SURVIVAL AND SEPARATION

Abstract

Almost all recent theorists in the philosophy of personal identity over time make causation an essential condition of one’s survival: unless a person-stage is causally connected to one existing at an earlier time, it simply cannot count as a survivor of the earlier one. 1 This is supposed to be the case even if the later person-stage has all of what is required for survival in terms of its mental and physical similarities to the earlier one. Quite some time ago a challenge was put forward to those who give either explicit or tacit support to the causal condition. Kolak and Martin (1987, p. 339) wrote: A curious fact about this near-consensus, a fact which ought to make us deeply suspicious, is that there is in the literature, so far as we know, not a single argument for the causal condition. To my knowledge, no one has yet responded to Kolak and Martin’s challenge; hence the motivation, partly at any rate, for the present paper. The causal condition, I want to claim, is essential to an account of personal identity because inter alia it is essential to a thesis about the individuation of persons, that is, to the separation of different persons. Accounts of personal identity that dispense with causation altogether will lack the resources for individuating persons, and that is a theoretical cost which cannot be tolerated. In testing whether we need a causal condition in personal identity it is possible also to test the limits of what counts as a philosophically defensible view of personal identity. I do so by tampering with the way the causal condition may be built in to one’s favoured continuity account. In particular, I ask to what extent we can minimise use of the causal component in the survival relation before we arrive