Moral Personhood and Personal Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-76
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Persistence Conditions ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Moral Personhood ◽  
Full Credit ◽  
Divine Law ◽  
Reward And Punishment

This chapter applies Locke’s kind-dependent account of identity to persons. First, the author argues that Lockean persons belong to a moral and legal kind of being: they are subjects of accountability. This interpretation gives full credit to Locke’s claim that ‘person’ is a forensic term, but it also shows that his arguments presuppose a particular conception of morality that is grounded in divine law and the power to enforce morality by reward and punishment. Next, the chapter asks how Locke’s moral and legal account of personhood enables us to specify persistence conditions for persons. It is argued that it is helpful to examine Locke’s understanding of just accountability. For Locke sameness of consciousness is a necessary condition for moral accountability. This makes it possible to establish that sameness of consciousness is a necessary condition for personal identity. Yet it is also acknowledged that Locke thinks about moral accountability in particular and controversial ways. The chapter ends by offering fine-grained distinctions for understanding the relation between morality and metaphysics in Locke’s account of personal identity.

Artificial Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James DiGiovanna
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Persistence Conditions ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
Extreme Change ◽  
At Will

Enhancement and AI create moral dilemmas not envisaged in standard ethical theories. Some of this stems from the increased malleability of personal identity that this technology affords: an artificial being can instantly alter its memory, preferences, and moral character. If a self can, at will, jettison essential identity-giving characteristics, how are we to rely upon, befriend, or judge it? Moral problems will stem from the fact that such beings are para-persons: they meet all the standard requirements of personhood (self-awareness, agency, intentional states, second-order desires, etc.) but have an additional ability—the capacity for instant change—that disqualifies them from ordinary personal identity. In order to rescue some responsibility assignments for para-persons, a fine-grained analysis of responsibility-bearing parts of selves and the persistence conditions of these parts is proposed and recommended also for standard persons who undergo extreme change.

Locke and his Early Critics and Defenders: Moral and Religious Differences

2021 ◽  
pp. 246-278
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Personhood ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Religious Differences ◽  
Divine Law

This chapter focuses on Shaftesbury’s and Hume’s responses to Locke’s account of persons and personal identity. Both philosophers generally share Locke’s metaphysically agnostic views, but disagree with Locke on moral and religious grounds. By contrasting their moral and religious views we can see how their different moral and religious views shape their thinking about persons and personal identity and understand why Shaftesbury and Hume develop views that differ from Locke’s. The chapter pays particular attention to how Shaftesbury and Hume each criticize psychological accounts of personal identity and what role their underlying moral and religious views play. Moreover, both philosophers reject moral theories grounded in divine law like Locke’s. Since Locke’s account of moral personhood can be separated from his psychological account of personal identity, it is interesting to ask how philosophers who do not share Locke’s moral views approach or can approach moral personhood.

scholarly journals The Role of Appropriation in Locke's Account of Persons and Personal Identity

Locke Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 3-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Persistence Conditions ◽  
Subsequent Discussion ◽  
Distinctive Role

According to Locke, appropriation is a precondition for moral responsibility and thus we can expect that it plays a distinctive role in his theory. Yet it is rare to find an interpretation of Locke’s account of appropriation that does not associate it with serious problems. To make room for a more satisfying understanding of Locke’s account of appropriation we have to analyse why it was so widely misunderstood. The aim of this paper is fourfold: First, I will show that Mackie’s and Winkler’s interpretations that have shaped the subsequent discussion contain serious flaws. Second, I will argue that the so-called appropriation interpretation —that is the view that appropriation is meant to provide alternative persistence conditions for persons—lacks support. Third, I will re-examine Locke’s texts and argue that we can come to a better understanding of his notion of appropriation in the Essay if we interpret it in analogy to his account of appropriation in Two Treatises. Fourth, I will offer a more fine-grained interpretation of the role of appropriation in relation to persistence conditions for persons. I conclude by showing that the advantage of this proposal is that it reconciles interpretations that have commonly been thought to be inconsistent.

Some Problems about Resurrection

1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-359
Author(s):  
Philip L. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Time Of Death ◽  
Dna Molecules ◽  
Bodily Continuity

Suppose that a person P1 dies some time during 1978. Many years later, the resurrection world, a perennial object of Christian concern, begins on the morning of the day of judgment. On its first morning there are in that world distinct persons, P2 and P3, each of whom is related in remarkably intimate ways to P1. You are to imagine that each of them satisfies each of the criteria or conditions necessary for identity with P1 to some extent, that both of them satisfy these conditions to exactly the same extent, and that every other denizen of the resurrection world satisfies each of these conditions to a lesser extent than P2 and P3 do. Thus, for example, philosophers often claim that bodily continuity is a necessary condition for personal identity. If it is, you might assume that the body P2 has on the morning of the day of judgment contains some of the same atoms the body of P11 contained when P1 died, and that P2's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death just in case P3's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death. Or, again, some philosophers hold that connectedness of memory is necessary for personal identity. If so, you are to suppose that on the morning of the day of judgment P3 seems to remember some of the events in the life of P1 having happened to him, and that P3 seems to remember a certain event in the life of P1 having happened to him just in case P2 seems to remember that very event in the life of P1 having happened to him. You are to fill in the details by adding complete parity between P2 and P3 with respect to similarity of DNA molecules, character traits and whatever else you deem relevant to personal identity. And, finally, you are to complete the story by imagining that P2 and P3 live very different sorts of lives in the resurrection world. To heighten the poignancy of the story, you might imagine that P2 enjoys forever after the beatitude promised to the blessed while P3 suffers the everlasting torments reserved for the damned.

