Reasons and Persons, de Parfit

Uno de esos libros clásicos que siempre había tenido ganas de leer, sobre todo desde la muerte de Parfit, y al que hasta este verano no pude comenzar a meter el diente...y que hasta hace unos días no pude terminar. Y es que el libro es denso y ni mucho menos sencillo. Como buen exponente de la filosofía analítica, Parfit es muy minucioso en sus análisis, y es difícil conseguir una visión global (aunque al final sí se logra). En todo caso, muy interesante. Para mí sobre todo cuando se mete en temas más cercanos a los míos: sostenibilidad, análisis de políticas sociales, etc.

De hecho, nada más comenzar ya se pone a analizar un tema muy cercano: las externalidades asociadas a los bienes públicos, a los que llama Dilemas.

p61. The commonest true dilemmas are contributor's dilemmas. These involve public goods: outcomes that benefit even those who do not help to produce them. It can be true of each person that, if he helps, he will add to the sum of benefits, or expected benefits. But only a very small portion of the benefit he adds will come back to him. Since the share of what he adds will be very small, it may not repay his contribution. It may thus be better for each if he does not contribute. But it will be worse for each if fewer othres contribute. And if none contribute this will be worse for each than if all do.
Many contributor's dilemmas involve two thresholds: if fewer than v contribute, no benefit will be produced; and if more than w contribute, this will not increase the benefit produced.

Parfit compara las soluciones políticas (como los impuestos) con las soluciones morales. Y concluye que las morales son mejores, aunque más complicadas de implantar. Y, añado yo, más cuanto más lejana esté la alternativa "moral" del comportamiento habitual. Milanovic está de acuerdo, creo.

p64. Political solutions to dilemmas change our situation. In moral solutions it is us who change: becoming trustworthy, reluctant to free-ride, Kantian, or more altruistic. Moral solutions are often better than political solutions. But situations can be changed more easily than people.

p65. Contributor's Dilemmas often need moral solutions. We often need some people who are directly disposed to do their share. Without such people it may never be achieved.
The moral solutions are, then, often best; and they are often the only attainable solutions. We therefore need the moral motives...They exist...Our need is to make these motives stronger and more widely spread.

One solution is a conditional agreement. Suppose that we are trustworthy. Each can now promise to do A, on condition that everyone else makes the same promise. If we know that we are all trustworthy, each will have a motive to join this conditional agreement.

If your only moral motive is trustworthiness, we shall then be unlikely to achieve the joint conditional agreement.
There are few people whose only moral motive is trustworthiness. If enough people are reluctant to be free-riders, there will be no need for an actual agreement.

Una de las soluciones que plantea es el racionalismo altruista, pero con poco recorrido también.

p85. The Commuter's Dilemma. Each might cause a thousand others to be delayed for two seconds. Most of us would regard such effects are so trivial that they can be morally ignored. Even a rational altruist can justifiably choose to go by car rather than by bus.

Rational altruists would avoid this result. We could claim that it is wrong to act in this way, even though the effects on each of the others would be trivial. If we have sufficient altruism, we would solve the Commuter's Dilemma, saving ourselves much time every day.
Similar reasoning applies to countless other cases...But, to believe that we are acting wrongly, many of us need to change our view. We must cease to believe that an act cannot be wrong, because of its effects on other people, if these effects are either trivial or imperceptible.

Luego se mete con otro tema también apasionante: la consideración del futuro y las tasas de descuento, por ejemplo. Esto lo hace en la parte quizá más famosa de su libro, en la que plantea su famosa teoría R sobre la personalidad. Reconozco que aquí me pierdo un poco cuando se pone a plantear casos de personas divididas...Pero sigue siendo muy interesante, en particular por sus conclusiones optimistas sobre cómo su visión le permite ser más altruista.

p177. Since I believe that this attitude is bad for us, I believe that we ought not to be biased towards the future. On any plausible moral view, we would be better if we were all happier. This is the sense in which, if we could, we ought not to be biased toward the future. In giving us this bias, Evolution denies us the best attitude to death. 

p281. Is the truth (the fact that our continued existence is not a deep further fact, distinct from our physical and psychological continuity) depressing? I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a such further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. 

When I believed the Non-Reductionist View, I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact....My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations.

