1. This is a revised version of a paper that was delivered as the Third Annual Evelyn Barker Memorial Lecture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County on April 10, 2006. An earlier version, entitled "What We Owe to Future People," was presented at the McDowell Conference on Philosophy and Social Policy on the topic "Ethics and Genetics," at American University in Washington, D.C., on November 4, 2005. I thank Dan Brock and Norman Daniels, speakers at that conference, for their comments and encouragement. I thank the faculty and students at both events for their probing and useful questions. I am grateful as well to the Editors ofPhilosophy & Public Affairsfor their very helpful comments.
2. Woody Allen,Without Feathers(New York: Random House, 1975).
3. I do not, of course, suggest that Allen fell for this illusion. On the contrary, seeing through the illusion is a necessary condition of seeing the humor in evoking it.
4. Reported in Bernard Williams,Problems of the Self(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 42-43.
5. I think this illusion has such a grip because it is natural to us as reflective beings. We think about ourselves thinking. This has the odd but pervasive effect of making it feel like our lives are happening before us, in front of our inner gaze. That in turn leads to thinking that there is an "I" for whom my life is happening and thus for whom a different life could happen. Perhaps this is why the idea of immortality, both before and after natural life, comes so easily to us.