Locke, Accountability and Personal Identity

Abstract


 
 
 When discussing Locke’s views on the topic of personal identity, commentators often cite from Essay II. xxvii. 26, which begins with the remark that ‘person ... is a forensic term appropriating actions and their merit ...’. In some way or other, what Locke says about accountability and punishment is supposed to bear on what he says about the identity of persons over time. According to some, the connection is this: the correct account of personal identity is crucial because the meting out of punishment and the allocation of reward depend upon it. Locke himself says, ‘In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment’ (II. xxvii. 18). More specifically perhaps, a person is not to be punished or rewarded for an action unless he or she was the person who performed it. To know that Sam is rightly to be punished for the crime one must know that he was actually the criminal; to know that he was actually the criminal one must know not only the details of the case but also, more generally, what it is that makes a person X at one time the same as a person Y at another; whence the need for a criterion of personal identity.