Persons, Indeterminacy and Responsibility

Abstract

In certain awkward cases there is an apparent conflict between competing criteria of personal identity. In my view in many such cases there is no answer to questions of personal identity. There is an indeterminacy in our concept of person: the identity conditions which we associate with the concept are sufficient to dictate which person is which in range of familiar cases but not sufficient to determine the answer to the question of identity in the puzzle cases. Derek Parfit suggests at the beginning of his well-known article on personal identity that there need not be correct answer to questions of identity.1 In the light of his observations the content of the last paragraph may seem to lack novelty. But there is at least one respect in which the matter deserves to be taken further than it is by Parfit. Claims such as the statement that questions of personal identity sometimes lack correct answer, or the statement that there is indeterminacy in the concept of person, cry out for semantic elaboration. Indeed they should not be accepted until the necessary detail has been filled in. I shall try to supply some of what is lacking by addressing myself to semantic problem raised by the thesis that the concept of person is indeterminate, namely the problem of what we refer to by a in Is the same person as b? when the question has no correct answer. It will be helpful to pick an example which we can keep in front of us while considering conflicting criteria of identity. It should be emphasized, however, that my semantic observations do not depend for their interest solely on whether or not there are conflicting criteria of identity in the chosen case. If there are any cases in which there are plausible alternative criteria of identity then my proposal can be applied, mutatis mutandis, in defense of the thesis that questions of identity are unanswerable in those cases. The chosen example is based on the tale of Mr. Bultitude and his schoolboy son, described in Anstey's Vice Versa and made philosophically familiar by Anthony Quinton.2 The bodies of Mr. Paul Bultitude,