I've been reading a lot about van Fraassen's Reflection Principle recently, especially whether we are to accept it in light of the Sleeping Beauty Paradox. (My answer is yes, but that Reflection is a more a guide to maximising rationality than a normative constraint).
I might do some work on these two other examples, both a lot more famous than the SB paradox:
1. Pascal's Wager: The wager is designed to persuade hardcore sceptics and agnostics that it's ++EV to believe in God even if one has no good evidence that God exists. Other philosophers have used the same argument to persuade us not to believe in God. For example, they might say, God is omniscient and if He knew we were only believing in Him because we like the sound of clinking utiles in our pocket, He would most likely be upset and ban us from Heaven, since the real reason to believe in God is Faith/ Love/ Duty/ whatever. Believing in God for reasons of maximising utility might even get you worse punishment than being a virtuous agnostic.
But how this question interests me is how we are supposed to acknowledge our future self and the worth of that person. Pascal argued that if one lives in a community of people that believe in certain statements, one will slowly adopt them as well even if they are against those beliefs beforehand. (I'm not convinced of that). So we might get belief-statements like "I don't believe in God now and am quite unsympathetic to the whole idea of organized religion but in a year's time I will be a happy Catholic living in coherentist Heaven". How are we to reconcile the utiles of a happy existence being the Catholic and the unhappy existence of being an agnostic? Is is unfair to even say that? An important issue here is that of first-order desires versus second-order desires, (and desires about beliefs). I would like to eliminate talk of second-order desies being significant in human action (I admit they exist trivially).
Also consider the Britney Spears dilemma:
I currently believe drug-taking is +EV (hence I do it), but I want to believe it is -EV and so will go into "rehab". Maybe this is a different issue.
Anyway my second scenario is what might be called Epicurus' wager. Epicurus told us not to fear death since when we are dead we will not be suffering.
1. I believe I am right to be afraid of death.
2. When I am dead I will not be afraid of death.
Via backward Reflection Principle:
3. Therefore I shouldn't fear death now.
Is it as easy as that though? Maybe I will find out at some later stage (hopefully before I am dead).
