Time and Identity

15 The Retroactivity Problem

Can the dead be harmed, or suffer misfortune? The usual view is that there seems to be a “no subject” problem if one answers in the affirmative. If death is the end of the existence of a person, then when something occurs after Smith’s death, it cannot happen to him, because at the time of the event there is no Smith existing to whom it occurs. Most philosophers who think that misfortune or harm can befall the dead solve this problem by saying that it is the antemortem person to whom these things occur, thus providing an existing subject. But this solution gives rise, according to conventional philosophical wisdom , to a retroactivity problem. If some event or act occurs after the death of Smith, it is puzzling how it can harm him, since it would seem that to be harmed is to have one’s life in some way altered or affected negatively, and by hypothesis his life has ceased. Those of us who gamely want to pursue the idea that events occurring after a person’s life can harm him must solve the retroactivity problem or explain why it is a pseudo-problem. Is there a retroactivity problem in posthumous harm or misfortune? I want in this short essay to consider what that retroactivity problem would amount to, and what it wouldn’t. I want, in other words, to clarify the alleged retroactivity problem. What gives rise to the retroactivity problem? I am going to suggest that it is the result of making several assumptions jointly, many of which are initially plausible but none of which, as far as I can tell, are actually defended. The first of the assumptions, which I find quite plausible, I shall call Worse-Off: Worse-Off An event harms a person only if it makes him worse off than he would have been if the event had not occurred. A second assumption is that Worse-Off implies: 15 The Retroactivity Problem Barbara Baum Levenbook 298 B. B. Levenbook Welfare An event harms a person only if it makes it the case that his welfare is lower than it would have been if the event had not occurred. But how does an event make it the case that one’s welfare is at a particular level? Some people may assume that an event does so by causing an effect. The effect is the harm, or constitutes the harm. So, for instance, if striking Joe on the jaw is harmful to Joe, the event of Joe being struck on the jaw causes some effect or effects (his being in pain, his jaw being temporarily incapacitated, and so on) that constitute the harm to Joe. Striking Joe on the jaw harms him because it causes effects that constitute harm to him. Given this additional assumption, a retroactivity problem for posthumous harm seems to arise once one adds the No Backward Causation principle, or NBC: NBC An event that happens at a time cannot cause an effect at an earlier time. NBC seems to explain why something I do in 2005 does not cause an effect on or in Napoleon’s early nineteenth-century life. However, NBC presents a problem for the coherence and logical possibility of time travel and, in particular, the possibility of reverse causation in time travel. It renders incoherent a type of scenario some philosophers maintain is coherent, such as the following: Suppose that while I’m sitting in the time machine in the year 2000 about to travel back to 1920, someone ties my shoelaces together. I arrive in 1920, attempt to step out of the time machine, and fall down and hit my head. (Hanley 1997, 218) Perhaps NBC ought to be modified to exclude the case of time travel. Supporters of the idea that it is logically possible to harm someone after his death do not typically depend on assuming that time travel is involved in the story. So any purported difficulties NBC has with the implications of time travel are beside the present point. How much of an obstacle to posthumous harm is posed by NBC? Three points are in order. First, it should be clear that NBC cannot be applied in one very direct way. A harming is not a causal consequence of a striking of a jaw, a stabbing, a discriminating, a betrayal of trust, and so on. The harm to Joe is not a causal effect of my striking Joe on the...