Galen Strawson has an article Why I have no Future over at The Philosophy Magazine. It is sad to say, but as modern moral philosophy goes I think it is quite unremarkable. It opens.
If, in any normal, non-depressed period of life, I ask myself whether I’d rather be alive than dead tomorrow morning, and completely put aside the fact that some people would be unhappy if I were dead, I find I have no preference either way. The fact that I’m trying to finish a book, or about to go on holiday, or happy, or in love, or looking forward to something, makes no difference. More specifically: when I put this question to myself and suppose that my death is going to be a matter of instant annihilation, completely unexperienced, completely unforeseen, it seems plain to me that I—the human being that I am now, GS—would lose nothing. My future life or experience doesn’t belong to me in such a way that it’s something that can be taken away from me. It can’t be thought of as possession in that way. To think that it’s something that can be taken away from me is like thinking that life could be deprived of life, or that something is taken away from an existing piece of string by the fact that it isn’t longer than it is. It’s just a mistake, like thinking that Paris is the capital of Argentina.
I’ll call this view No Ownership of the Future—NOF for short. Most will think it absurd, and I don’t expect to be able to change their minds. A few, though, will know immediately what I mean and think it obvious.
Note the suggestion that while a most people won’t have the courage to face this ‘reality’ an elect unblinking few are capable of gazing into the existential abyss. Needless to say there are some interesting ethical corollaries .
If NOF is true then you can harm people in all sorts of ways but you can’t harm them simply by bringing about their painless and unforeseen death (by “simply” I mean that their death is considered completely independently of any consequences it may have for others).
Needless to say this goes against just about every ethical system devised throughout human history, but these were all made up by pre-modern sissies clinging to consoling myths. Stephen Luper’s survey for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on Death reveals a similar pattern: paradox piled upon paradox, all emerging from a physicalist ontology which just gets assumed, because that is what modern science tells us, right?
Sure—if you are still in the 19th century.However some developments in physics in the twentieth century forced physicists to come to terms with the fact that classical materialist ontology was highly problematic. Einstein and others complained about the new idealist turn but could do nothing about it. As Feynman said, whether physicists liked it or not, wasn’t the point: that is what nature is telling us.
As I related in the comment I left on the article, I have heard the story told of a quite accomplished Tibetan-Buddhist practitioner who accidentally drove over a cliff in India. His automatic response was to pray to his teacher, a great (living) meditation master, asking him ‘What has happened?’ ‘You are dead!’ ‘Oh!’ and he got on with (post-mortem) meditation practice. (We know of the story through the living meditation master, of course).
But we don’t need to rely on anecdotal stories from esoteric traditions of foreign cultures. We have the late Ian Stephenson’s research and the ongoing work of his colleagues, a carefully compiled mass of scientific evidence that points to reincarnation, or rebirth in Buddhist terminology. The evidence takes the form of the claims of a young person to being able to remember episodes from a previous life, backed up by knowledge that is difficult to account for otherwise. Another interesting branch pursued by Stephenson was the correlation between exit wounds and birthmarks in the young person with memories. It is easy enough to dismiss a single case as some bizarre coincidence, but Stephenson and his colleagues have collected a lot. (Check our, for example, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker.)
Looked at from the Buddhist perspective, taking away someone’s life, even painlessly, is not to be taken lightly, and this is grounded in reason and evidence. After we die we are by no means assured of another gig in which we have the leisure and advantages to study philosophy. Taking a look around it is quite obvious that there is vastly more suffering in the world which people are trapped in subsistent situations, and many of them involve quite frightful suffering. This is true enough of the human condition but especially true when all animal suffering is included, and we are told that there are other realms in which even more being suffer much more acutely. But these later states aren’t necessary for the argument: just considering the amount of suffering going on in our sight, taking away someone’s life, especially a life with possibilities for leisure is the most terrible theft, apart from any suffering episode involved in the killing.
None of this is at all obscure. I am not necessarily expecting contemporary moral philosophers to adopt my views, but you would have thought that they might consider some of the alternatives, yet as a herd (Strawson represents the orthodox way of thinking) they continue these very strange ethical investigations based on an ontology that all but denies the reality of the mind.
Cheapening Life
Note the suggestion that while a most people won’t have the courage to face this ‘reality’ an elect unblinking few are capable of gazing into the existential abyss. Needless to say there are some interesting ethical corollaries .
Needless to say this goes against just about every ethical system devised throughout human history, but these were all made up by pre-modern sissies clinging to consoling myths. Stephen Luper’s survey for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on Death reveals a similar pattern: paradox piled upon paradox, all emerging from a physicalist ontology which just gets assumed, because that is what modern science tells us, right?
Sure—if you are still in the 19th century.However some developments in physics in the twentieth century forced physicists to come to terms with the fact that classical materialist ontology was highly problematic. Einstein and others complained about the new idealist turn but could do nothing about it. As Feynman said, whether physicists liked it or not, wasn’t the point: that is what nature is telling us.
As I related in the comment I left on the article, I have heard the story told of a quite accomplished Tibetan-Buddhist practitioner who accidentally drove over a cliff in India. His automatic response was to pray to his teacher, a great (living) meditation master, asking him ‘What has happened?’ ‘You are dead!’ ‘Oh!’ and he got on with (post-mortem) meditation practice. (We know of the story through the living meditation master, of course).
But we don’t need to rely on anecdotal stories from esoteric traditions of foreign cultures. We have the late Ian Stephenson’s research and the ongoing work of his colleagues, a carefully compiled mass of scientific evidence that points to reincarnation, or rebirth in Buddhist terminology. The evidence takes the form of the claims of a young person to being able to remember episodes from a previous life, backed up by knowledge that is difficult to account for otherwise. Another interesting branch pursued by Stephenson was the correlation between exit wounds and birthmarks in the young person with memories. It is easy enough to dismiss a single case as some bizarre coincidence, but Stephenson and his colleagues have collected a lot. (Check our, for example, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker.)
Looked at from the Buddhist perspective, taking away someone’s life, even painlessly, is not to be taken lightly, and this is grounded in reason and evidence. After we die we are by no means assured of another gig in which we have the leisure and advantages to study philosophy. Taking a look around it is quite obvious that there is vastly more suffering in the world which people are trapped in subsistent situations, and many of them involve quite frightful suffering. This is true enough of the human condition but especially true when all animal suffering is included, and we are told that there are other realms in which even more being suffer much more acutely. But these later states aren’t necessary for the argument: just considering the amount of suffering going on in our sight, taking away someone’s life, especially a life with possibilities for leisure is the most terrible theft, apart from any suffering episode involved in the killing.
None of this is at all obscure. I am not necessarily expecting contemporary moral philosophers to adopt my views, but you would have thought that they might consider some of the alternatives, yet as a herd (Strawson represents the orthodox way of thinking) they continue these very strange ethical investigations based on an ontology that all but denies the reality of the mind.
Very strange.