm not overcome with joy that that doesn't happen didn't happen to me why the same thought because that's such a remote possibility maybe not literally impossible but so unlikely such a such a distant possible world that we have to discount for that you know on the other hand if I just accidentally just just merely miss near miss a car almost hits me it's worms out of the last minute or somebody pushes me out of the way then it does seem as though here the world in which the bad thing happens is sufficiently it didn't happen son actual but sufficiently close not at all remote high probability that very little discounting seems like it should take place so that seems like there's an analogous idea for goods and Bad's which which is good you know that's a give some support to the thought and to say what I want to do is explore some possibilities for going beyond just that that broad idea and then mention as well you know some other questions that need to be worked out and and and and some difficulties with it alright so in a hyper hyper the papers talk this morning talked about she didn't like utilitarian because of mathematize death except over your ears cover your eyes I'm about to mathematize ethics but I'm gonna do it with diagrams I like graphs so here's I take it the basic thought so let the x-axis be something like the likelihood that that thing would happen go back you know to a bad thing and the y-axis so this is you know chance or likelihood likely likelihood or I should say chance it and though and the y-axis is something like the amount of the misfortune if we're dealing with a but you know a bad thing or the amount of regret it would be rational to have so let's call this rational regret and and the rough idea I take it that I've just been giving voice to it is some isn't the line goes you know does something like this so that you know near misses of getting if this was a good thing that didn't come my way how upset should I be pretty upset if it was almost like Lee but didn't happen like in the Bill Gates second version of the story where everybody ate here gets a million bucks but I don't then it was a very very high chance whereas in the real world that's approaching zero and so very little rational got those of you who are fastidious will of course be thinking that this has to be you know not all the way up to hundred percent because after all we stipulated didn't happen so can't actually have a probability of a hundred percent that it would have happened or having said that I won't continue to make that point so so so that's that's the rough idea and it seems to my ears at least in my mind it seems like a unintelligible plausible thought but what do I do is ask some questions about the line and how exactly they work so I mean one question actually is should the line be straight a straight line or might it be curved right if you're going to have a curved line well you know one possibility we the line curves up and so as soon as becomes not very likely you know of clothes not you start moving away from certainty give you a huge drop-off that strikes me is probably a less plausible possibility than this one that the line maker down I don't mean ever curve all the way back down but but begins sloping to the right where the thought would be something like the initial drop in probability isn't enough to have a significant reduction in the amount of rational regret but as you start getting bigger and bigger closer and closer to no chance inevitably not going to happen then the the drop off start happening in a huge way it could it could in fact be that the line isn't curved everywhere it might Plateau which would be to say something like we don't really get any reduction in rational regret for the first whatever it is you know loss of 5% 10% of probability it's not until you get remote enough that you really start having drops so that's a possibility as well alright so one question is what should the shape of the line be another rather different person I guess I'll just keep using this one we'll see whether we get to that one is uh what where does the line go so I mean I've been drawing the line as though it goes to the origin so actually let me just draw that back again I'm gonna go back to drawing straight lines because it's easier so one possibility is that you know just that that the line goes through the origin let's call that the simple view it's a natural thought but there's at least two other possibilities another one would be that the line actually doesn't go to the origin but cuts the x-axis at a certain point so what you'd be saying here is if the probability is too low then no regret at all makes sense you know here you don't actually eliminate all regret until you've literally become impossible but on on this view which I suppose we could call the threshold view there's a minimum there's a threshold amount of possibility or probability that has to be attained before any rational regret makes sense you know at all and in another possibility of course it's not that it cuts the x-axis but it cuts the y-axis and that view says you know even if it was inevitable that the good thing wasn't going to come my way it still makes sense to have some minimal amount of regret it's not eliminated altogether because because here he got eliminated well before you became impossible or inevitable you weren't got it get it here it does go 2-0 regret once it becomes impossible but you know I think know if you know the things bad rather than if it would have been a good thing to get and I didn't get it even if I couldn't have gotten it there's some regret there and so there's a kind of residual amount of regret left over and so we could call this the residue residue view the threshold view maybe the view that that nagels got in mind I read you the first half of this quote let me read it again we still have to set some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its non realization to be a misfortune I pointed out that the same thought works for for Bad's that didn't come your way and he navel makes that same point immediately after he continues parenthetically but let me read the whole sentence we'll have the context again we still have to set some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its non realization to be a misfortune parentheses or good fortune should the possibility be a bad one but the crucial point is how possible it has to be that that's the language that you would expect from a threshold theorist right if it's not possible enough then it's non-occurrence can't be a misfortune you know at all so all right for whatever it's worth Nagel seems to have expressed himself in the language of a threshold theorist though I'm not sure whether it was you know fully self conscious it's not like the passage says oh here's why you should be a threshold theorist as opposed to a simple theorist or a residue theorist once you draw the graph you see oh yeah well there's three possibilities as to where the lines going to go and I think there's you know something to be said for all of them it's not obvious what the right view is so let's take each of them in turn and ask well so that was just a kind of generic line I've drawn let's try having different lines because this is this is roughly speaking what the graph looks like for some specified good or sighs good or kind of good that I didn't get but there'll be bigger goods or smaller goods that didn't come my way and so I suppose if you've got this simple view you'll end up with a picture that looks sort of like this if I manage to keep them all at the same point you know this might be a good of a certain size that's a smaller good this is a bigger good this this represents the thought that you know for any given degree of likelihood or remoteness the bigger the good is the more regret it makes sense to have that I didn't get it I mean you know I didn't get him a million dollars and I also didn't get you know ten dollars and it makes to whatever a sentence makes any sense to be upset about that it makes sense to be more upset that I didn't get a million dollars or of course especially if we do the you know the gates thing where he gave a million dollars to all of you and now told the story where he gave you know a dime to each of you and didn't give me a dime well there the likelihood was still pretty high but the amount of regret it makes sense to have it's got to be way lower right and so this is a pretty plausible picture again all within this simple view or the simple approach it's not the only approach that you might have here this could of course could all be drawn with curves right it's easy to see how that would go I mentioned it I'll draw another diagram in a second I suppose if we do have this we've got the interesting question I suppose the natural thought would be that there's space up you know how much we've got you should have here you know so basically where these lines hit the hundred percent mark should be proportional to the size of the good so that if you know some other good was twice as good then you should regret it twice as much but yeah maybe that's not right I mean that's