The Worm View and the Personite Problem: towards a Collectivist Solution

蠕虫观点和人格问题：走向集体主义解决方案

• 批准号: 2746430
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Reading
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2746430
• 关键词: Worm; View; Personite; Problem; towards

According to the Worm View (WV), only those spacetime worms perduring as maximalaggregates of person-stages are continuant persons and thus moral agents. However, nonmaximally extended worms, personites, present all the seemingly necessary mental and physicalqualities, apart from stage-maximality, to be included into moral calculus. During a continuantperson's lifetime, it is possible to individuate a personite for every sufficiently extended timeinterval. Since they come into and go out of existence suddenly and abruptly, granting personitesa moral status turns out to be incompatible with any ethics that does not want to fall into thecategory of ethical hedonism. For these reasons, recognizing them as moral agents leads to thePersonite Problem (PP) for the WV. This proposal focuses on addressing this problematicinteraction by seeking a collectivist solution to the PP in order to defend the WV withoutresorting to ethical hedonism. In particular, this solution proposes to view continuant persons aswe-formations composed of many personites that jointly collaborate for the satisfaction of whatde facto turn out to be collective attitudes. Moreover, it aims at conceptualizing the investigationof cross-temporal flourishing in this collectivist fashion. This understanding of continuantpersons can also contribute to account for the most salient features of we-phenomena involvingcollective agents which in certain social contexts are able to act as a we.Metaphysical theories of personal identity over time are directly linked to ethics. Moral calculus,in fact, is shaped upon what we take to be the persistence conditions of persons. For thisreason, a fundamental question underlies this relationship: how should we face undesirableethical implications of a particular metaphysics of persons? Should we change our ethics or ourmetaphysics? These metaphilosophical questions can be tackled by taking the Worm View (WV)as a paradigmatic case.

根据蠕虫观(WV)，只有那些作为人阶段的最大集合体的时空蠕虫才是连续的人，因此才是道德代理人。然而，非最大限度扩展的蠕虫，人，呈现了所有看似必要的精神和身体品质，除了阶段最大化，要包括在道德演算中。在一个连续的人的一生中，有可能在每个足够长的时间间隔内对一个人进行个性化。由于它们突然地存在和消失，赋予人一种道德地位被证明是与任何不想落入伦理享乐主义范畴的伦理不相容的。出于这些原因，承认他们是道德代理人会导致WV的人格问题(PP)。这项提案的重点是通过寻求一种集体主义的解决方案来解决这一问题，从而在不诉诸道德享乐主义的情况下保护WV。特别是，这一解决方案建议将连续的人视为由许多人组成的组织，这些人共同合作，以满足事实证明是集体态度的东西。此外，它的目的是将这种集体主义方式下的跨时期繁荣的研究概念化。这种对连续人的理解也有助于解释我们最显著的特征--涉及集体代理人的现象，这些集体代理人在特定的社会背景下能够充当我们。关于个人身份随时间推移的形而上学理论直接与伦理学联系在一起。事实上，道德演算是基于我们所认为的人的坚持条件而形成的。出于这个原因，一个根本性的问题支撑着这种关系：我们应该如何面对特定的人的形而上学带来的不受欢迎的伦理影响？我们应该改变我们的伦理还是我们的形而上学？这些半哲学问题可以通过以蠕虫观为范例来解决。