“I Said Something Wrong”: Transworld Obligation in Yesterday

Danny Boyle's film Yesterday (2019) is a contemporary morality play in which the main character, Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, is magically sent to a different possible world in which the Beatles never existed. Possessing his memory of the Beatles’ catalogue in the new possible world, he is now in sole possession of an extremely valuable artifact. Recording and performing the songs of the Beatles and passing them off as his own, he becomes rich, famous, and deeply unhappy. Once he confesses his wrong-doing, however, he is redeemed and his life becomes wonderful. The presupposition that underlays the plot is that in claiming authorship of the songs of the Beatles in a world in which the Beatles never existed, he is acting immorally. But on what theoretical grounds can this intuitive judgment be justified? Can one plagiarize work for which there is no author in one's world? Saul Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, dubs terms that refer in all possible worlds to be “rigid designators” and considers the metaphysics necessary to support them. In this case, it is not reference but moral responsibility that is invariant under changes of possible world and so we must ask a similar question for “rigid obligators.” We argue that a virtue ethics approach is the only way to support the foundational moral intuition.

Kripke Was Right Even If He Was Wrong: Sherlock Holmes and the Unicorns

In the Addenda to Naming and Necessity (1980), Kripke famously argues that it is false that there could have been unicorns, or more properly, that “no counterfactual situation is properly describable as one in which there would have been unicorns.” He adds that he holds similarly that ‘one cannot say of any possible person that he would have been Sherlock Holmes, had he existed.” He notes the “cryptic brevity” of these remarks and refers to a forthcoming work for elaborations—the work being, of course, the John Locke Lectures (2013). Coming as it does at the end of Naming and Necessity, it is natural to read this discussion as drawing out consequences of Kripke’s non-descriptivist picture of proper names and names of natural kinds. In fact, so much is suggested there by Kripke himself. The question thus arises: can the contentious claims quoted from the Addenda be defended independently of Kripke’s rejection of descriptivism? I shall argue that, as appears from the John Locke Lectures, they can be.

Naming and Necessity. Bigarren hitzaldia: 1970eko urtarrilaren 22a

Naming and Necessity. Bigarren hitzaldia: 1970eko urtarrilaren 22a(Itzultzailea: Ekain Garmendia)

CCCP

This chapter is concerned with Crispin Wright’s critique, in his 2002 “The Conceivability of Naturalism,” of the well-known argument developed in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity against the identity of pain with C-fibre firing. Kripke argued that if the identity held it would do so necessarily, so that the identity theorist would have the task of explaining away the apparent conceivability of pain without C-fibre firing and C-fibre firing without pain. Wright identified a principle underlying Kripke’s argument (the “Counter-Conceivability Principle,” to the effect that a clear and distinct conception of a situation is the best possible evidence of its possibility), and suggested that Kripke’s deployment of it against the identity theory resulted in failure. The present chapter raises some doubts about the details of Wright’s diagnosis of the flaw in Kripke’s argument, and makes a contribution of its own to our understanding of the aetiology of modal illusion.