a substantive question and as it were the theory of rational regret should the amount of regret be proportional to the size of the good that didn't come your way oh I didn't say this I hope it's obvious said and now I'll just graphs and three possibilities would also be true if I were talking about Bad's that didn't come my way how instead of rational gret there'd be you know rational what's the opposite of regret relief thank you rational relief sometimes I talk about you know rational dismay and then what is the opposite of that rational may I'm not really you know so good relieves a better word thank you so yeah so so you know one one thought here is that these things should be proportional though I suppose one could you ask whether that's really so or not and as I said these could certainly be drawn curved I think of this as what I call slightly misleading leaves the everywhere differentiated view because it's not strictly speaking true they all coincide at the origin but everyplace else the lines all are distinct right that for any given level of remoteness or chance or likelihood you'll have a different amount of rational gret depend on the size the good there's another possibility which I also find pretty interesting which looks more like this I can manage to draw properly something more like this so so here the thought is that and of course it'd be more and more for a big big of goods but this would be on g+ this would be capital G this is lowercase G the idea is that for low enough levels there'll be a shared amount of regret for four different sized goods they begin but then as you get closer and closer to near-misses status they they max out right and so the lines have to break off but it takes long or longer to break off for greater and greater Goods but the idea would be that you know for a certain amount of probability there'd be a certain number of goods if they're unlikely enough you should no longer differentiate they're all similarly small if this looks vaguely like a feather to my impoverished imagination so I think of this as a as the feather view as opposed to the everywhere differentiated view okay so that's the possibilities there are other questions as well but I mean you know back with the one which I have now erased with the different lines if you're gonna have proportionality that would affect how the slopes need to be and so this interesting questions about how the slope should vary as well that's the simple view now suppose instead that we accept the threshold view what should we say then now strictly speaking one possibility is I just realized and this is being video recorded right but like it's like is this it nobody's moving the camera as I dance around the room as I guess it capturing me or is that you know seeing an empty desk right now I don't really have the notion all right so one possibility for the threshold view is largely speak and you could have just like hears about all the lines passing through the origin you could have all the lines passing through a certain threshold amount yeah so again this could be G this could be G Plus that could be G plus plus this could be lowercase G this is although it's a pelagic opossum it's very implausible right this is basically saying that regardless of what size good it is the minimum amount of probability that you need to have to have any kind of regret at all is is fixed that does not seem right it seems that to me if there's going to be a threshold theorists then you should say something like the larger the good that didn't come your way the lower the probability needs to be before it vanishes regret no longer makes any sense at all or the other way around but for small potatoes that didn't come your way it's got to be a pretty closed world before it makes sense to be upset you know at all so so what we should really expect is something I suppose more like this with different thresholds corresponding to different Goods and then again if that's right then well actually here's a question so these get rid of this because this is this is uh you know begging the question but I mean what's the right order I'm gonna erase the threshold so I can put the the word threshold so you can see the issue should this thing be like this G capital G large G I think that's the wrong ordering because this would be saying that for large goods they didn't come your way doesn't make sense to be upset you know unless they're very close things but for for that the dyeing that I didn't get some kind of regret still makes sense even though it's almost inevitable that Bill Gates wasn't going to give me a dime either that gets a you know reversed intuitively it makes sense to as the possibility of the good thing coming your way becomes more and more remote hanging on to some regret seems to make sense for a longer points the larger the good so the ordering shouldn't be this one but this one G Plus and G and little G so the intuitively the larger the good the closer could be to impossible inevitable that you weren't going to get it and still have it make sense you're upset to some degree that it didn't come your way notice finder by that if you do then take this approach this guarantees that you might have thought if I just put it to me there'd be some sort of proportionality condition here but that can't be because you know Goods can get larger and larger and larger but they're going to have to make smaller and smaller distance closer to the the y-axis or the origin and so there can't be that kind of proportionality condition I don't maybe this some sort of inverse proportionality condition I haven't haven't thought about that but the one you might have thought could be here can't be here all right that's that's the what we get at least possibilities for the for the threshold view for the residue view again same thing you could in principle have again the idea the residue was even if it was in the limit impossible that this good thing was going to come my way there's still some residual amount of dismay or regret that it didn't happen and so logically speaking you could have had all the lines have the same residue but that also seems very implausible because that would be saying no matter whether it was a dime that I didn't get or a million dollars that I didn't get I should be equally upset that doesn't seem right it seems that if you're going to have residue the amount of residual regret that you should get should be a function of the size of the good that didn't come your way so here again we're going to have you know something like this and here the ordering does again seem pretty clearly to be this that is the larger the good that didn't come your way the more regret it makes sense to have even in the limit case the amount of residual regret and so in principle you could have a proportionality condition be met here as the goods get smaller and smaller they approach zero in size and so the amount of residual grunt regret would be zero it could be all laid out proportionally it would take you know a series of examples and test cases to decide whether a perp or jollity condition there made sense at all even if you were a residue theorist in hopes to save you some of the incredibly boring details you know they're going to be I just won't work this out but I mentioned that you of course there's detail safe if you know if you want to proportionality condition here you want a proportionality condition there that's going to have implications for what's going to happen with the slopes and so forth actually once you see the possibility of not just the simple view but also the threshold view and the residue view there's another view that becomes possible it would be the mixed view where maybe for remember so over here we had you know small Goods and larger Goods and larger Goods so you know this could be small good than capital G and this could be G Plus and this could be G double plus and this could be G triple Plus so there's no particular reason in the absence of further argumentation to rule out the possibility that some of them may have thresholds they're small enough that unless you up to a certain likelihood you shouldn't care about it at all others of them have residue these are large enough goods that you should be upset even though it's virtually no chance or no chance that they were going to come your way and then I get an interesting question but what kind of proportionality you know if you if you lower the axis then you may be able to get some kind of proportionality again all right so there are some questions and as you can see you know once you start doing these things there's other kinds of questions as well but let me ask a completely different question I'll stop drawing graphs I have deliberately and somewhat sloppily conflated two different ways of talking about what are we discounting for I've talked about the remoteness of the world in which the thing comes your way or the likelihood that it would have come your way or the chance of it coming your way you know so one of these locations has something to do with possibilities of a brother probabilities and one of these locations has something