Personal Identity and Impersonal Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Tim Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Christine Korsgaard ◽  
Moral Importance ◽  
Psychological Criterion ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Susan Wolf ◽  
Mark Johnston ◽  
David Brink ◽  
Over Time

On the Reductionist View, the fact of a person’s existence and that of her identity over time just consist in the holding of certain more particular facts about physical and mental events and the relations between these events. These more particular facts are impersonal—they do not presuppose or entail the existence of any person or mental subject. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit claims that if the Reductionist View is true, then ‘it is … more plausible to focus, not on persons, but on experiences, and to claim that what matters morally is the nature of these experiences’. But why think that the Reductionist View has this implication? As critics such as Robert Adams, David Brink, Mark Johnston, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf have suggested, it is not clear why the Reductionist View should have any implications regarding the moral importance of persons. This chapter argues that in contrast to Non-reductionist views, Psychological Reductionism, a version of the Reductionist View that assumes a psychological criterion of personal identity, supports the kind of impersonal moral outlook that Parfit describes.

EXPERIENCE, AGENCY, AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marya Schechtman
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Unity Of Consciousness ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Over Time

Psychologically based accounts of personal identity over time start from a view of persons as experiencing subjects. Derek Parfit argues that if such an account is to justify the importance we attach to identity it will need to provide a deep unity of consciousness throughout the life of a person, and no such unity is possible. In response, many philosophers have switched to a view of persons as essentially agents, arguing that the importance of identity depends upon agential unity rather than unity of consciousness. While this shift contributes significantly to the discussion, it does not offer a fully satisfying alternative. Unity of consciousness still seems required if identity is to be as important as we think it is. Views of identity based on agential unity do, however, point to a new understanding of unity of consciousness which meets Parfit's challenge, yielding an integrated view of identity which sees persons as both subjects and agents.

Memories of Venice: Analysis of two thought experiments by Derek Parfit

Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Andrej Rozemberg
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Memory Trace ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Over Time

Abstract It is commonly believed that our episodic memory teaches us about the reality of personal identity over time. Derek Parfitt’s notion of quasi-memory challenges this belief. According to Parfit, q-memories provide us with knowledge of past experiences in the same way that memory does, without presupposing that the rememberer and the experiencer are the same person. Various aspects of Parfit’s theory have met with criticism from scholars such as D. Wiggins, J. McDowell, M. Schechtman, and others. In this paper, I will focus primarily on the holistic argument that q-memories cannot be squared with the complex nature of mental life. This is a well-known argument and, when understood as criticism of memory-trace copying, is accepted by some q-memory proponents. In this paper, I will try to show why it is impossible to defend quasi-memory, even when wholesale psychological continuity applies, and why post-fission persons are not genuine cases of q-memories.

scholarly journals Institutional Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-34
Author(s):  
Joshua Rust
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Institutional Identity ◽  
Single Thread ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Unbroken Chain

AbstractFor some sufficiently long-standing institutions, such as the English Crown, there is no single thread, whether specified in terms of constitutive rules or assigned functions, that would connect the stages of that institution. Elizabeth II and Egbert are not connected by an unbroken chain of primogeniture and they have importantly different powers and functions. Derek Parfit famously sought to illuminate his account of personal identity by comparing a person to a club. If Parfit could use our intuitions about clubs to help motivate his neo-Lockean account of personal identity over time, which resists the idea that personal identity requires a common psychological thread, then I argue that an adapted version of his account of identity might, in turn, be reapplied to clubs and other institutions, such as the Crown.

scholarly journals On Parfit's View That We Are Not Human Beings

2015 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Eric T. Olson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Over Time

AbstractDerek Parfit claims that we are not human beings. Rather, each of us is the part of a human being that thinks in the strictest sense. This is said to solve a number of difficult metaphysical problems. I argue that the view has metaphysical problems of its own, and is inconsistent with any psychological-continuity account of personal identity over time, including Parfit's own.

scholarly journals Derek Parfit and yearning for personal identity (we do not exist, but really want to)

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-81
Author(s):  
U. V. Dobronravova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Real ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Psychological Criterion

