Abstract
David Lewis’s attempt to defuse grandfather paradoxes consistently without special restrictions on the ability of time travelers to act in the past is controversial. Kadri Vihvelin uses the case of possible autoinfanticide—killing one’s infant self—to argue on Lewisian grounds that Lewis is wrong, since all counterfactual attempts at autoinfanticide would fail. I present a new defense of Lewis against Vihvelin premised on the possibility of personal reinstatement, where a person who dies prematurely is replicated from information collected from a previous live scan. I argue on Lewisian grounds that in a Vihvelin case where Suzy does not attempt to kill Baby Suzy, Vihvelin has not shown that Suzy would have failed had she tried to kill Baby Suzy. For, Baby Suzy might have been reinstated. Hence, even granting Vihvelin’s own assumptions, a Lewisian can assert that Suzy can kill Baby Suzy. Reinstatement does not require a “big” miracle; so autoinfanticide is no biggie.
Highlights
David Lewis [1] argues that even in progenitor or retro-killing cases—the most notorious being “grandfather paradox” cases—time travelers have more or less the same abilities as anyone else
In a series of pieces of which [2,3,4] are representative, Kadri Vihvelin argues that time traveling to the past and retro-killing is logically possible, in a typical progenitor case the time traveler lacks the ordinary ability to do the deed
Considered in the broader light of Lewis’s view that teleportation is survivable, that transworld identity is a matter of modal counterpart theory, and that de re modality is inconstant, Vihvelin’s case is uncompelling, even granting the Counterfactual Possibility
Summary
David Lewis [1] argues that even in progenitor or retro-killing cases—the most notorious being “grandfather paradox” cases—time travelers have more or less the same abilities as anyone else. Like Lewis, Vihvelin does not think you will succeed in retro-killing anyone that you did not retro-kill Her distinctive claim is that you could not have succeeded; more precisely, that in a case where you did not try to retro-kill a progenitor on a particular occasion, it is true that had you tried, you would have failed. I conclude that Lewisians should continue to say that time travelers can retro-kill in the same sense that non time travelers can kill
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