to do one of these sets of locations have something to do with something like how unlike our world this is you know the world in which Bill Gates gives Aladdin's lamp exist has to be very different from our world the world in which Bill Gates gives money to me is less impossible than less remote fewer changes to the laws of nature or something like that than the one with Aladdin's lamp it's still pretty unlikely yes so we've got some basic thought that there's some kind of metric that can be varied but is it are we discounting for probability in likelihood or we discounting for remoteness and I don't think it's obvious though it's not obvious to me what the right answer to that is in many many cases these will coincide they'll give the at least they'll be roughly correlated with each other will give roughly the same answers but there are cases where they come apart at least we might at least try to dream up cases where they come apart to test you know if we could keep one of these variables constant while toggling or varying the other one and see whether the amount of regret changes you know that would be a way of feeling an otter you know ought to change now that would be a way of deciding which of these you know it works so let me tell you two cases and again this is something I don't so you know I gave a bunch of user which of these views is the right view in terms of these graphs I don't know I mean I find there's something to be said for all of them having discovered the mixed view I kind of liked that because I feel like my child or something but I hadn't seen that one coming it's like an unexpected child I don't know but similarly I'm not of any instance of any single mind about the likelihood versus remoteness thing so so here's some cases so imagine that there's a lottery and the winner is going to get a million bucks and you lose alright so some kind of regret seems appropriate there now imagine that we vary the number of tickets so what were the chances of your winning as we increase the number of tickets the likelihood that you would have won goes down but the remoteness of the world in which you win intuitively doesn't become more remote you know it's just you know there was the the ping-pong ball being taken out of uh you know whatever the world in which the number with Europe came up with the versus some other one you know it seems equally remote the number of tickets if that's right I mean I'm not sure if it is right but if that's the right way to describe the case then as we increase the number of tickets we're keeping remoteness constant but likelihood is decreasing I have the intuition and I guess you have to ask yourself do you have the same intuition I think I've got the intuition about that case that as the number of tickets go up the amount of regret I should have goes down should go down you know say if there were only two tickets and I lost Wow should I be pissed right or you know just made but if there were a million tickets and I didn't win well that's just you know ten million a hundred million tickets that's people lose the lottery tickets all the day you know all the time they don't think so that's only if that's the intuition that you've got then that's some evidence stone your case but you know some evidence for the thought that what we really want to be tracking here is probabilities or chances or likelihoods and not the remoteness of the possible worlds all right so that's that's one case now it also be nice to have a case to test that the varies the other direction right so keeping the probabilities the same but the remoteness different so here's an example that Tom Parker discusses issues in this neighborhood in his discussion of his book of virtue of ice in value where [Music] you know his his his rough thought is you know virtues a matter of loving good things vices a matter of loving bad things but there's also questions about good you know how how how please should you be that a good thing you know how completion even if the bad thing didn't happen so he's interesting in some issues in the same neighborhood and so as I recall he gives an example where he says uh imagine the lottery whatever was you know one in a hundred tickets keep something even small one in ten tickets one in fifty tickets you didn't win a should be pretty upset but now time goes by it's five years later ten years later fifty years later you're looking back his intuition and and I think I guess my intuition as well is that the amount of regret you should feel as time goes by should go down now there are different hypotheses we might have about why that's so even if we agree that it is so but at least one possible explanation is well look the likelihood that you would have one does not change over time but the remoteness of the world that you'd be in increases over time because you know initially it was just like this little although ping-pong ball everything would've been exactly the same except a ping-pong ball would have come up slightly different very closely similar possible rules but as time progresses you know the world's diverged more and more and more the life you're having from the life you would have had had you won the million dollars you know gets bigger and bigger so conceivably the right description of this case is that's one where probability stays constant but remoteness increases and if you then think that it makes sense to regret less and less and less with the passage of time a conceivable moral to draw from that is that yeah its remoteness that's the relevant dimension not not likely this not likelihood now I say I'm not remotely confident about either those intuitions being the right explanations of the relevant cases or doubt the case or the test case is really properly constructed but at least if they are and if you share the intuitions then of course what we now have is a piece of evidence on behalf of each dimension as opposed to here two different cases and happily they're both pointing the same direction they point in the direction of different hypotheses I don't know what to make of that you know one possibility is the cases aren't well constructed another possibility is that we need a two-dimensional metric that's sensitive to both changes in probability and remoteness of possible worlds a different possibility not that I'd know how to scho anywhere with this would be that you know there are Goods and there are goods and there are Bad's and there are Bad's and maybe certain Goods are sensitive to likelihood and other goods are sensitive to remoteness you know same analogous remarks about about bad stuff and the like so you know another yes it's a just a relevant question would be this one about so what's the thing that we're discounting for it's not obvious okay so let me mention a different issue this is a problem well I suppose we worked all this out and you know we we decide and of course it could be that you know the simple view is right for certain kinds of goods are Bad's and the residues right for other kinds of goods are bad and so so the possibilities really do multiply for more and more complicated theories but but the basic idea again I'll just slip into talking about you know remote a problem like I would therefore did before I'll just slip into using both locations depending what comes out of my mouth you know for for inevitable failures to get good things it you shouldn't shouldn't have regret yeah yeah that's the rough thought you know the more inevitable yeah you shouldn't have things shouldn't have good things okay but now now we got into all this of course because we were things about you because I was think about the deprivation of counsel let's go back to death and when I said wait a minute deaths inevitable so if deaths inevitable and if inevitability are things you shouldn't care about it shouldn't get upset about then we've now lost the very point we started off trying to capture why is death and misfortune death was a misfortune because the deprivation account the deprivation account was subject to the problem about Aladdin's lamp and Bill Gates so we introduced all this discounting but neither got the disk now it turns out since death is inevitable it's not really a misfortune get over it that's not very satisfactory results that's that's objection number one tell us how does the whole approach here's a different objection I've been the cases I've been talking about our ones where you know Here I am in the actual world and I'm looking at something good that didn't happen some alternate possible world and roughly speaking I'm discounting for how remote it is you know bracketing the issues I was talking about a minute ago or here's something bad that didn't happen and how pleased I should be or relieved I should be I'm discounting for a huh so so roughly the more inevitable it was that things would be that way that is not calving the good thing not having the bad thing the the less I should care that's what happened for absences let's think about good and bad things that do occur how pleased should I be that a good thing happened how displeased should I be that a bad thing happened well it looks