ABSTRACT

According to the Psychological-Continuity Account of What Matters, you are justified in having special concern for the well-being of a person at a future time if and only if that person will be psychologically continuous with you as you are now. On some versions of the account, the psychological continuity is required to be temporally ordered, whereas, on other versions, it is allowed to be temporally unordered. In this paper, I argue that the account is implausible if the psychological continuity is allowed to be temporally unordered. I also argue that, if the psychological continuity is required to be temporally ordered, it cannot plausibly be purely psychological (in the sense that the psychological continuity is not required to be caused through spatio-temporal continuity of a brain). The upshot is that no plausible version of the Psychological-Continuity Account of What Matters is purely psychological. So, psychological continuity is not what matters in survival.

摘要

根据重要的心理连续性解释，当且仅当该人在心理上与您现在一样时，您才有理由特别关注他未来的幸福。在某些版本的帐户中，心理连续性需要按时间顺序排列，而在其他版本中，则允许在时间上无序。在本文中，我认为如果允许心理连续性在时间上是无序的，那么这个解释是不可信的。我还认为，如果心理连续性需要按时间顺序排列，那么它不可能是纯粹的心理连续性（从某种意义上说，心理连续性不需要通过大脑的时空连续性引起）。结果是，关于重要的心理连续性解释的可信版本没有纯粹是心理上的。因此，心理连续性在生存中并不重要。