Parfit on what matters in survival

Abstract

Parfit's most controversial claim about personal identity is that personal identity does not matter in the way we uncritically think it does.' I would like to analyze Parfit's reasons for making this claim. These reasons are complex, and they stand in some tension with one another. I would like to examine them carefully and to try to arrive at the strongest case that can be made for Parfit's controversial claim about what matters. I in fact attach a certain high level of concern to my own survival. If I am about to enter combat, then the question whether I will survive the battle is naturally of great concern to me. This is the question whether there will be some person existing after the battle who is numerically identical to me.2 Parfit's controversial claim about what matters is that the concern I attach to the foregoing question about identity ought to attach instead to a different question: will there be some person exdsting after the battle who is R-related to me? R is "psychological connectedness and/or continuity with the right kind of cause." (262) Since the Rrelation (which we will explicate in a moment) is not the identity relation, and since the question about R, and not the identity question, is the one that matters (or rationally ought to), identity is not what matters. We can say, if we want, that identity is not what matters in survival, since if I do survive the battle, the R-relation will hold between me and some person existing in the future with whom I am identical. According to Parfit, it is the holding of the R-relation in such a case of survival, not the holding of the identity relation, which fundamentally matters. What exactly is the R-relation? Let us begin by discussing psychological connectedness, which is "the holding of particular direct