as though the very same thought generalizes in the obvious way and we say something like if it was inevitable that you would get this good thing you really shouldn't be pleased if it was inevitable that you you were going to get this bad thing it's not really all that big deal you shouldn't be all that upset about it that's got some at least in some cases some pretty implausible implications and Nagel saw this as well in the article that really you know there's an inspiration for a lot of this thinking Nagel has an example something like this where suppose it turns out that the human condition had evolved in such a way that we all end the last six of our lives the last six months of our lives in incredible excruciating pain that's just how our genes work right well it's inevitable and of course this thought suitably generalized says oh okay so it's inevitable no big deal you know you should you should that shouldn't have any regret about this but that that's not the intuition that Nagel had not the intuition I have when I think about that case we think you know we think oh my god isn't this horrible that we all buy these horrible excruciatingly painful deaths now that's a problem right because what it basically says is you know here's an idea seems sensible for dealing with the Aladdin lamp case and you know I spent some time saying here different ways of exploring it but you know just suppose we got that all worked out you generalize the idea in the obvious way and it gives us an implication for the painful end of life story which is unintuitive what are our options at this point so so so Nagle's conclusion is since it's not right to say it wouldn't be a misfortune to end our last six months of our lives in so much pain the generalization is false and so the basic idea is false and so the the problem you know that problem goes away since the basic idea is wrong then we don't have to worry anymore about the first objection namely the worry that deaths inevitable so we have to say that's not bad either that was only true if we bought that did the whole discounting idea throw the whole machinery out and of course you can do all that but that's at the cost now of now you back saying that's Aladdin's lamp is you know it's bad that I haven't got Aladdin's lap we're not going to discount so I don't think that's a very let's just lay out what the options are right I mean so we've got a base idea we've got which seems you know and you both attractive in its own right and necessary to avoid the Aladdin's lamp you know objection we've got a way of generalizing it we've got the thought that as generalized it has the implication that it's not bad that the the painful end of life story you shouldn't be upset about that and we've got the intuition that you shouldn't be upset about that now you know something's got to go no so you could say okay maybe we really shouldn't be upset about the painful life end of life option at that that's a way a possible response doesn't seem very attractive to me another possibilities to give up all the machinery altogether and either say okay so we it is the misfortune I didn't get a check for a million dollars today it is a misfortune I didn't find a Ladin's lamp and that would be a thing that we could say doesn't seem plausible you know to me either you could hope to find some other explanation that differentiates death you know why death is a misfortune at quod deprivation but Aladdin's lamp isn't some other story other than the discounting for remoteness story but I haven't any idea what that what that would look like so if neither those moves are plausible there's two other moves one is that I generalized correctly but I miss applied the theory to the painful end of life story and the other alternative is I miss generalised now I actually think there's something to be said for that I miss applied the story because suppose you were a residue theorist then what you're saying is even for inevitabilities there's some residual emotional appropriate rational regret and so even if it was genetically built into us that it was inevitable that we were all going to die these horrible painful deaths over six months and that's the proper generalization still if you're a residue theorist you could say oh all right some regrets still makes make sense and of course the the worse thing there the thing is that's inevitable the more the regret and so it might be that it's by virtue of either slipping into thinking of it in terms of a simple theory or the threshold theory that that we ended up thinking no regret makes any sense for horrible present actual bad things so it might be that we should just keep all the machinery but just having noticed that there's more possibilities for how these lines will actually go the problems less bad than we might think I think that's actually something to be said for that but another possibility is that we miss generalized and so let me try to quickly say something about that so take again the basic idea the basic it is Here I am in the actual world where you know I don't have the million dollars and so forth and I'm going to say I want to discount based on some kind of distance between well this world you know and that world where I have the million dollars what's the right description of what I'm measuring is it here's that here's that here's the thought in terms of the way we did generalize the way I did generalize it's look at the distance between the world where you don't have it and the world where you do have it right and if that's the right thing that we're measuring then the right generalization of that that's for absence world I look at the absent world I look at the present world I see how far apart they are absence versus presence and that's the distance that's relevant for the discount and then the same thought would be okay so if we're in the presence world I've got the painful disease I look and see how remote is the world where I didn't have the painful disease if it's part of human evolution that's going to be very remote world all you know you know all together and so it's presence versus absence you know we said with absence versus presence the generalization is absence versus presence doesn't matter whether this world is the presence world of this world's the absence world the relevant thing is absence versus presence but maybe that's not the right initial thought or the right description of the initial thought so maybe it's not the right generalization Here I am in the actual world in the absence of Ladin's lamp there's the world with Aladdin's lamp instead of thinking that the relevant distance is Aladdin's lamp to the abscence world may be the relevant distance is Aladdin's lamp to the actual world ok now that's of course just two ways of measuring the very same distance in absence cases but now switch over to a presence case I've got the painful disease how far is it from the painful disease world the presents world to the actual world I'm no longer going to the absence world from the painful disease world in the world in which I've got the painful disease there's no distance between the presence of the painful disease and the actual world so there's no discounting at all if that's the right way to generalize the theory is that the right way to generalize the theory you know I don't actually again have a firm view on this so you know in terms of how should we deal with the painful disease question one answer would be become residue theorists or maybe even mixed theorists we have the generalization right the first time but the second possibility is no no we miss generalized we assume that the relevant distinction was absence versus presence it's rather thing we're trying to measure versus actual presence versus actual and if that's the right way to measure that's the right way to generalize then the painful disease case isn't problematic and we can stick with the thought then ok death in the ordinary case is bad it's inevitable because the world but it's inevitable but that's ok I should still be you know upset because you know I've got some residue etc etc well I guess I misspoke what what what the what with the double general with a different generalization does is it deals with the problem deals with the problem what about the painful end-of-life case okay I think we've got possible two possible answers to that but we still have the first puzzle if death really is an Evan then why is it a misfortune and so here one possible answer is the residue move which is easy to overlook you know navels a threshold theorist so of course you've got to overlook that but we could be residue theorists or mixed theorists in which case that's a possible answer but there's another possible answer which is maybe we should say death is inevitable but when we die isn't inevitable all right and so you know if I get if I die at 50 then it wasn't inevitable I was gonna die 50 I could have made it to 55 that's a pretty high chance that was a near-miss if I got hit by a truck you know at age 50 if I admit it to 55 there'd be a lesser chance that I'd make it to 60 but still a significant chance that he made it to 60 