Este cambio de perspectiva le lleva también a plantear extensiones de la consideración moral de actos que no necesariamente se veían como tales: los actos en los que sólo nos afectamos nosotros mismos, por ejemplo, y el papel del paternalismo.

p319. If my act's main effects will be on myself, most of us would not judge it to be morally wrong. But they are: because I am making outcomes worse, and because we have special obligations to those to whom we stand in certain relations (parents, children, etc.)
If we care now little about ourselves in the further future, our future selves are like future generations. We can affect them for the worse, and because they do not exist, they cannot defend themselves. Like future generations, future selves have no vote, so their interests need to be specially protected...We ought not to do to our future selves what it would be wrong to do to other people.

p321. The claim that great imprudence is morally wrong strengthens the case for paternalistic intervention.
We do not believe that we have a general right to prevent people from acting irrationally. But we do believe that we have a general right to prevent people from acting wrongly...Autonomy does not include the right to impose upon oneself, for no good reason, great harm.

p346. If we cease to believe that persons are separately existing entities, and come to believe that the unity of a life involves no more than the various relations between the experiences in this life, it becomes more plausible to be more concerned about the quality of experiences, and less concerned about whose experiences they are.

p347. If the connections are weaker between a criminal now and himself at the time of the crime, he deserves less punishment.

Finalmente, Parfit analiza el impacto de nuestras actuaciones en las generaciones futuras, a partir de esta nueva concepción de la persona. Así, plantea el Non-Identity problem, el que aparece cuando las personas que vivirán en el futuro son distintas como consecuencia de nuestros actos presentes.

p355. You were conceived at a certain time. It is in fact true that, if you had not been conceived within a month of that time, you would never have existed.

Unless we, or some global disaster, destroy the human race, there will be people living later who do not now exist. These are future people. Science has given to our generation great ability both to affect these people, and to predict these effects.
Two kinds of effect raise puzzling questions. We can affect the identities of future people, or who the people are who will later live. And we can affect the number of future people. These effects give us different kinds of choice.

Este hecho da origen a situaciones paradójicas cuando uno se plantea políticas de conservación, o el uso de la energía nuclear

p361ss:

Future people are, in one respect, unlike distant people. We can affect their identity. And many of our acts have this effect.

Under depletion quality of life is much lower. If particular people live lives that are worth living, is this worse for these people than if they had never existed? Our answer must be no...Does this make a moral difference?

p365. People do not have rights to a share of a particular resource. Suppose that we deplete some resource, but invent technology that will enable our successors, though they lack this resource, to have the same range of opportunities. There would be no objection to what we have done. The most that could be claimed is that people in each generation have a right to an equal range of opportunities, or to an equally high quality of life (esta es la idea de Solow)

p357. Does it make a moral difference that the child whom I harm does not now exist?

Uno de los argumentos que considera es la tasa de descuento. Y no le convence, no porque no haya argumentos sólidos, sino porque ninguno realmente aplica al paso del tiempo, sino a otras cosas (algo que de hecho ya está en las definiciones que yo al menos utilizo para la tasa de descuento social)

Remoteness in time roughly correlates with some important facts, such as predictability. But these correlations are too rough to justify the SDR. Remoteness in time has, in itself, no more significance than remoteness in space.

Appendix F: Six arguments for the SDR

The argument from Democracy: since many people care less about the further future
Probability: Valid
Opportunity costs: Dice que no es válido, pero porque habla del coste de oportunidad del capital, pero por razones anecdóticas
Our successors will be better off: productividad
Excessive sacrifice: any small increase in benefits that extends far into the future might demand any amount of sacrifice in the present
Special Relations: Bias for the near

p486. All these different reasons need to be stated and judged separately, on their merits. If we bundle them together in a Social Discount Rate, we make ourselves morally blind.

Como ninguno de los argumentos que encuentra le convence, plantea la ignorancia cómo única solución temporal:

p373. It may be better if we conceal the Non-Identity Problem from those who will decide whether we increase our use of nuclear energy. It may be better if these people believe falsely that such a policy may, by causing a catastrophe, be greatly against the interests of some of those who will live in the distant future. If these people have this false belief, they may be more likely to reach the right conclusions.

Can it be wrong to harm others, when we know both that if the people harmed knew about our act, they would not regret this act, and that our act will not be worse for these people than anything else that could have been done?

Otro problema que analiza es el de la población, llegando a conclusiones que llama "repugnantes"

p381. Is it better if more people live? How many children should we have?

The Repugnant Conclusion: For any possible population with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.

Y descartando el principio básico de evaluación económica, la evolución de la renta media:

p420. According to the Average Principle (some economists make this principle true by definition), it is worse if there is a lower average quality of life, per life lived. But we should reject this principle. On the AP, the best history might be the one in which only Eve and Adam ever live.

Desgraciadamente, y como ya decía antes, no encuentra solución: (p451) Because we can easily affect the identities of future people, we face the Non-Identity problem (the fact that, in different cases, different people would exist). To solve this problem we need a new theory, X, about beneficence. This theory must also avoid the Repugnant and the Absurd Conclusions, and solve the Mere Addition Paradox. I have not found this theory.

En todo caso, el que no encuentre solución para este problema tan complejo no significa, como decía antes, que el libro no valga la pena. Eso sí, hay que cogerlo con ánimo y paciencia :)