Living (or dying) the good life

ben | 30 Oct 2022, 3:36 p.m.

This thought starts, as every good thought must, with the Nichomacean Ethics. If you pick up your copy and flick through it by the fireplace, you will find a slightly odd paragraph at the beginning of the 10th section of Book I. Aristotle starts off by commenting: "That the fortunes of descendants and of all a man’s friends should not affect his happiness at all seems a very unfriendly doctrine."

This book is his introductory struggle with what it means for a man to be happy or to have a good life. This vagueness is partially due to the fact that he's trying to come up with what matters without any prior assumptions; it's not yet pinned down to what we in the modern day would call a consequentialist account, or a deontological account et cetera (of course the academic framework he's working in can't be exactly expressed in those terms anyway, but the point is he's not committed to any metaethical account of moral value).

There's also a vagueness due to issues of translation. If you'll forgive me I'll now lapse into a philosophical stereotype and do some etymology. The words Aristotle uses in the above quote that have been translated as fortunes and happiness actually can both be translated as "fortunes", or "fate". This ambiguity also occurs for the word that Aristotle eventually settles on, εὐδαιμονία - which is variously translated as good spirit, happiness, or welfare. Beyond even the academic translation in relation to which Aristotle was expressing himself he was also constrained to express himself in a vocabulary which does not nicely map on to our modern philosophical terms. This is arguably a constraint on his philosophy, but I view it as a helpful way of allowing us to consider ideas that would otherwise require a very carefully balanced and long winded explanation in English. And all that it requires is that we keep in mind these fine meanings. 

 

So keeping the context of the translation in mind, let's consider exactly what's so queer about what Aristotle is exploring. He's suggesting that a person could be less well off after their death. 

This view is very odd to many utilitarians, for obvious reasons. If what it means for something to be good is for someone to have a pleasurable experience, and dead people cannot have pleasurable experiences, then it immediately follows that dead people ethically do not count. Of course living people may still care about dead people, so there's a sort of derivative value (for example, if you desecrate a grave of a friend of mine, the friend will not care, but the fact that I am upset can matter to a utilitarian). But Aristotle isn't suggesting a derivative value, he's suggesting that it can be fundamentally worse or better for a dead person after they are dead. 

Although this view, for many, is intuitively odd, and in fact contradicts many moral theories, there are some reasons to treat it seriously.

For one, preference utilitarians should take it seriously. One of the better known examples of where a preference utilitarian differs from a hedonic utilitarian is that of cheating: if a person cares about whether their partner cheats on them, and then their partner cheats in perfect secrecy, the hedonic utilitarian is committed to saying that the act of cheating has made the person no worse off - if they do not know, they cannot have a state of displeasure about it. The preference to not be cheated on has still been violated however, so the preference utilitarian thinks that the resultant world has some extra negative utility due to the cheating. 

This naturally extends past death. If I have a preference that my descendents will eventually live on Mars, then I die, my preference can still be fulfilled or not (it can even be definitely failed to be fulfilled if my descendents all die off without children, never having lived on Mars). So the preference utilitarian should take this musing of Aristotle's seriously. 

The views of the dead should also be taken seriously if you think that people can take part in some grander purpose, or some story, which they can ask other people to fulfil, and for which the result - whether seen or not - can make them better or worse off. This is subtly different from a preference, and is more teleological. For example, assume Churchill never believed after WWII that Britain could be successfully taken over, so never formed a preference that it would not be taken over. Then assume that, a year after he died, France invaded and took control of Britain. It's obvious that this runs contrary to the greater story which Churchill was part of, that if he were alive he would form a preference against it. And it's plausible that someone could say that Churchill was, in a way, a posthumous failure - or in other words he was worse off. Maybe this is a stretch (and it definitely requires finer explication) but it appeals to me. 

 

So what does taking the idea that the dead could be benefited or harmed after death entail? Well to some extent we already do it. We take peoples' wills seriously, and a will is just an expression of a dead person's preferences. We also have some customs around the dead, such as funerals, and not speaking ill of the dead. 

We can indirectly take the dead seriously via belief in the idea of the wellbeing of communities and a belief in the myths of groups of people. For example - if you partake in the idea of Britain as this thing that can be better or worse off, you are partaking in the same purpose as many people who came before you, and can be said to be cooperating with them. This also has some very odd results though: are we obligated to partake in the mythologies of the ancient civilisations and nations? And we morally failing by not believing in the power of Ancient Babylonia? And when we admit of the existence of communities as a thing over and above their constituents we also make things such as reparations more defensible, which at least to me is a slightly confusing idea. 

 

Aristotle himself realised how odd was the idea that the dead could be affected in a way that mattered, ethically speaking. He commented himself that it was contrary to the viewpoints of people who thought that what mattered was some experience of happiness. But if this idea is right it poses a question about what we owe the past (to stand contra MacAskill). As there are a lot of dead people (around 90% of all people who ever lived are dead, which is less than I would think but clearly still a lot). And the amount is only ever going up. Human beings have this nasty habit of dying. 

So maybe if we don't owe anything to the future (see the non-identity problem) then what we owe the past could be a very important question to answer. And even if we do have obligations to future human beings, outweighing our obligations to past human beings (there are probably going to be more humans being in the future than there have been so far by many many orders of magnitude) it must eventually be the case that dead humans will outweigh future humans. 

And then one day there would be the last human being. And by God, would he owe a lot to all of us, dead and lying in the past.