Premium
Animal Interrupted, or Why Accepting P ascal's W ager Might Be the Last Thing You Ever Do
Author(s) -
Baron Sam,
Dyke Christina
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
the southern journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.281
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 2041-6962
pISSN - 0038-4283
DOI - 10.1111/sjp.12069
Subject(s) - arbitrariness , egalitarianism , perspective (graphical) , identity (music) , philosophy , epistemology , mathematics , law , political science , aesthetics , geometry , politics
According to conventionalist accounts of personal identity, persons are constituted in part by practices and attitudes of certain sorts of care. In this paper, we concentrate on the most well‐developed and defended version of conventionalism currently on offer (namely, that proposed by D avid B raddon‐ M itchell, C aroline W est, and K ristie M iller) and discuss how the conventionalist appears forced either (1) to accept arbitrariness concerning from which perspective to judge one's survival or (2) to maintain egalitarianism at the cost of making “transfiguring” decisions such as P ascal's Wager rationally intractable. We consider three ways the egalitarian conventionalist could make these choices tractable and show that each one comes at significant cost to the view. We end the paper by considering whether accepting arbitrariness would be a better move for the conventionalist and conclude that, even here, she runs the risk of transfiguring choices being rationally intractable.