there would still be a non-trivial chance you'd have to get pretty far out you know to a hundred you know whatever or so before the chances really become very very small of making it any further so what we in terms of the amount of misfortune we've got some rational regret you know if you die at 50 you've got some rational gret for not having you know for not have made it to 55 some other rational grapheme age of 16 some other rational gret for not having made it 65 and 70 and 75 and 80 and then you know around 80 85 90 begins to peter out because given the human condition at least under current technology that is pretty inevitable you're gonna die by a hundred or so but that still allows us to say that yeah doesn't make sense to be sad or regret or feel it's a misfortune that we die but that when we die when we do that could still be in misfortune all right I've been going on long enough let me just wrap it up there Thanks [Applause] all right yeah yeah yes yes I completely agree so I mean I in my usual utter abstract fashion of thinking about ethics never anything remotely concrete I talk about you know G big G small G you know bigger goods but I presume that these things are going to get measured in terms of something at least yes the first pass something like their impact on your welfare and your point is that the impact of was a $10,000 in the prize of $10,000 for you know for for you or me is non-trivial but for well goldstick both Bill Gates Bill Gates you know in the time that I've been thinking about the answer to your question his fortune has gone up ten thousand dollars right yeah that doesn't even show up on his bank account so there is no welfare gain for him and so what you're really making the point is that the size of a good isn't a function of the amount of dollars but something like the amount of you tiles or something like that and that seems right I mean of course that's just a placeholder for what the actual goods actually are but I certainly think that in many cases need will be something that affects how a certain X circumstances good or bad for you yeah and so the size will vary in just the way that you were suggesting you're talking a lot about how we should feel when there's a certain what we call a certain misfortune that and I think you're it seems like you're trying to save what is right yeah well there's a tradition that it's being revived and becoming more more popular stoicism and the stoic things that what you would describe as a misfortune they're gonna describe it a couple different ways but if it's a really bad misfortune Zeus really thinks highly of you just like we just like a in a war Epictetus says that the best soldiers are called forth for the toughest battles and although it's definitely count counterintuitive to think that way we can look at many cases of people's biographies where we where most of us would say it was the worst thing that what ever happened to me say I get as it said today I get zeroed out divorced loss of job children taken away the whole thing but there are people who have had such experiences they say it's actually the best thing that has ever happened to me Mike Bloomberg is one example so he was in his early 40s and he got fired from a highly lucrative job and then went on to build an immense portrait so so the stoic view would be actually it's not rational to think it was a bad thing to happen and you as you know they think most people are insane so they think no actually the rational thing would need to say oh this is great this is a great opportunity opportunity do something there's a sense in which your question really is just a variant on the first question namely what are the actual goods that were responding to and the stoic view which I know you know almost nothing about but as I understand it the stoic view is that you know there's really only one thing that's genuinely good and that's virtue right now if we think that then one possibility is all this notion of multiple lines goes out the window right because multiple lines is what you get when you've got multiple goods there's only one good you'll have one line it could still be the case if the Stoics did graphs that week and you know that you know in some lost manuscript or Krista pieces do we have you know was it a mere me I'm no sage right but if only I had studied with so-and-so I would have become a sage and become virtuous that's a near-miss that would be a rational thing to regret I take it from the stoic point of view they've had it the only sage in all of human history was Socrates then I would have had to have studied with I would have had been alive whatever 2,500 years ago that's not very likely at all and so though it would be compatible with stoic value theory I guess what I'm saying is you know even one acceptance to a value field we still have to ask the question does the amount of rational agretti vary with you know the chant you know if I if I had these wonderful opportunities that war or whatever it is gave me to show my indifference to the indifference and I blew it maybe I should be more upset at you know that the failure to gain the virtue that I could have gained or the failure to display or whatever it would have been so at least the meat you'll be in one way simpler but then you'd still in principle I think have to face the question do we want to have discounting for remoteness yeah or not I need to take someone from this side all right I'm still formulating but here goes all right perhaps this is just this is a possible error theory that might explain some of the phenomena were talking about yeah I'm just gonna try it out and see if I can articulate what I hope is something here perhaps we've looked into the absence world right don't get the million dollars I guess and perhaps that involves an incorrect epistemic objection I'm thinking about what this is a kind of a psychological explanation a little bit psychology I mean you'll have to side of events like I might remember all the red lights I got on the way here but not paid so much attention to creating lies and I think oh but for a near-miss I wouldn't got that red line we systematically make incorrect judgments about the lengths they go to those sorts of events it might might be that a mistake distance of these other worlds like for instance the presents world rather than a house because if we're wrong and projected likelihood which makes the proximity of that world seem closer than it is so the regrets proportion in a way that's based on yeah yeah I think that's a great fun so I think that just as we nothing - there's a there's a familiar distinction right between subjective obligations and objective obligations I say it's familiar I don't mean that's obvious how exactly it works I think that's a lot of obscurity there but but you know at least as a first approximation it's you know what do we take our duties to be versus what our duties actually or maybe what our duties would be we knew all the facts or something like that right so there's some kind of distinction between our objective duty and subjective Duty I think we'd probably want to have a similar parallel distinction in all of its machinery there's as I take it some fact of the matter about how remote the world was or how unlikely it was but then there's also my or your perception based on whatever metaphysical or empirical beliefs you might have psychologically driven by whatever it might be and so I think we'd want to talk about subjectively rational regret you know if the world war the way I don't mean how much great you actually have but rather given your beliefs how much you know if that was the way the world were how much regret would it make sense for you to have that would be your subjectively irrational regret and then there's the way the world actually is and so that would give us a measure of objectively rational or grant and of course if you got the facts right these will coincide but if you don't they'll come apart you may not realise that from the inside you'll typically take you etcetera etc etc so so import all those speeches you know how to give about subjective versus objective duty and now make parallel responses but I think yeah I think we're going to need to throw all that in as well hi this is a question about the difference between regret and other negative feelings oh yeah so my intuition about the death piece and the people end-of-life piece is that it makes no sense to have regret in those pieces but it does make sense to make me feel like sad or scared or something like that like other negative feelings the regret in those cases doesn't make sense to me because of the inevitability even though in my hand fisted way I was indeed just running together all these negative emotions and I'm the positive side you know we had relief was it and may you know the opposite of just may you know or joy or whatever and and I think you're quite right I mean it's at least an interesting you know if one found these sets of questions interesting at all then there'd be an interesting way of pushing the research project forward maybe you know it does discounting work like this for all of