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Animal interrupted, or why accepting Pascal's Wager might be the last thing you ever do
Baron, Sam Van Dyke, Christina
Baron, Sam
Van Dyke, Christina
Author
Abstract
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 David Braddon‐Mitchell, Caroline West, and Kristie Miller) 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 Pascal'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.
Keywords
Date
2014
Type
Journal article
Journal
The Southern Journal of Philosophy
Book
Volume
52
Issue
S1
Page Range
109-133
Article Number
ACU Department
Dianoia Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
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Open Access Status
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