All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.
— William Shakespeare
I.
Introduction
Mark Johnston has argued that four-dimensionalist theories of persistence have “surprising, repellent and perhaps even disastrous, implications for our ordinary moral outlook.”[1] In response, Alex Kaiserman has argued that these disastrous implications afflict only one kind of four-dimensionalism, namely, worm theory, but that they do not afflict the alternative stage theory.[2] In this post, I argue that given some plausible premises having to do with pain and moral status, stage theory does not in fact escape the problem raised by Johnston.
