It is said that when your friend has bad things happen, the occurrence of these bad things constitutes a loss of wellbeing for you. Not just because you are saddened, but simply directly in virtue of your interest in your friend’s wellbeing. This is said to happen even if you don’t know about your friend’s misfortune.
But when do you lose wellbeing? On the story above, you lose wellbeing when you friend suffers. But if we say that your loss of wellbeing is simultaneous with your friend’s, what does that mean, given that simultaneity is relative? What is the relevant reference frame?
There are two obvious candidates:
Your reference frame.
Your friend’s reference frame.
These may be quite different if you and your friend are traveling at high speeds through space. And there doesn’t seem to be a compelling argument for choosing one over the other. Furthermore, there really isn’t such a thing as the reference frame of a squishy object like a human being. Different parts of a human being are always moving in different directions. My chest moves away from my backbone, and soon moves towards it. It is tempting to define my reference frame as the reference frame of my center of mass. I am not sure this makes complete sense in the framework of general relativity (a center of mass is a weighted average of the positions of my parts, but when the positions like in a curved spacetime, I don’t know if a weighted average is well-defined). But even in special relativity there are problems, since it is possible for an organism’s center of mass to move faster than light. (Imagine that a knife moving at nearly the speed of light cuts a stretched-out snake in half, and the snake briefly survives. During the time that the knife moved through the thickness of the snake, the center of mass of the snake moved by a quarter of the snake’s length.)
Here is another option. Perhaps your friend’s misfortunes are yours precisely when a ray of light from the misfortune could have illuminated you, i.e., precisely when you are at the surface of the future lightcone centered on some portion of the misfortune. There is something a bit wacky about this: misfortune propagates just as idealized light (not taking into account collisions with matter) would. In particular, this means that misfortune is subject to gravitational lensing. That seems really weird.
All of the above seems like it’s barking up the wrong tree. Here is a suggestion. While some aspects of wellbeing or illbeing can be temporally localized—pains, for instance—others cannot be. Having a rich and varied life is not temporally localized. Perhaps the contribution to your illbeing from the misfortune of your friends is similarly not temporally localized in your life. It’s just a negative in your life as a whole.
But I am not very happy with that, either. For it seems that if your friend is in pain, and then is no longer in pain, there is some change in the wellbeing of your life.
I don’t know.
5 comments:
Solution: simultaneity is not relative; A-theory/presentism is true. :)
Here is a non-relativistic worry about time and extended wellbeing. It seems to be bad for you if your friend suffers, even if you don't exist while your friend suffers.
Two hypothetical scenarios, both compatible with presentism:
1. You cease to exist at death (whether permanently or temporarily), and then your friend begins to suffer.
2. You time-travel forward, skipping over your friend's suffering.
In both cases, I think you're still worse off for your friend's suffering.
Here is a crazy thought. The components of my well-being have both spatial and temporal coordinates. So when my friend suffers some evil in Chicago on Monday, my well-being is reduced in Chicago on Monday, precisely by that very same evil. We could also say, on this account, that the evil is not multiplied just because I am my friend’s friend; rather, I simply have a kind of partial ownership of that evil suffered.
Oooh, I really, really like the partial ownership. It explains why it is that if we have a choice between saving a friendless drowning person's life and the life of a drowning person with friends, we don't automatically need to go for the one with friends, as if there were more people drowning there. It also helps with the puzzle that I posted about at least twice, why it is that when the Belgians are playing soccer against the Brazilians, the Belgians don't have good moral reason to lose because fewer people are rooting for them (there being way fewer Belgians in the world than Brazilians). Finally, it solves this puzzle. If someone is suffering, we don't want to say that by becoming their friend we are increasing the amount of evil in the world, but only the number of owners of evil. Similarly, if someone is doing really well, it doesn't follow that suddenly everyone has a consequence-based moral reason to become their friend in order to multiply the amount of good in the world!
On the other hand, what about this? If we love God, then do we get co-ownership of his infinite wellbeing?
I think spatial location is a red herring, though, because your friend might be an angel with no location.
Given that we are talking about the empathic person's loss of wellbeing due to the suffering of their friend, wouldn't the loss of wellbeing being for or in them automatically lead to their proper time and frame of reference being the only relevant one? Insofar as their wellbeing tracks with them as a kind of property, it is simply associated with their proper time and inferred hyper-planes of simultaneity, if that makes sense.
But perhaps objective wellbeing and subjective/experienced wellbeing (happiness as known) follow different rules, as you suggest. The latter clearly does depend on the delay due to the lightcone. But the former is more abstract, and so may not have concrete-like spatiotemporal properties. As something more like a relational, logical or Cambridge property, I don't see why it must have a specified spatio-temporal locus. Insofar as this property is concretely known "before" the subjective experience, it is known to God (thus from an eternal perspective, a more B-theory perspective, that is).
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