This paper makes use of an example of Williams’s, an example involving so-called psychological deprogramming–reprogramming, in arguing that procedures such as Teletransportation would not provide what matters to us in our self-interested concern for the future. This is so because the beliefs and other psychological states of a resultant person would not be appropriately causally dependent on any beliefs or other psychological states of the original person.

Your replica is created on Mars and you, on Earth, are destroyed. Parfit claims that your replica may still have what prudentially matters for you – provided that you are psychologically connected and continuous with your replica. If someone accidentally destroys the tapes containing your psychological profile used in the production of your replica and this same action fortuitously produces a functionally equivalent tape, Ehring claims that Parfit should maintain that the resulting new individual may still have what matters. Nihilism (...) about what matters follows, or so Ehring claims. I argue that Ehring is wrong and that the difference between the two ways of creating a replica is not trivial – there is no trivial survival. (shrink)

Suppose you can save one group of people or a larger group of different people, but you cannot save both groups. Are you morally required, ceteris paribus, to save the larger group? Some say, “No.” Far more say, without qualification, “Yes.” But some say, “It depends on the sizes of the groups.” In this paper, I argue that an attractive moral principle that seems on its face to support the second answer in fact supports a version of the third. In (...) the process, I defend some revisionary claims about how the lives and deaths of different people compare evaluatively to one another. The most important of these for my purposes is the claim that the deaths of different people are on a par, other things being equal. (shrink)