the negative emotions one has about the lack of a good or the on the positive side you know do we need to distinguish between different positive emotions for the absence of a bad and and so forth do they all are they're all subject to discounting are they all responding to the same underlying feature I mean here's a possible you know I said look is it is a possibility or is it remoteness what which of those is it right and and me and then I said maybe different ones for different goods but of course we could equal say maybe different ones for different negative emotions different ones for different positive emotions I'm not in any way wed to the assumption that the same answer would be the right answer for all of them on the one hand I do think I'm basically dude just too coarse-grained a fellow to do that part you know that research project carefully though I do think you know let people who actually read literature you know do you know have you know finely tuned sensitivities which I'm completely lacking in you know but that's what it would take right and so that seems great I do think I want to say okay but to do that you first gotta figure out what are some of the options here so you've got to you have some of the machinery available to you to start asking does the line look like this you know it could be that you know after all maybe it's a straight line for certain negative emotions but a curved line with different degrees of curvature I mean the possibilities only open up to my mind I think of these things as I find these things very valuable here these graphs in particular very valuable heuristics for saying oh here are questions about how does the emotion vary and it's once you see that there are these options you begin to ask do all the negative emotions work the same way or not so that's a great great quick great question yeah Thanks I think this is just another way of asking well another dimension of the kind of chances or remoteness that we're asking about that I want to be few thought about so you know enables this kind of case of people dying with you know lots of pain I lost six months of their lives we've kind of set up the cases it was part of the human condition and so inevitable in that sense for us all but we can think about cases where you know someone's death is inevitable because they have some rare genetic disease or something we going to die at 40 and then they gave it back they five I mean you know so we can I was wondering about that kind of case where it's inevitable for you in a specific way but not have the human condition yeah it does seem like another relevant test case for trying these things out yeah it's so you compare somebody who you know Joe who has this horrible genetic disease that will never leak ill you at 50 and Sally who does not have any such disease and has the genes that could keep her up to 90 but that gets hit by a car at 50 you know across the crossing the street so if you combine that with the thought that Gene's render you know it inevitable you know common enough thought but I suppose one could wonder about it then that's a nice test case you know if you feel that the one has more to regret yet the thought might be look it's sad in both cases and we can even say you know especially if it got residue or mixed you can say even in Joe's case there's some some grounds for being sad but I think I would understand the thought and maybe even share the thought oh for Sally it's it's worse it's more misfortune right that wasn't in the cards that she was going to die right unless you believe him you know reason blow goes this morning Louis working itself out right now if you're not if don't believe necessity of that kind of stuff of fatalism then if you've got the intuition it's it's more of a misfortune for the healthy person to die that's some support on the other hand if you've got the other intuition that you could just say okay that argues the against you know the entire bit of machinery that's argument against the intuition I'm not because supposedly we were varying the amount of inevitability if there's no variation the misfortune that does threaten the whole approach or else it threatens whether or not we really share the underlying metaphysical stipulation so I don't myself think that your genes are necessary to you so when I I mean I was taught by Kripke so I know why I'm supposed to think that but you know but but but I just didn't I've never had the intuitions right so I know how to say oh yo your genes are inevitable you know - you are essential to you so it couldn't have been otherwise blah blah blah blah blah but I worry that when I tried that particular test case on for size I'm not actually inhabiting the assumptions properly to trust my own intuitions but nonetheless cases like that are highly relevant yeah I have the question because you'll produce to end up second just in your face for you know I can fix okay well you apply this to death and having like we had mentioned like having a very you're suffering for six months before your death well what if you had this what if you applied this to earth like having a child who was born with severe mental deficiencies but was had the genes to live you know forever is there yeah certainly would think so so so I'm not sure I've got exactly the kind of case you have in mind but I mean this sort of thing you know tragically of course does actually happen perfectly healthy fetus close to term gets caught up in the bilkul cord around its neck and strangles and dies so that's just a near-miss of making it to birth you know alive and so here's this good thing that almost made it to you your way in terms of misfortune for me the parent was a very near miss and so either a very small amount of discounting would take place or maybe none remember I said early on that maybe these lines should to be really crude about a plateau and so if if the death occurred very late in the nine months you might think oh almost made it maybe there should be no discounting about you know if you thought that that would be some evidence for a plateau view or it could of course be you know it might not be literally Plateau might be that it was asymptotically approaching and so it might be almost indistinguishable until you start getting some significant drop-off in probability and and I think that meshes you know at least at a crude level with our intuitions about how autism is fortunately think it is when a pregnancy gets lost at different levels I mean I forget what it is remember these statistics you know half of all fertilizations occur with natural spontaneous abortions 2/3 something like that right people do not consider this a horrible misfortune why because that was nine months ago we had a lot of other stuff it was going to go through a chance of so it was almost like when such a huge percentage of it don't make it that's a very high chance that you're not going to get the good thing and so there's gonna be a lot of discounting but when you've made it all the way through pregnancy and you're down to the last you know few weeks and the fetus dies of some sheer accident then we expect it to be a lot of this way so those kinds of cases actually struck me as they're kind of the data that support having this kind of a view so they're not problematic they're they're instances of it there illustration of the view at work I was thinking about I was thinking about stoicism as well aren't we all and if we're if I mean if we're if you're a true stoic and these these circumstances are truly external totally out of your control then we'll be a complete flatline right no I don't think maybe I need to hear more but remember the fact that it's out of your control means again the stoic thought is I can't control whether I have I mean you don't want to say tank controlled you have virtual because you can't control whether you have virtue but you know it's weatherize out of my control but that's a role because life's deaths that's not it all that matters is that I just want somebody said to David before choosing sense that I understand this dog view the question is what's good and the answer is there's one good thing furthermore we don't have the disunity of the virtues there's only just right as well there's only really one virtue and so there's only one good thing to have now they're still going to be I have it I don't have it how likely was it that I got it I don't have I mean it may be I don't know what the soul should say about you is it is it my fault is it not my fault that I have that I have virtue but you know we might complicate the view maybe this is where you're really going I'm talking about likelihood of remoteness there's another dimension how much of my fault is it that the good or bad thing happened versus a being out of my control if one was I don't know like Spinoza or something as come everything's completely out of my control there is no control is that right is that anybody here actually known of Spinoza and although I got that one right sure they say okay good a raging hotbed of Stoicism Stoics here but no but no no Spinoza all right so let's just suppose it's for those