Personal Identity: The Non-Branching Form of “What Matters”

2007 ◽  
pp. 190-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer E. Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
What Matters

Parfit on Love and Partiality

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Roger Crisp
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Concern For Others ◽  
Instrumental Reasons ◽  
What Matters

It is generally held that in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit was advocating greater impartiality in ethics. In his later work, On What Matters, he seems more inclined to accept that we have partial reasons, for example, to give priority to those we love. This chapter raises some questions concerning Parfit’s arguments for partiality, including whether affection is too contingent to be valuable in itself, and whether partial concern for others, shared histories, or commitments can plausibly be said to ground non-instrumental reasons or value. The paper ends with a discussion of gratitude and an argument based on Parfit’s reductionist conception of personal identity.

Fission and Indeterminacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Douglas Ehring
Keyword(s):  
Fission Product ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
What Matters In Survival ◽  
What Matters

In Chapter 3, the assumption that facts about personal identity are always fully determinate is put to one side so as to consider mappings of identity onto fission according to which it is indeterminate that the fissioner is identical to each fission product. In this chapter, the suggestion that what matters in survival is a relation that is “identity-based” but compatible with such indeterminacy is examined and rejected. In addition, an alternate claim is discussed according to which it is indeterminate, but nearly true that fissioner is identical to each fission product and it is that nearness to identity that really matters. This claim is rejected. It is concluded that identity and “identity-based” relations do not matter in fission.

Morality and the Distinction between Oneself and Others

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ingmar Persson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
The Future ◽  
What Matters

In On What Matters Derek Parfit adopts Henry Sidgwick’s idea of a duality of practical reason consisting in there being personal reasons to care about our own well-being as well as moral reasons to care about everyone else’s well-being. But this sits ill with his well-known claim in Reasons and Persons that personal identity is not what matters. For this implies that were we to divide into two individuals, we would have the same reasons to care about these individuals as ourselves, though they are distinct from us. It is suggested that this is because we empathize with them in the same way as with ourselves in the future, ‘from the inside’, and that considerations of justice do not apply to them because their wills are too dependent on our wills.

Personal identity and Purgatory

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID B. HERSHENOV ◽  
ROSE KOCH-HERSHENOV
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Proper Part ◽  
What Matters

If Purgatory involves just an immaterial soul undergoing a transformation between our death and resurrection, then, as Aquinas recognized, it won't be us in Purgatory. Drawing upon Parfit's ideas about identity not being what matters to us, we explore whether the soul's experience of Purgatory could still be beneficial to it as well as the deceased human who didn't experience the purging yet would possess the purged soul upon resurrection. We also investigate an alternative non-Thomistic hylomorphic account of Purgatory in which humans would survive during the period between death and resurrection in a bodiless form with a soul as their only proper part.

Countering the Appeal of the Psychological Approach to Personal Identity

Philosophy ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hershenov
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Conjoined Twins ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Peter Unger ◽  
What Matters

Brain transplants and the dicephalus (an organism just like us except that it has two cerebrums) are thought to support the position that we are essentially thinking creatures, not living organisms. I try to offset the first of these intuitions by responding to thought experiments Peter Unger devised to show that identity is what matters. I then try to motivate an interpretation of the alleged conjoined twins as really just one person cut off from himself by relying upon what I take will be the reader's disagreement with Locke's conjecture that a dreaming Socrates and an awake Socrates are two distinct people.

Indeterminate Identity, Personal Identity, and Fission

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-163
Author(s):  
Kit Fine
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Global Theory ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Vague Identity ◽  
What Matters

I apply my “global” theory of vagueness to the question of vague identity. I consider, in particular, the application of the theory to the case of fission and attempt to show that the theory is able to preserve the connection between identity and what matters and between identity and psychological continuity.

Why It Does Not Matter What Matters: Relation R, Personal Identity, and Moral Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (278) ◽  
pp. 178-198
Author(s):  
Bastian Steuwer
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
The Future ◽  
Separateness Of Persons ◽  
What Matters

Abstract Derek Parfit famously argued that personal identity is not what matters for prudential concern about the future. Instead, he argues what matters is Relation R, a combination of psychological connectedness and continuity with any cause. This revisionary conclusion, Parfit argued, has profound implications for moral theory. It should lead us, among other things, to deny the importance of the separateness of persons as an important fact of morality. Instead, we should adopt impersonal consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that Parfit is mistaken about this last step. His revisionary arguments about personal identity and rationality have no implications for moral theory. We need not decide whether Relation R or personal identity contain what matters if we want to retain the importance of the separateness of persons.

On What Matters for African Americans: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” in the Light of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons

Janus Head ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Michael Wainwright ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk ◽  
What Matters

In Reasons and Persons (1984), the greatest contribution to utilitarian philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874), Derek Parfit supports his Reductionist contention “that personal identity is not what matters” by turning to the neurosurgical findings of Roger Wolcott Sperry. Parfit’s scientifically informed argument has important implications for W. E. B. Du Bois’s contentious hypothesis of African-American “double-consciousness,” which he initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), before amending for inclusion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An analysis of “Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, helps to trace these ramifications, resituating Du Bois’s notion from the pragmatist to the utilitarian tradition, and revealing how his concept effectively prefigured Parfit’s scientifically informed Reductionism.

Parfit’s Reorientation

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
Ingmar Persson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
The Third ◽  
Rule Consequentialism ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Significant Change ◽  
Common Sense Morality ◽  
What Matters

This paper aims to show that between Reasons and Persons and On What Matters the orientation of Derek Parfit’s philosophy underwent a significant change. The approach of Reasons and Persons is largely revisionist, which is exemplified by his reductionist account of personal identity. This account is omitted in On What Matters apparently because it does not fit in with the conciliationist project of this work. The aim of the first two volumes of that work is to show that, on the basis of a non-naturalist theory of normative reasons, three supposedly irreconcilable moral theories—rule-consequentialism, Kantian and Scanlonian contractualism—could converge to form a single Triple Theory. In the third volume, the conciliationist approach is carried further by Parfit’s attempt to show both that his metaethical position is in essential agreement with rivals, such as Gibbard’s expressivism, and to reconcile parts of common-sense morality and consequentialism in order to bring them together in the Triple Theory. This chapter argues that the failure of these attempts as well as the fact that the most controversial revisionist claims in Reasons and Persons are left out throw doubt on the feasibility of Parfit’s conciliationalist undertaking.

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