The article critically represents Derek Parfit’s view on personal identity and its connection with our bodies. During the discussion with animalists who claim that persons are identical with bodies Parfit defends Lockean view and concludes that person isn’t identical with human being and easily can exist beyond it. Yet it seems obvious that person isn’t identical with body, such views lead to the controversial effects. For example, Parfit claims that abortion or euthanasia wouldn’t be a crime. This article discusses some of the most debatable basics of Parfit’s position and suggests at least three points worth of next thinking. At first, the author highlights that the so-called psychological criterion of personal identity is rather conventional. At second, the real experience of personal life doesn’t match with the famous Lockean definition, because we have no any continuity. At third, D. Parfit doesn’t explain what it means to be an animal (or human animal). If there is some biological «base» of a person (head, cerebrum, or part of a cerebrum), it still stays an animal. In the conclusion of the article the author suggests that we are not human beings, nor persons. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t become them

The Distinction between [P] and [S]

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Strawson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time

This chapter examines the difference between John Locke's definition of a person [P], considered as a kind of thing, and his definition of a subject of experience of a certain sophisticated sort [S]. It first discusses the equation [P] = [S], where [S] is assumed to be a continuing thing that is able to survive radical change of substantial realization, as well as Locke's position about consciousness in relation to [P]'s identity or existence over time as [S]. It argues that Locke is not guilty of circularity because he is not proposing consciousness as the determinant of [S]'s identity over time, but only of [S]'s moral and legal responsibility over time. Finally, it suggests that the terms “Person” and “Personal identity” pull apart, in Locke's scheme of things, but in a perfectly coherent way.

scholarly journals Personal Identity: The Simple and Complex Views Revisited

Disputatio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (52) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Harold Noonan
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Clear Sense ◽  
Reasonable Possibility ◽  
Time Fall ◽  
Recent Account ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

Abstract Eric Olson has argued, startlingly, that no coherent account can be giv- en of the distinction made in the personal identity literature between ‘complex views’ and ‘simple views’. ‘We tell our students,’ he writes, ‘that accounts of personal identity over time fall into [these] two broad categories’. But ‘it is impossible to characterize this distinction in any satisfactory way. The debate has been systematically misdescribed’. I argue, first, that, for all Olson has said, a recent account by Noonan provides the coherent characterization he claims impossible. If so we have not been wrong all along in the way he says in what we have been telling our students. I then give an account of the distinction between the reductionist and non-reductionist positions which makes it differ- ent from the complex/simple distinction. The aim is to make clear sense of the notion of a not simple but non-reductionist position — which seems an eminently reasonable possibility and something it may also be useful to tell our students about.

Locke’s Underlying Background Beliefs

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-206
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Over Time

This chapter brings together the results of the previous chapters and shows what role Locke’s moral, religious, metaphysical, and epistemic background beliefs play in his thinking about persons and personal identity. Locke breaks with traditional metaphysical debates, first, by adopting a metaphysically agnostic stance with regard to the materiality or immateriality of thinking substances and, second, by arguing for a kind-dependent approach to questions of identity over time. Locke’s moral and legal conception of a person, according to which persons are subjects of accountability, is informed by his moral and religious beliefs. His thinking about moral accountability can be challenged and has been challenged by his contemporaries. Although Locke has good reasons for distinguishing our idea of a person from that of a human being and of a substance, these reasons are based on his metaphysical agnostic views and his religious belief in an afterlife.

The Self

2019 ◽  
pp. 106-138
Author(s):  
Christopher Peacocke
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
New Treatment ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Metaphysical Principle

This chapter presents a metaphysics-first treatment of subjects and the first-person way of representing subjects. It develops a new explanation of the metaphysical principle that it is in the nature of mental events that they have subjects. It advocates the view that the identity of a subject over time involves the identity of a subpersonal integration apparatus, and contrasts the resulting position with Johnston’s conception of personites. A new treatment of the first person is developed that gives a greater role for agency than in previous accounts. Only by doing so can we explain how the first person brings a subject, rather than something else, into the contents of the states and events in which it is involved. Some of the consequences of the resulting agency-involving account of the first person are traced out.

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