Will I Be a Dead Person?

Abstract

In a recent paper Was I Ever a Fetus?, Eric T. Olson argues convincingly that the Standard View of personal identity cannot resolve the 'fetus problem' and so should be rejected. I shall show that Olson's favored Biological View of personal identity is in much the same boat with respect to what I'll call the dead person problem. Friends of the Biological View (BV hereafter) hold that we continue for so long, but only so long, as our lives continue. The dead person who lay in state after John Kennedy's assassination was not JFK, by the lights of BV theorists, since JFK no longer existed after he died. That leaves us with the question: how was it with this dead person (the dead person who was ceremonially buried in Arlington National Cemetery shortly after JFK's death) prior to JFK's assassination? I do not believe that fans of BV can plausibly respond to the question. As we shall see, the brief for this is much the same as the case Olson makes for judging that friends of SV (the Standard View) cannot plausibly respond to questions concerning the future of fetal individuals. Let Flam be an ordinary (midlife) person, Flem be the fetal individual that emerges from (as we normally would say) Flam's conception, and Flan be the dead person who is buried when (as many would say) Flam is buried. Identity questions present themselves. Is Flem Flam? And is Flan Flam? SV