Criterion Of Personal Identity Research Articles

Locke on Persons and Personal ldentity

Criticism of Locke's account of personal identity has proceeded cumulatively. Three years after the publication of the chapter “Of Identity and Diversity”, John Sergeant raised an objection which, in Bishop Butler's hands, was to become famous as the dictum that “one should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity: any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes”. Berkeley added, in effect, that when consciousness is taken to be the criterion of personal identity, one must admit that a man conscious of segments of his life at some times and not at others both is — because “conscious of” states a transitive relation — and is not — because of lack of consciousness—the same person.

Moral Theory and the Plasticity of Persons

There is a hoary tradition in moral philosophy that assumes we cannot determine which moral theory is acceptable or correct unless we have available a correct theory of human nature, or, in its more modern form, of the person.2 With such a theory of the person, however, we could at least narrow down the choice among competing ethical theories. A more recent tradition, at least in one of its standard interpretations, agrees it would be necessary to have a correct theory of the person before we could determine an acceptable moral theory, but it denies there is a determinate nature of the person to be captured in such a theory. The plasticity of the person, according to this strand of Marxist theory, rules out the possibility of there being uni versal moral theory at all. In this paper, I would like to explore a view that treads an intermediate path. It agrees with the Marxist denial that there is a determinate nature of the person, a deep fact of the matter, that can be abstracted from the social matrix and made the subject of a (non-moral) theory of the person. And, it agrees with both traditions that moral theory de pends on and embodies a theory of the person. But, by making the problem of arriving at an acceptable view of the person itself something that depends on overall theoretical considerations, including moral ones, the intermediary <, view may be able to avoid the type of moral relativism associated with the Marxist view. The immediate source of the view I discuss is an exchange between John Rawls and Derek Parfit3 on the connection between criteria of personal identity and moral theories. The focus on personal identity is of some in terest, because, at least at first sight, it seems to be a less morally loaded no tion than other concepts usually dealt with in the theory of the person, such as autonomy and rationality. I will support what I take to be the the thrust of Rawls' remarks4: even here, in the heart of echt philosophy of mind, we find a feature of the concept of the person that is in an important sense indeter minate without input from moral theory. First, however, I will examine Par fit's claims about the connection between two views of personal identity, which he calls the Simple and the Complex, and competing moral theories. I will then look at Rawls' argument that philosophy of mind underdetermines theory selection in ethics. Pursuing the thrust of Rawls' remarks will lead me to the intermediary view just noted and to the connection of this issue to a coherentist or holist view of theory acceptance in ethics.

The Crucial Relation in Personal Identity

1. What is the Problem of Personal Identity?Locke posed the problem of personal identity in one brief question, “What makes the same person?” This formulation is deceptively simple. My aim is to offer a new interpretation of the problem and to suggest a method for finding a solution.Investigations of personal identity are usually cast in terms of finding the criterion for personal identity. Yet talk of criteria is ambiguous. In one sense of the term, the criterion of personal identity would be special evidence for personal identity. According to the second usage, the criterion of personal identity would be that state of affairs for which evidence for personal identity is evidence. We will not be concerned with the first construal. On that reading, the problem of personal identity would be an epistemological issue. But the basic question concerning personal identity, “What is one person?” does not appear to be an epistemological question.

A Theory of disembodied survival and re-embodied existence

In his Survival and Disembodied Existences Terence Penelhum presents two arguments against the possibility of disembodied survival. The first is that the memory criterion of personal identity is parasitic upon bodily identity and the second is the more fundamental contention that the notion of a disembodied person is unintelligible. Penelhum's claim is not that it is impossible as such to speak of disembodied intelligence, or perception, or even agency, but that the problem of construing the identity of disembodied individuals is overwhelmingly difficult. With regard to the idea of resurrection Penelhum argues that it is intelligible but that the question of whether or not an individual is someone who has been resurrected, or not, is one which no evidence could conclusively settle. It calls for a decision rather than for the production of conclusive evidence. ‘When resurrection is predicted it is always open to a critic to deny that what is predicted has to be accorded that title.’

Ayer on Personal Identity

In ‘The Concept of a Person’ Ayer presents a theory of personal identity which has never, to my knowledge, attracted the close attention which it deserves. The theory puts forward bodily continuity as the central criterion of personal identity. In this, of course, Ayer does not differ from many other philosophers who have written on this subject. The real interest of Ayer's view is that it is quite explicit that the body is taken as the principle of unity underlying one's experiences, as that in virtue of which a series of experiences are the experiences of one person. Without the body, ‘not only is it not clear how the individual experiences are to be identified, but there appears to be no principle according to which they can be grouped together; there is no answer to the question what makes two experiences which are separate in time the experiences of the same self’ (pp. 113–114). Some link between experiences there must be. Memory cannot serve as this link, since remembering an experience already implies thinking of it as one's own. The only acceptable candidate is the body.

Disembodied Survival Again

In a recent paper, I challenged a currently fashionable argument against the intelligibility of disembodied survival. This argument urges that only bodily continuity can provide a satisfactory criterion for personal identity and since bodily continuity is, of course, ruled out ex hypothesi in disembodied survival, we could have no satisfactory criterion for identity of a disembodied person. Toward the end of the paper I issued a challenge to supporters of this argument; if there are reasonable standards for a criterion of personal identity which do not beg the question in favor of the bodily continuity criterion, let them be stated and let us see if other criteria of personal identity can meet them as well as bodily continuity.The recent republication of a number of early papers by Bernard Williams has drawn my attention to a paper by Williams which may seem to anticipate and answer this challenge. In what follows I wish to see whether or not this is so; whether Williams has given standards for a criterion of personal identity which are reasonable, which bodily continuity can meet, and which other criteria (such as those proposed in my earlier paper) cannot meet.

Wittgenstein on Persons and Human Beings

The last part of Wittgenstein's Blue Book consists of a discussion of Solipsism. In the course of that discussion there occur several remarks (extending over about a page-and-a-half) which are explicitly concerned with the concept of a person and with the criteria of personal identity. This section is replaced in the Philosophical Investigations by half a sentence which reads: ‘… there is a great variety of criteria for personal “identity”’. Wittgenstein has italicised the word ‘identity’, and has placed it in inverted commas: I don't quite know why he does this, but it might be a hint to the effect that there is something slightly suspect about the notion of personal identity.

Wittgenstein on Persons and Human Beings

The last part of Wittgenstein's Blue Book consists of a discussion of Solipsism. In the course of that discussion there occur several remarks (extending over about a page-and-a-half) which are explicitly concerned with the concept of a person and with the criteria of personal identity. This section is replaced in the Philosophical Investigations by half a sentence which reads: ‘… there is a great variety of criteria for personal “identity”’. Wittgenstein has italicised the word ‘identity’, and has placed it in inverted commas: I don't quite know why he does this, but it might be a hint to the effect that there is something slightly suspect about the notion of personal identity.