On the inseparability of selves
In the previous post, I raised a question about the relationship between interpersonal morality and intrapersonal morality. Interpersonal morality concerns the distinctively moral norms that govern our behaviour towards other people; intrapersonal morality concerns the distinctively moral norms that govern our behaviour towards ourselves, including ourselves in the past, at the present time, and in the future—or, as it is sometimes put, towards our past, present, and future selves (though this talk of selves should carry no metaphysical implications). What interests me is the apparent asymmetry between the two: interpersonal morality seems more demanding than intrapersonal morality. I want to know whether that appearance is accurate, and if so why.
One extreme account of the asymmetry says that there simply are no intrapersonal moral norms: the domain of the moral is our behaviour towards others, while our behaviour towards ourselves is the domain of the prudentially rational. But most moral systems—and certainly standard Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian positions—reject this.
Another account of the asymmetry comes from Daniel Muñoz and Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt’s recent paper, ‘Wronging Oneself’. This account of the asymmetry begins with the claim that, at one level, there is no assymetry. Just as you have certain rights against me—the right that I not pinch your arm, for instance—so I also have that right against myself, and indeed my future selves have certain rights against my current self and my past selves, and so on; perhaps my past selves even have rights against my future selves, just as we might say that the dead can have rights against the living that at least some of their projects be respected. The apparent asymmetry between inter- and intra-personal morality then results because it is easier for me to ensure that I waive my right against myself than it is to ensure that you waive your right against me; and, moreover, I in fact do more often waive my rights against myself.
My worry about this account is that there are ways in which I can treat my future selves that we tend not to consider morally wrong, but which would count as wrong were we to treat others in this way. There are burdens it seems morally permissible to place on future selves for our current benefit that morality demands we do not place on other people for our own benefit. Of course, if those future selves were here to consent to bearing those burdens and thereby waive their rights, there would be no problem. But they’re not.
Of course, we might say that it is sufficient that we know that the future self would consent were they around to do so. But we tend to require actual consent in interpersonal cases. Even if you would consent to me taking some of your property or imposing a significant burden on you were I to ask you, and even if I know this, it nonetheless seems that I do you wrong by taking the property or imposing the burden. And in any case, sometimes my current behaviour affects far future selves of mine. For instance, certain decisions I make now might carry a high risk of affecting my body adversely in twenty years’ time, when it’s inhabited by my sixty year old self. And I just don’t have the right access to that future self’s values and desires and preferences to be sure that they would in fact consent to bearing the burden I impose on them.
So we need to look elsewhere if we are to retain Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt’s account. In this post, I’d like to explore the possibility of appealing to an adapted version of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist thought experiment from her paper ‘In Defence of Abortion’. Here is the original example in Thomson’s words:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”
Of this case, Thomson asks:
Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?
And her reply: no, you do not have to accede to this. As she says, we might think it quite praiseworthy if you were to do this, but the violinist has no right against you, and so it is not the case that, morally speaking, you must do this. We’ll think more about this verdict later on, but before that, let me describe a related case.
This time, it is a flautist who is hooked up to your circulatory system. And there are some other differences as well. First, he is as light as air, and you can carry him around with you at all times without his presence intruding on your life or preventing you from doing anything you’d otherwise do. Second, he will remain hooked up to you and unconscious until the day you die, at which point he’ll wake up cured, he’ll detach themselves from you, and he’ll live his life. Third, however, his quality of life after you die and he wakes up depends significantly on how you live your life: drink a moderate amount of alcohol and he’ll suffer quite considerably; get certain cosmetic procedures and there’s a high chance he’ll suffer quite considerably; and so on.
The question about the flautist is not whether or not your should accede to the situation. After all, as I’ve said, he does not intrude at all on your life nor restrict what you can do, unlike his colleague the violinist. The question in this case is whether you must refrain from drinking even in moderation; whether you must refrain from the cosmetic procedure you’d like to get; whether you must refrain from behaviour that will result in a certain degree of suffering for the flautist.
If we transpose Jarvis Thomson’s conclusion to this case, we will say that just as the violinist has no standing to demand that you stay hooked up to him, so the flautist has no standing to demand that you change how you would otherwise behave now that your behaviour has these dire consequences for him. In particular, just as the violinist’s right to life does not create an obligation in you to keep him alive, so the flautist’s right not to suffer does not create an obligation in you to act in a way that doesn’t result in his suffering. And just as Jarvis Thomson draws an analogy between the violinist and an embryo, so we might draw an analogy between the flautist and your future self. Like your future self, the flautist does not impinge upon your current self’s existence; your future self does not exist at all, while the flautist exists but does not intrude. Like your future self, the flautist’s well-being when they wake up after you die depends on how your current self behaves. And so, if the transposed version of Jarvis Thomson’s conclusion is correct, and you do not have obligations to the flautist, even though the flautist has the usual suite of rights that we all enjoy, nor do you have obligations to your future self, even though that future self has the usual suite of rights that Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt say they have.