of you know things that nothing's under my control we might wonder should that affect my degree of regret as well I think that's an interesting question perfectly compare and and then your thought was okay so maybe the Stoics think that it's all completely out of my control and so if you think things under my control should never be a source of regret the trouble is you can't as far as I can I don't face a problem for me a problem with Stokes I don't see how to combine that with the thought I should regret my not having virtue surely which is why I assume that the Stoics believe whether I have virtue is under my control sound right may if I got anybody had to know enough stoicism to know whether that's right not good all right so so whether I whether I become virtuous or not is something that I have control over and so even if we added your dimension that probably wouldn't be a flat line though maybe just be a you know two to two tiered lon I don't absolutely all right it all seems compatible with this stuff it's not so much in tension with it would be here's yet another dimension maybe we should throw in two if we had a complete theory of rational regret we'd want to take into account not just likelihood and remoteness but control degree of control good so I've got a kind of a puzzle I guess I don't I don't think I want to say problem with using remoteness okay so I don't really know I mean if we're thinking I don't really know how to measure distances between possible worlds but if it has something to do with how different that world is then that one moment where becomes clear that I'm the one who's not going to get it now so if it's different so the rule bear I would have gotten a million dollars is now more remote to the world where I would have gotten ten cents and so this is maybe we want the world bribe you miss out on a million dollars to the lumber we have more rational regret writing but now it's more remote and it's going to scale exactly with that size of the good yeah and so I don't think it's a problem so you can kind of maybe you can make up for this it's weird that's actively working so that's a great question of me think about this so we've got the the remoteness of the world is greater said yeah well are we talking about he gives the money to everybody tonight and I'm thinking of how upset am I when I'm the loser tonight or is this when I look back in 10 years 20 years so it isn't clear to me the thing that you just said whether that's so or not that the world you know if if it's the very same procedure that gets used to select the loser and all that's very it is the amount of check that he wrote down on the check that's attached inside the envelope then I'm not sure the worlds are equally are differentially remote right now might be that they're differentially remote you know twenty years from now because of course with a million bucks I could have done a lot of different things that I would do with a dime which is just lose it right laughs I suppose what that really shows is probably isn't the remoteness of the world probably gonna have to be the remoteness of the world time slices or something like that because the world you know if they if they were close at the beginning it's the very same world once its diverges so it's gotta be time but all right techie fix to get her out techie problem let the techie fixers fix it I know you're thinking I draw these diagrams I'm doing one of those techie people but now I'm not really techie this is about as heavy-duty that can get ok so so you thought was on the one hand as time goes by or at least we moved to the time goes by case the worlds are very remote there should be a lot of discounting on the other hand with the a million dollars versus a dime there would be much less divergence with a dime so there shouldn't be any discount so there should be sorry I thought I had it and I lost it the dime versus try it again the dime versus million bucks if you're doing it if you're doing it temporarily yeah then the the amount you regret missing out on the dime is just not going to change at all right but the amount you regret missing out a million dollars is gonna go down that doesn't seem wrong doesn't seem right but my example is I think that there's not in the same way but there are at the moment differences but if you disagree on them okay all right so good so so if we're doing though looking back 20 years later case then it's then what then what we're saying is what I'm saying I guess is you'd regret it a lot in the moment you regret it less and less and less over time of course if it was a million dollars you're still gonna have a lot of regret even ten years later right but it'll be less regret but if you're simply talked about in the moment case then I guess my inclination is to think that no there they're equally far apart because of the size at the moment maybe that's wrong at least that's my immediate reaction to cases hi so one question I had is is there a difference between rational regret as to an event that has occurred like the gates lottery you were talking about versus what we feel about events that yeah do you ever sell thoughts on that I do I think that it's kind of a misnomer of the color with respect to a future event like and I'm not sure we're talking about that am I thinking about how I feel about my death right now so the likelihood or in fact the fact that I'm going to die in the future SS today or is it during the whole period leading up to my death or right at that good right so I take it two thoughts gotta be good too it's got to be regret and if regrets not the right word for anticipatory you know negative emotions it will substitute in you know some other emotion that's - right right one there's got to be something you know because we do think about an anticipatory way I think of my death as a looming misfortune for me and so there's got to be not just backwards looking stuff like this but forward-looking stuff like if that much seems right to me whether or not this isn't quite the question you asked but I suppose one kind of wonder then does the difference in temporal direction make a difference to the grass or any of these other features I don't want you I suppose it could that's that's a wonderful question to think about I haven't actually ever wondered that I mean you talk about some case where I anticipate some good thing that could have come my way not coming my way I look back on an exactly equal sized good thing that could have come my way didn't come my way Oh Lucretia's okay so you guys all remember Lucretia's is puzzle about why you know we're all totally indifferent to the fact that there was his eternity when we didn't exist before our birth but we're all totally upset about that like who's going to be this eternity after our death and there are different puzzles about how the hell are we supposed to explain can we justify these asymmetrically different reactions he's metaphysically puzzling bla bla bla bla bla though different moves they're all very clever and none of them the least bit persuasive here's a further utterly clever unpersuasive explanation using this machinery right when you think back on what would have needed to have been different for you to have been born earlier for most of us that's utterly remote I'd have to change huge patches swatches of human history gonna have to have a huge amount of discounting there but when I think about what would have to be different for me to live longer than I'm gonna live almost nothing right you know a few little medical discoveries and I could live another 10 years right and so the amount of discounting for the One Direction versus the other direction very asymmetrical and so it's a possible explanation as to and it's a it's a real it's not an endorsement of Lucretia's it's a possible answer to Lucretius which doesn't actually strike me as ad hoc seems to me oh yeah maybe it's on to something so when I think about the rationality of regret the rationality part it's regretful of why is this motion math means how we react in different cases well I think correctly addressing that or thinking about that I thought it might be helpful we think about a case like the overtime how our regret might change or why you think it ought to change rationally might have something to do with what regret is for now it was fine to goods and their probabilities at a time if they occur for action guiding this for time I don't have a theory here at all he's not thinking that as time goes on continuing aggressively way of the back in the past might miss what the point of a Brett is holding on to something that has no action for the action possibility but this PK specifically big ones might have that and smaller ones might not some things we think about why we think rather rational we might get a sense of why it changes over time it doesn't involve anything about the moments of possible worlds that's to do it yeah so this is actually to my eerily similar or at least similar of I mean in the same philosophical neighborhood as the question or remark about the different types of negative emotions that is yeah I use the word we're good