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38 GARETH B. MATTHEWS 38 STEVE, THREE YEARS OLD, watched his father eating a banana. “You don’t like bananas, do you, Steve?” commented the father. “No,” agreed Steve; “if you wuz me, you wouldn’t like bananas either.” Steve reflected a moment. He began to look puzzled. “Then who would be the daddy?” he asked, simply. Steve’s puzzle is profound. It is a puzzle about what philosophers call “counterfactual identicals.” If I were you, who would you be? If George Bush were Al Gore, who would be president now? If Bach were Beethoven, would great romantic symphonies have appeared already in the early eighteenth century , or would the B Minor Mass be a nineteenth-century composition? In the last several decades philosophers have made significant progress in understanding counterfactual conditionals by appealing to the idea of possible worlds. Consider the counterfactual conditional ‘If Steve had been fed bananas as an infant, he would like bananas now.’ According to one suggested line of analysis, that conditional is true if, and only if, Steve likes bananas in the possible world otherwise most like our actual world, except that in that world Steve is fed bananas as an infant. Can we understand Steve’s own counterfactual conditional (‘If you were me, you wouldn’t like bananas either’) this way? It seems not. The reason is that there is apparently no possible world in which Steve’s father is Steve. Try supposing there were, and then ask Steve’s question: “Then who would be the daddy?” I should perhaps add that there are a few discussions of counterfactual identicals in the technical philosophical literature that might seem to offer a good basis for responding to Steve’s question. But I find none of them satisfactory . I myself have tried several times to write a discussion of the question that I am happy with. I have not succeeded, but I have not given up trying. Children as Philosophers Chapter 2 GARETH B. MATTHEWS Children as Philosophers 39 Steve’s question is a wonderful example of philosophical perplexity. Consider now another example, this one from my first book on philosophy and children , Philosophy and the Young Child. Ian, six years old, was watching TV when friends of his parents arrived for a visit. His parents’ friends had brought along their three children, who immediately took over the TV from Ian and changed the channel from his favorite program to theirs. Annoyed and upset, Ian went out to the kitchen to complain to his mother. “Mother,” Ian asked in frustration , “why is it better for three people to be selfish than for one?” (Matthews 1980, 28). Ian’s mother told me this story when she learned that I was interested in philosophical thinking in children. She had remembered the occasion quite vividly because, as she told me, she had felt that her response to Ian had been inadequate. She had first reacted to the child’s expressions of annoyance and frustration by making some comment to the effect that the three visiting children would, no doubt, not have enjoyed watching Ian’s favorite program. This way, at least, three people were enjoying themselves instead of just one— namely, Ian. Ian’s reply to his mother, born of his own frustration and annoyance, presents a serious challenge to classical utilitarianism. According to classical utilitarianism we should always choose the option that would maximize utility, which is usually thought of as total pleasure or happiness. Many of us have the strong intuition that we should produce as much happiness as we can—and as little pain and suffering. It is the strength of this intuition that makes utilitarianism, as an ethical theory, so plausible. Utilitarianism has not had clear sailing in philosophy. In fact, I think it is correct to say that no interesting philosophical theory has ever had completely clear sailing. I won’t stop here to list the difficulties that plague utilitarianism. But I will say that I myself consider Ian’s annoyed question an interesting basis for an important criticism of utilitarianism, and in this I am not alone. The renowned English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who was herself a lifelong critic of utilitarianism , once used Ian’s question in a lecture at Oxford on what’s wrong with utilitarianism . For Anscombe an ethical theory is defective to the degree that it claims we have the obligation to produce as much overall happiness as we can, even if we thereby encourage selfishness. Ian’s question...

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