[rousing music] This episode is all about. . .
the future.
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It's generally believed that recycling and green energy and conservation of resources is a good thing.
It's good to save the planet.
But, why?
Well, part of the reason is that we, i. e. people who are alive now, /live/ on a planet,
so it's kind of in our own interests to keep it in good condition.
But you will also hear it said that we should preserve planet earth for "future generations"
future people who will need those resources or will appreciate that natural landscape or whatever,
i. e., we have a moral obligation to /future/ people living in the /future./
But future people don't exist. . .
yet.
We normally think that an action is wrong if it harms someone,
so, if I break into your house and steal all your stuff, then that's wrong because it harms /you./
And we normally think that we can't have moral obligations to things that don't exist.
I'm not morally obliged to preserve unicorn habitats and you're not morally obliged to save Narnia.
But future people don't exist now. They aren't around anywhere to be harmed.
So destroying the environment, as long as it doesn't hurt people who are alive now,
must be. . . okay?
This is called the Non-Identity Problem and it is a tough one.
[Anchor Man] I am in a pickle!
The temptation is obviously to say, "Okay, but future people /will/ be around
so they /will/ be harmed, so it /is/ bad to mess things up for them."
But a) you don't know future people will be around for certain, right?
I mean, who knows what could happen.
And b) when you say "future people will exist," you're still talking in terms of some class of things
none of which we can ever encounter.
So, how can we have moral obligations towards them?
There are a couple of potential answers to this problem, so let's take a look.
The first shot at a resolution is called Perdurance Theory or Worm Theory or
FOUR DIMENSIONALISM!
The theory, which is called
FOUR DIMENSIONALISM! [Inception Bwoooooonnng]
says that future people actually /do/ exist. The future is a real, physical place.
Olly: And so is the past. Scientist: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Objects exist in extended in the three-dimensions of space as we know,
but they also exist extended in the fourth dimension: time.
We normally don't see it because we're moving through it,
but the world, and your computer, and /you/ exist right now, exist in the past, and exist in the future.
For realsies.
And if you could step back out of the fourth dimension then you'd see
Olly: it all existing 10th Doctor: Wibbly wobbly
Olly: simultaneously Doctor: timey wimey
Doctor: stuff.
But, this opens up some pretty hard-core problems.
For one thing, it's kind of difficult to prove.
And for another, we have this intuition that what we do can affect the future, but that the past is fixed.
But if four dimensionism is true, then we don't occupy a special place in time
called "the present" from which the future can be changed, but the past is locked off.
We're just one point on the spectrum.
So we can change the future, but people in our past can change the present.
And people in the further past can change the more recent past.
Marty: Whoa, this is heavy.
Unless, of course, we don't have any free will and everything is fixed,
in which case, that problem goes away but we don't have any free will.
You see what kind of problems we get into in philosophy?
If all that kind of went over your head, then don't worry, because another slightly less crazy solution
might be to say that there are such things as moral patients.
So we say that humans are moral agents, we do morality.
We can decide right and wrong and then act on it.
But things like lightning bolts and tornadoes and hurricanes can't.
They might hurt us, but we don't hold tigers morally responsible when they eat people
because morality just isn't something that nature does.
But we might say that they are moral patients. They're not moral agents
but we, as moral agents, are still obliged to treat them in a certain way.
So, we have a moral duty not to be cruel to animals, for example,
or even if a person is no longer a moral agent, say because they're stuck in a coma,
then we still have duties towards them.
Whilst it would be difficult to say that future people who don't exist are moral patients,
maybe it wouldn't be that crazy to say that the environment is a moral patient.
It doesn't play by our rules of right and wrong but we, as moral agents, still have a duty to preserve it.
What do you guys think? Can we have moral obligations to things that don't exist?
Is there more to morality than just benefiting or harming someone?
Can the environment be a moral patient?
Leave a comment with your questions and suggestions and we'll answer them at the end of the next video.
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THE FOURTH DIMENSION!! [Inception Bwooooonnng]
Your comments were truly beautiful.
We'd like to have a look at what you said about the connection between truth and beauty.
A lot of people -- BBrucker2, Zach Lathouris,and Brock Stubbendeck, among them -- said that
beauty might be subjective, and that's definitely a road you can go down.
That might lead us to say that, "Okay, sometimes truth contributes to beauty and sometimes it doesn't."
The problem with that, though, is that it leads to something that Kant called the "Antinomy of Taste:"
if there's no definite criterion for beauty, then it's difficult to say that one judgement of beauty
is better than any other.
That might actually be a good subject for another video.
El LucyRose asked, "If truth isn't beauty, then what is?"
Well, there have been lots of different suggestions:
the pleasure of viewing, what art can teach us,
Schopenhauer thought that it was about transcendent freedom from slavery to the will.
Take your pick.
Alex Young actually took that connotative approach and said,
"Maybe beauty is all about what art can teach us about life."
Again, that's definitely a road you can go down.
If that's your only criterion, though, that's gonna still rule a lot of stuff out as not beautiful,
like in the "truth is beauty" case.
And if you say, "Beautiful is what art can teach us,"
or truth, or this this and this, and you start building in lots of criteria, then
you're definition starts to get quite broad and vague.
Donoghuemd: thank you. It's always nice to get good feedback. Tell your friends!
And Reuben Tobolewski: that is an interesting idea.
I would have thought World War II myself, but. . .
Hmmm. . .
Could you explain that a bit more?
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