So, we could formulate a version of Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt’s account that goes something like this: My future selves have exactly the same rights against my current self that you and other people have against my current self. While we might be able to predict with a certain degree of confidence in many cases that my future self would agree to bear a burden in order to gain a benefit for my current self, just believing someone will agree to having something done to them does not have the same power to make that thing permissible that consent has; and, in any case, we’re often not terribly confident about what our far future selves will do. But, it turns out that this is not necessary, because in many cases in which my current self imposes a burden on a future self to benefit himself, this doesn’t violate any right that the future self has against him, because the relationship between the current and future self is analogous to the relationship between you and the flautist when they’re hooked up to your kidney against your will. In such cases, there’s a range of things that a person is permitted to do that doesn’t become prohibited when, against that person’s will, someone has put them into a causal nexus that means this quotidian behaviour has very bad effects on others. In the case of the flautist, this behaviour might include drinking a moderate amount of alcohol, for instance, or undergoing a certain cosmetic procedure; for Jarvis Thomson, in the case of the violinist, it includes unhooking them completely, which will kill them; and also for Jarvis Thomson, in the case in which her life might be saved by the cool hand of Henry Fonda on her brow, it includes, for Henry Fonda, simply not crossing a room to administer this cure.
Recall my original question: why is there an asymmetry between the moral laws that govern our treatment of our future selves and our treatment of other people? On this version of Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt’s account, there is no such asymmetry. There appears to be an asymmetry because we see burdens that it is permissible for my current self to impose on my future self that it is not permissible for my current self to impose on you. But that would only show that there’s an asymmetry if the relationship between the actions of my current self and my future self was the same as the relationship between the actions of my current self and you. But they are not. My future self has been hooked up to my current self without my agreement; you haven’t. And this means that certain actions that predictably result in burdens to my future self are permissible in ways that actions that predictably result in similar burdens to you are not.
One initial worry about this story is that Jarvis Thomson’s original case relied heavily on the much-discussed distinction between killing and letting die. The reason I don’t violate the violinist’s right to life when I unhook them is that I simply let them die in that case; I don’t kill them. What will kill them is the condition that requires the Society of Music Lovers to hook them up to my kidneys in the first place. There is no obvious analogy of this in the case of my future self. Think again of the cosmetic procedure that I desperately want to get now, but which risks imposing a serious burden on my far future self because of how it will affect the body we share. In the case of the violinist, Jarvis Thomson could portray remaining hooked up as the act of saving a life, and unhooking as simply letting die—there is a clear distinction between the active and the passive in this case, because there is an external process, the illness, that is driving the fate of the violinist. In the case of the cosmetic procedure, it’s not so easy to see whether undergoing it is the active imposition of a burden (analogous to killing) or simply letting things take their course (analogous to letting die). But let’s leave that aside.
What I want to focus on instead is whether what I have said is really sufficient to answer my question. I think it does if (i) you think there’s a close relationship between rights and what we morally ought to do, namely, you do something morally impermissible only if you violate a right, or something close to that; and (ii) you agree with Jarvis Thomson’s general picture of what certain rights give you standing to demand. But it’s not clear to me that even Jarvis Thomas agrees with (i). She recognises that there are moral judgments we’d make about a person that go beyond whether or not they have violated another person’s rights. If Henry Fonda could save her life by crossing the room and doesn’t, he may not violate her right to life, but he surely does something morally wrong? Indeed, note that, when Peter Singer wished to argue that we’re morally required to give to charity, he began with what he took to be an uncontroversial case of a moral requirement: sacrificing a little time and some modest amount of money to save a child whose life is in peril right near to you. And then he drew an analogy with the controversial case. And I think Jarvis Thomson agrees:
So my own view is that even though you ought to let the violinist use your kidneys for the one hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so—we should say that if you refuse, you are, like the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give none away, self-centered and callous, indecent in fact, but not unjust. […] The complaints are no less grave; they are just different.
And if this is the case, then whatever we’ve learned about the rights my future self has against my current self, still we might not have accounted for the asymmetry between inter- and intra-personal morality. For all we’ve said, other moral considerations beyond rights might simply flood in to fill the space and render the facts about what burdens we may impose on future selves the same as the facts about what burdens we may impose on others. That’s the question I want to address in the next post.
How does the flautist case differ from ordinary cases of (wrongfully) harming others? Is the idea that he relies on (say) the full functioning of your kidneys to maintain his health, and so if you drink alcohol, even the mild taxing of your organs will result in grave harms to the flautist? And so, the idea goes, you aren't unjustly harming the flautist at all, because -- having no right to your organs to begin with -- you aren't depriving him of anything that he has a right to, unlike in the case of ordinary harms (e.g. polluting clean air that another *does* have a right to)?
It seems like the precise causal details will matter here (for the deontologist). If we instead imagine that your drinking alcohol harms the flautist via a causal chain unrelated to their use of your organs -- say the alcohol releases fumes that are toxic to weightless people floating about in your vicinity -- then it would seem like any other ordinary harm. If pursuing some minor interest would expose others to severely harmful toxins, it's (ordinarily) clearly impermissible to proceed.
But now it seems very strange to think that whether you can permissibly drink and cause this harm to the flautist depends on these fine details of the causal chain between the drink and the harm, and whether or not it goes via your organs. So I think that's some reason to be suspicious of the idea that Thomson is actually getting at anything morally fundamental with her talk of rights. I'm inclined to think the whole self/other asymmetry is best understood on the level of surface heuristics (people can be better trusted to make intrapersonal tradeoffs than interpersonal ones, so we give others veto power to prevent abuse) rather than fundamental moral principles (e.g. deontological claims that even perfect utilitarian tradeoffs would be objectionable, in principle, without the other's consent).
I'm not sure whether the following helps or muddies the waters, but anyway ... What about harms that are interpersonal *and* diachronic? In other words, suppose I do something now that harms my neighbour's future self. Arguably this is permissible if my neighbour's current self consents.
We still have the problem of how a person (my neighbour, in this case) can consent in the present to harm to her future self; but now, perhaps, the interpersonal and intrapersonal cases don't seem so different from each other.