Episode 93: Barry Lam discusses obligations after death
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What is an obligation and how do we normally understand it?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. I just want to say thanks very much for all the iTunes reviews. They've been very helpful, and please keep them coming. As always, you can find us on Twitter at atelucidationspod, and you can check out our blog at lucian.uchicago.edu slash blogs slash elucidations. One other thing I wanted to mention is that since August, we've been doing our hosting through a new startup called Pippa, which is pretty cool. It was actually founded by some former philosophers. And I have to say I've been very impressed so far. The service is totally free. It provides detailed analytics, makes it very easy for you to migrate from your previous host to them. So all in all, it's been a very positive experience, and it's enabled us to get much more detailed stats on who's listening and when.
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Thank you.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Barry Lamb, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College and Story Lab Fellow at Duke University. He is also the creator, producer, and lead host of a new philosophy podcast called Hi-Fi Nation, which I highly commend to your attention. As soon as you're done listening to this, go subscribe to it. You might describe it as a similar format to something like This American Life, but with a philosophy theme. And he's here to discuss obligations after death. Barry Lamb, welcome.
Hi, Matt. How are you doing?
So I thought maybe we could talk a bit about what an obligation is. It seems like, I don't know, like a plain vanilla example of an obligation is you loan me $50. We agree that I'll pay you back within a year. Come one year from now, I need to pay you $50 in order to, as sometimes people say, discharge the obligation, which is just to say, once I pay you the $50 back after a year, I'm no longer obligated to pay you $50 because I've done it already. And it seems like a lot of the obligations we have to each other have this general sort of shape. So what exactly is an obligation? Is that a good example? Or should we start with a different kind of example?
I think that that's a very good example. You know, when we use the word obligations, I don't mean anything more special than that. We have family obligations. We have job obligations. And we have the kind of obligations that you talked about, which are promises. When you make a promise to somebody or an agreement, you have an obligation to fulfill that promise. And, you know, with family obligations, it's not clear that you've made a promise to anybody, but you have these family obligations. If it's very important to your grandmother that you're at her birthday party, you have a family obligation to go to her birthday party, even if it's more fun to be at a barbecue with your friends or something.
Okay, yeah. Maybe there are different kinds of social rituals that we can engage in. Some of them, like you might say, generate obligations, like making a promise that puts you under an obligation you weren't under before. But then maybe there are other kinds of interactions we might have that don't sort of like create the obligation out of thin air. It's just maybe you kind of just have an obligation to certain family members. So they come about in different ways, but we all have this sense that like for certain people, we owe them something or we ought to do something for them.
That's right. And these are the kind of obligations that we have towards particular people. And I think there's a lot of obligations that we have that aren't really for particular people. But you might think that we have an obligation just to be good or something like that. Right. Or not be just mean to just generally not be mean generally and to particular people as well. So I think it's a very broad term and it's a term we're all very familiar with.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is an obligation and how do we normally understand it?
0:00–4:53
2
How do obligations change when the person who created them is dead?
4:53–11:21
3
Why do we feel a moral pull to honor the wishes of deceased individuals?
11:21–24:03
4
What legal and economic structures enforce the wishes of the dead?
24:03–41:25
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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