The Symmetry Argument III

The symmetry argument, if you take it to be coherent, aims to show that our attitudes about prenatal nonexistence and posthumous nonexistence are inconsistent. In order to meet temporal symmetry, you must either wish you were both born earlier and die later or not care whether you are born earlier or die later. But is this symmetry premise really compelling?

Imagine this scenario, first described by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons. You are in some remote location out of contact with the world when receive a letter regarding your mother, who you haven't heard from for many years. You find that she's fatally ill with a disease that will cause a lot of pain and suffering. She will die in a month, and you are unable to see her. Consider how you feel about this. But the next day, you receive another letter. It says that you were partially misinformed, not about the disease itself, but about the timing. Your mother has already suffered intensely for a month but is now dead. Consider how you feel about this.

Derek Parfit argues that our intuition is that the suffering is no less evil if it were in the past rather than the future. That she will suffer for a month is equally bad as that she has suffered for a month. He thinks this shows that we hold temporal symmetry for others.

Here's another scenario. You have some disease which is completely curable but the process takes a month and is intensely painful. Luckily, there is a drug given at the very end that will act as an amnesic and erase the memory of the pain. In the first case, you wake up and the doctors say you are ready for the procedure which will cause intense pain for a month. In the second case, you wake up and the doctors say that the procedure was a success; you were in intense pain for a month, but now you are fine and you don't remember anything. Are the two cases equivalent? Which one would you prefer?

We have a different intuition here favoring temporal asymmetry because it is our subjective experience. This distorts our values; we consider situations differently if they are happening to us rather than someone else. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? After all, we can't escape our conscious experience, except through intellectually imagining it. But a Lucretian might say that this is what we should do to remain completely rational and unswayed by our narrowminded perception of the world. This would be support for temporal symmetry.