Concluding Remarks

Abstract

Locke cleverly advances debates about persons and personal identity. By bringing together moral debates about personhood with metaphysical and religious debates about personal identity, he takes on a task that Hobbes left off. Locke regards his account of personal identity in terms of sameness of consciousness as ideally suited for addressing questions of moral accountability. Moreover, his view can make sense of the possibility of the afterlife without requiring a metaphysical stance on debates concerning the materiality or immateriality of thinking substances....