Friends and Future Selves

Abstract

M Post of us believe that we have reasons to care about our own future selves and that these reasons differ, either in degree or in kind, from the reasons we have to act on behalf of one another. It is often assumed that an adequate account of personal identity should be able to explain-and perhaps also to justifythe sort of concern we have for our future selves. And this is thought to pose a special problem for psychological continuity accounts of personal identity-that is, for accounts which treat personal identity through time as consisting in some sort of continuity of experience rather than in the persistence of an irreducible subject such as an immaterial soul or a bare Cartesian ego. It is supposed to be obvious that I have special reasons to care about my future self if she has my immaterial soul in a way in which it is not obvious that I have special reasons to care about her if all she is is someone whose experiences are connected in certain ways to my present ones.. But this is far from obvious to me. In fact, my intuitions run the opposite way. I believe that I have special reasons to care about my future self if her experiences are connected in certain important ways to my present ones-if, for example, she will recall and carry out some of my present but future-directed intentions. And I doubt that I have any more reason to care about her than about anyone else, if her experiences are related to mine only in the sense that they belong to the same immaterial soul. But that may be because I assume that my soul-if I've got one-is no different from anyone else's except in so far as it has my experiences, memories, intentions and so on. Without these things, my soul is nothing to me. What follows is a defense of these intuitions-or at least of one of them. My primary aim is to argue that psychological continuity accounts of personal identity can explain, and in some sense justify, the sort of concern that each of us has for her own future selves. I will not argue that I have no reason to care about my future self if her experiences are related to mine only in the sense that they