Personal Identity and Responsibility for Past Actions

Abstract

I take it as a fact that most, if not all human societies would collapse without moral and legal practices in which people are held responsible for at least some of their actions. Are we committed by this fact to endorse specific ontological views? In this contribution I will address only part of this question. I will be concerned with whether moral and legal practices of holding people responsible presuppose a specific ontology of personal identity. Obviously, the idea that persons are responsible presupposes that our ontology contains persons. But do we need to be more specific as to what exactly it is that sustains the continued existence of persons over time in order to account for our moral and legal practices? My answer to this question will be negative. I will reach this conclusion by including in my discussion a feature of moral and legal practices that is regularly neglected in this context. The connection between (theories of) personal identity and these practices is usually scrutinised merely by focusing on the simple fact that we hold people responsible at one point in time for actions they performed at an earlier point in time. Apart from this, I will also focus on the fact that the consequences attached to responsibility tend to be influenced, in our practices, by the degree to which a person has changed in (relevant) psychological respects since the performing of the action for which she is held responsible.