Criteria of Personal Identity

1975 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-69
Author(s):  
Karl Ameriks
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Psychological Characteristics ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Sufficient Condition ◽  
Bodily Continuity ◽  
Secondary Objective ◽  
The Way

The primary objective of this paper is to improve the defense of the thesis that(1) bodily continuity is the primary criterion of personal identity.This is to be done by establishing (in Parts Ill and IV) that there is a unique sense in which(2) bodily continuity is a necessary condition of personal identity.A secondary objective of the paper is to illustrate (in Part I) the way in which the value and validity of (2) has been obscured in recent defenses and criticisms of (1), which inappropriately interpret it in terms of the claim that(3) bodily continuity is a sufficient condition of personal identity.Since the truth of (3) will be denied, the defense of (1) will also involve arguing (in Part II) that the traditional alternative to the bodily criterion, namely the criterion of memory and psychological characteristics, not only is not a necessary condition of personal identity but also is not a sufficient condition.

Interaction Model of Brain and Consciousness

2018 ◽  
pp. 105-126
Author(s):  
Georg Northoff
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Vegetative State ◽  
Interaction Model ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Additive Interaction ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Nancy Cartwright ◽  
Level Of Consciousness ◽  
The Brain

In addition to the spectrum model, I also introduced an interaction model to characterize the brain’s neural activity (chapter 2). Is the interaction model of brain also relevant for consciousness? That is the focus in the present chapter. I here present various lines of empirical evidence focusing on disorders of consciousness like vegetative state, anesthesia, and sleep. Based on empirical evidence, I show that the degree of non-additive interaction between spontaneous and stimulus-induced activity indexes the level of consciousness in a seemingly rather fine-grained way; for that reason, it may be considered a neural correlate of the level of consciousness, i.e., NCC. In contrast, the spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure is rather a necessary condition of possible consciousness, that is, a neural predisposition of consciousness (NPC). The concept of NPC is further enriched by the concept of capacities for which I recruit Nancy Cartwright. I suggest that the brain’s non-additive interaction including the subsequent association of stimulus-induced activity with consciousness is based on the spontaneous activity’s capacity. Since that very same capacity, operating as NPC, can be traced to the spontaneous activity’s spatiotemporal features, I speak of “spatiotemporal capacity”. I conclude that the empirical data suggest a capacity-based approach (rather than law-based approach) to the brain and how it is related to consciousness.

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.

Locke’s Kind-dependent Approach to Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Persistence Conditions ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Subsequent Discussion ◽  
Over Time

This chapter offers a close analysis of Locke’s approach to questions of individuation and identity over time. It examines how Locke distinguishes individuation from identity and proposes that Locke’s approach to identity is best understood as kind-dependent. This means that the persistence conditions vary depending on the kind of being under consideration. For Locke it is important to first examine the kind under consideration, before persistence conditions for members of this kind can be specified. More precisely, if the nominal essences of kind F and kind G vary, then it is likely that the persistence conditions for members of kind F will vary from the persistence conditions for members of kind G. This chapter provides the framework for the subsequent discussion of Locke’s account of persons and personal identity.

Are the irreversibly comatose still here? The destruction of brains and the persistence of persons

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukas J Meier
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Brain Damage ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Memory Storage ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Functional Loss ◽  
Empirical Basis ◽  
Persistence Conditions ◽  
Mental Characteristics

When an individual is comatose while parts of her brain remain functional, the question arises as to whether any mental characteristics are still associated with this brain, that is, whether the person still exists. Settling this uncertainty requires that one becomes clear about two issues: the type of functional loss that is associated with the respective profile of brain damage and the persistence conditions of persons. Medical case studies can answer the former question, but they are not concerned with the latter. Conversely, in the philosophical literature, various accounts of personal identity are discussed, but usually detached from any empirical basis. Only uniting the two debates and interpreting the real-life configurations of brain damage through the lens of the philosophical concepts enables one to make an informed judgment regarding the persistence of comatose persons. Especially challenging are cases in which three mental characteristics that normally occur together—wakefulness, awareness and memory storage—come apart. These shall be the focus of this paper.

scholarly journals Island for gravitationally prepared state and pseudo entanglement wedge

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Masamichi Miyaji
Keyword(s):  
Transition Matrix ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Entanglement Entropy ◽  
Initial Boundary ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Initial State ◽  
Boundary Area ◽  
Generalized Entropy ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Boundary State

Abstract We consider spacetime initiated by a finite-sized initial boundary as a generalization of the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary state. We study entanglement entropy of matter state prepared by such spacetime. We find that the entanglement entropy for large subregion is given either by the initial state entanglement or the entanglement island, preventing the entropy to grow arbitrarily large. Consequently, the entanglement entropy is always bounded from above by the boundary area of the island, leading to an entropy bound in terms of the island. The island I is located in the analytically continued spacetime, either at the bra or the ket part of the spacetime in Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. The entanglement entropy is given by an average of complex pseudo generalized entropy for each entanglement island. We find a necessary condition of the initial state to be consistent with the strong sub-additivity, which requires that any probe degrees of freedom are thermally entangled with the rest of the system. We then find a large parameter region where the spacetime with finite-sized initial boundary, which does not have the factorization puzzle at leading order, dominates over the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary state or the bra-ket wormhole. Due to the absence of a moment of time reflection symmetry, the island in our setup is a generalization of the entanglement wedge, called pseudo entanglement wedge. In pseudo entanglement wedge reconstruction, we consider reconstructing the bulk matter transition matrix on A ∪ I, from a fine-grained state on A. The bulk transition matrix is given by a thermofield double state with a projection by the initial state. We also provide an AdS/BCFT model by considering EOW branes with corners. We also find the exponential hardness of such reconstruction task using a generalization of Python’s lunch conjecture to pseudo generalized entropy.

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