I probably even put the word up there but you know in the passage from Nagle talks about this fortune and you know the suggestions maybe it's sorrow not regret right and so one answer might just be yeah David you're right I shouldn't use the word regret there's some other negative emotion that we need a word for maybe even have a word for to use the wrong one you know how much of a misfortune is it you know that this good thing didn't come my way maybe that would do the trick another possibility is no regrets perfectly fine here it's just that like most things it's sensitive to a lot of stuff that's as well as the point about how much it's under your control right and so I'm not saying the only thing that regret should ever be responsive to is the likelihood or remoteness you know may be one thing and this is you know what can we learn from this can we grow as a result of this and that if so then stop regretting and you know pick yourself up by your bootstraps become a better person you know just discover the difference between the valuables and need you know whatever it might be yeah I don't mean to say here's the entire theory of regret I meant merely here's an aspect of where negative emotions seem to be sensitive into a dimension we need to have some theory about this in order to preserve the deprivation account which I certainly want to preserve from the counter examples of Aladdin and Bill Gates you're going to need something like this even if there's all this other machinery that are mucking around in our negative emotions as well yeah clear I'm assuming you would answer these other questions like the death isn't a medical question it's the time of death that matters you answer the painful death case for the residual case there's this puzzle about how it changes over time and I was focusing on that and in particular if we focus on all this I may not have to use for moments of worlds for that one other factor so I mean it really even could be that and to really simplify your thought there's the lessons that you could learn or did learn or should learn and you know when's the right time to learn the relevant lessons there's the lesson aspect of our emotions that's I don't have any desire to try to resist that that's perfectly compatible thinking there's also this dimension and this is all over the other side here's a dimension that we need to think about in order to preserve puffs of what I want to say about death ends yeah I can easily imagine somebody becoming more regretful as time nasty it's the event that took plans big difference if I made in your life my child there's a I can't remember who wrote this poem of I was or song down by the Sally Gardens the second verse of which is remember who wrote it okay excellent so I won't sing it for you you know he and the narrator and his love you know this and that she bids me take love easy right I'll skip some lines and he says but I was young and foolish so what you know didn't do it and now I'm feel of pull of tears right so that's a familiar thought now let me take that beautiful thought and uglify it by doing analytic philosophy okay okay but not have to Dec dress right so so I had the privilege of having Carl temple as my colleague when I first taught at assistant professor at University of Pittsburgh and I sat in on his seminar on philosophy of science and I never at the blackboard saying one day in the bad old days before antlered philosophy would have said something like person across the street now thanks Emily philosophy we know the right thing to say is person P cross the street s at time t1 I don't want to do that to the 8th stop oh yes all right I say maybe what's going on there is the point about subject to versus object what was that I was saying that to subjective versus objective differences here right it's that at the time you didn't appreciate what was going on and now with the distance of hindsight you realize what's going on and so your subjective assessment of the facts has altered and consequently the amount of regret that makes sense for you to feel subjectively it's changing as well even though had you known all the facts back then would have been you the same amount so we should just say yeah I think the phenomena that you're pointing to is perfectly real and perfectly right but I think actually you know if one wanted to God knows why one would one could capture those thoughts in terms of this these distinctions I don't know how serious you were about calling what you were doing there ERISA days but it occurs to me that the longer I listen to what you were doing the more I learned something that I hadn't really thought of before which is I don't want to think about the possibility of death and regrets in in in such a vacuum yeah that the way I think about the depending of my impending death which is our closer Korean ears is that it makes a lot of difference to the quality in my life that I integrate my thoughts about my impending death with more of the things that have already happened to me that change its meaning and make me less regretful so I could use your heuristic to train my intuitions about what I should do with something like my fear or regret or my opinion that I don't know if that's what you were intending but it it seems to me the more I listen to you the more I thought it's really unhealthy as single out one thing about your life like that and then fool around with it use your pardon expression with diagrams yeah so two thoughts at least in response you know one I agree with what you're saying and when I disagree with what you're saying don't take away my graphs you know it's so so as I teach this class on deaf right I don't mean this class I mean the I teach out class on death to my students and one of the topics that we talk about is how much did you think about death and I say to my students well it's kind of too late for you guys right semester you know thinking about it but I do talk about the question you know there there is this thought right that I mean in the Jewish tradition you know you should live every day as I'm sure everybody and all traditions have a version though it's gonna be your last I think I think that's a horrible sentiment I don't buy that at all right yeah there's a place in the time for thinking about death I say to my students know you're on a hot date right you're busy making out with no filling your favorite gender here you know and and now you start picturing their rotting corpse and the great yeah that is not the time to be thinking about that but that doesn't mean there isn't a time for thinking about death and well this was one of them this is the time so and at least you were warned you know the title was right or was right there the title so right but but that there's a place in time that seems right and what what I actually meant about it the heuristics thing was was just this when you draw a graph like this you know and when I initial graph just had the single line going through the origin if you are visually you know oriented like I am for this sort of stuff I mean it is the case 200 plus graphs in my book on dessert and you know I started after that the line be straight or should it not be straight should you know should be curving what's gonna curve what direction we and I think ways these aren't merely mathematical possibilities each one corresponds to a different view about the significance of the discounting which actually you know think about the birth and the definitely a fetus cases you know correspond to actual moral data right so this is an attempt to visually portray alternative views about the underlying facts about moral psychology or something like that I certainly will be the first to acknowledge that not everybody finds this kind of methodology congenial and I don't mean to suggest it's the only way to do philosophy God knows right but I guess I do want to say I find it helpful because I find myself wondering Oh does the line go here or does the line cut here it is the line cut here and by the by if the line cuts here the navel was wrong you know when he worried about a certain case and that's a discovery that I would not have discovered the first ten times I read the paper by Nagel I did discover it until I force myself to ask where does the line go and so there are there are there are alternative theories in moral psychology who which in principle could be discoverable in purely linguistic methods for a lot you know language will have you but you might not notice some of these alternatives until you draw them graphically and that's really what happens in my case so that's what I meant by calling them heuristics any more questions I warn you all down no rational regrets if you don't ask any more questions all right let us put our hands together [Music] you

Channel: College of the Holy Cross

Views: 5,900

Rating: 4.858407 out of 5

Keywords: College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, Education, Liberal, Arts, Jesuit, Catholic, College, death, philosophy, kagan, rational regret, heuristics

Id: OmAlbpiwiAs

Length: 102min 32sec (6152 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019