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Thought Experiment 43: Future Shock

2/22/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
Can any of those me's talk for me now?
​Remember all those promises I made when I listened to Rush Limbaugh in college? Yeah, don't hold me to them. Here's why.

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     "Drew! I haven't seen you since college, twenty years ago! My God, Drew—what are you doing with that gun?"
     "I've come to kill you," said Drew, "just as you asked me to."
     "What the hell are you talking about?"
     "Don't you remember? You said to me, many times, 'If I ever vote Republican, then shoot me.' Well, I just read you're actually a Republican senator. So you see, you must die."
     "Drew, you're crazy! That was twenty years ago! I was young, I was idealistic! You can't hold me to that!"
     "It was no casual, flippant remark, senator. In fact, I have here a piece of paper, signed by you and witnessed by others, instructing me to do this. And before you tell me not to take that seriously, let me remind you that you voted for a bill recently in favour of living wills. In fact, you've got one yourself. Now tell me this: if you think people in the future should carry out your wish to kill you if you get demential or fall into a permanent vegetative state, why shouldn't I carry out your past wish to kill you if you became a Republican?"
     "I've got an answer to that!" screamed the sweating senator. "Just give me a few minutes!"
     Drew cocked the pistol and aimed. "You'd better be quick."

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 127.

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What do you think? Can you come up with a good answer for Drew as to why our future selves should be beholden to our present selves in some situations but not in others? I bet Friday Ed will know. I'm gonna wait for him to show up and tell me why.
2 Comments
Atthatmatt link
2/22/2016 06:37:18 pm

Isn't a will written to speak for you when you aren't available and/or of sound mind? The usual cases seem to be when you're dead, missing and presumed dead, totally crazy, or lingering in a coma. It's called a will because it's what you will to happen. But you can totally override your own written will when ever you want.

So the guy is invoking the written will as having force, but the person who wrote the will is standing in front of him and negating bearing he old written will simply by speaking. Can anybody else even act on a written will if the writer is still of sound mind?

I don't think wills even exist to force our own hand in the future. They exist to force OTHER people's hands when we can't speak for ourselves.

There isn't even any such thing as a future self. There's only the present self.

And for the hell of it, since the whole thing rests on interpreting law, he only said "shoot me" in his living will, not "kill me".

Reply
@EdGibney link
2/23/2016 08:44:29 am

Ding, ding, ding, ding! That's the answer that should make Drew put his gun down. I'd ask if you want to write a guest post on this for me to save me the trouble of writing this up on Friday, but it's not interesting enough to seek out other opinions. I just read a long piece on Derek Parfitt though and his book about future persons so maybe I'll use this experiment as an excuse to discuss that. But don't hold me to that.

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