c) Tomorrow, every single human on Earth, including you and everyone you know, will also have their lives randomly swapped with someone else.
The problem I have with this thought experiment is that “lives swapped”, once you think about it for a minute or two, becomes incoherent. Suppose you “swap” persons A and B. A is a calm, highly-intelligent nuclear reactor technician, and B is a linebacker with the opposite personality.
* Are you just swapping them physically and legally? Neither can do the other’s job, so that gets you immediate societal collapse.
* Are you swapping their bodies and capabilities, but leaving their personalities intact? Plenty of jobs have demeanor as an essential qualification, so that gets you less intense societal collapse, but still societal collapse.
* Okay, so you swap everything. Person B now has person A’s location, appearance, DNA, legal identity, intelligence, and personality. In what sense is he still person B?
I’ve mostly seen this hypothetical used as the basis for moral tracts, where it engages in Begging The Question. It imposes the assumption that there’s some special attribute that makes a person who they are which is independent of their genetics, their experiences, and all of the choices that they have made, and then uses this to argue that genetics, experiences, and past choices should be discounted when comparing individuals’ moral worth.
The problem I have with this thought experiment is that “lives swapped”, once you think about it for a minute or two, becomes incoherent. Suppose you “swap” persons A and B. A is a calm, highly-intelligent nuclear reactor technician, and B is a linebacker with the opposite personality.
* Are you just swapping them physically and legally? Neither can do the other’s job, so that gets you immediate societal collapse.
* Are you swapping their bodies and capabilities, but leaving their personalities intact? Plenty of jobs have demeanor as an essential qualification, so that gets you less intense societal collapse, but still societal collapse.
* Okay, so you swap everything. Person B now has person A’s location, appearance, DNA, legal identity, intelligence, and personality. In what sense is he still person B?
I’ve mostly seen this hypothetical used as the basis for moral tracts, where it engages in Begging The Question. It imposes the assumption that there’s some special attribute that makes a person who they are which is independent of their genetics, their experiences, and all of the choices that they have made, and then uses this to argue that genetics, experiences, and past choices should be discounted when comparing individuals’ moral worth.