Concluding Remarks

2021 ◽  
pp. 279-280
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Accountability

Locke cleverly advances debates about persons and personal identity. By bringing together moral debates about personhood with metaphysical and religious debates about personal identity, he takes on a task that Hobbes left off. Locke regards his account of personal identity in terms of sameness of consciousness as ideally suited for addressing questions of moral accountability. Moreover, his view can make sense of the possibility of the afterlife without requiring a metaphysical stance on debates concerning the materiality or immateriality of thinking substances....

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.

Personal Identity, Transitivity, and Divine Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 172-200
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
New Look

This chapter offers a new look at the problem of transitivity. It argues that a genuine question of transitivity arises in the context of the afterlife and a last judgement and that Locke would take the transitivity problem seriously in this context. Recent non-transitive interpretations emphasize that Locke’s account of personal identity fundamentally concerns questions of moral accountability, but they do not give sufficient attention to the religious context of Locke’s view. The chapter develops a hybrid interpretation that combines insights of transitive and non-transitive interpretations. It shows how the hybrid interpretation is grounded in Locke’s account of sameness of consciousness, how it can better accommodate the religious context than competing interpretations without neglecting the insights of non-transitive interpretations. Moreover, it shows with reference to Locke’s writings on religion that his account of personal identity leaves room for repentance.

scholarly journals Locke on Persons and Personal Identity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
Per Se ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Philosophical Project ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Over Time

This book offers a new perspective on John Locke’s account of persons and personal identity by considering it within the context of his broader philosophical project and the philosophical debates of his day. Ruth Boeker’s interpretation emphasizes the importance of the moral and religious dimensions of his view. She argues that taking seriously Locke’s general approach to questions of identity over time, means that his account of personhood should be considered separately from his account of personal identity over time. On this basis, Boeker argues that Locke endorses a moral account of personhood, according to which persons are subjects of accountability, and that his particular thinking about moral accountability explains why he regards sameness of consciousness as necessary for personal identity over time. Moreover, she shows that Locke’s religious beliefs in an afterlife and a last judgement make it attractive to distinguish between the ideas of persons, human beings, and substances, and to defend a consciousness-based account of personal identity. In contrast to some neo-Lockean views about personal identity, she argues that Locke’s account of personal identity is not psychological per se, but rather his underlying moral, religious, metaphysical, and epistemic background beliefs are relevant for understanding why he argues for a consciousness-based account of personal identity. Taking his underlying background beliefs into consideration not only sheds light on why many of his early critics do not adopt Locke’s view, but also shows why his view cannot be as easily dismissed as some of his critics assume.

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.

scholarly journals Reconciling Locke’s Consciousness-Based Theory of Personal Identity and His Soteriology

Locke Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Diego Lucci
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Last Judgment ◽  
Temporal Continuity ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Resurrection Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Galen Strawson

This article maintains that Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity, which Locke expounded in book 2, chapter 27 of the second edition of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), perfectly fits with his views on the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, and salvation. The compatibility of Locke’s theory of personal identity with his soteriology has been questioned by Udo Thiel and Galen Strawson. These two authors have claimed that Locke’s emphasis on repentance, which he described as necessary to salvation in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), clashes with his notion of punishment as annexed to personality and, hence, to consciousness. Pace Thiel and Strawson, I argue that Locke’s theory of personal identity is compatible with his concept of repentance. To this purpose, I first explain Locke’s views on the soul’s death and the resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day, when, according to Locke, we will all be raised from death by divine miracle, but only the repentant faithful will be admitted to eternal bliss while the wicked will be annihilated. Locke’s mortalism, along with his agnosticism on the ontological constitution of thinking substances or souls, played a role in his formulation of a non-substantialist account of personal identity, because it denied the temporal continuity of the soul between physical death and resurrection and it rejected the resurrection of the same body. I then analyze Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity, with a focus on the implications of this theory regarding moral accountability. Finally, I turn my attention to Thiel’s and Strawson’s considerations about Locke’s views on consciousness and repentance. To prove that Locke’s views on salvation are consistent with his theory of personal identity, I clarify Locke’s soteriology, which describes not only repentance, but also obedience, faith, and the conscientious study of Scripture as necessary to salvation.

scholarly journals 大腦移植對於道德責任歸屬的挑戰: 人格同一性判準的反思

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Wanling CHOU
Keyword(s):  
Organ Transplantation ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Medical Technology ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Traditional Definition ◽  
Digital Commons ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Brain

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.當今社會， 作為治療方式的器官移植手術(organ transplantation)已經相當普遍。然而，如果大腦作為器官的一種，並且在技術上成為可能，那麼我們如何透過大腦的提供者和接收者的關係去界定人格同一性的問題？我們又如何在傳統的同一性的概念上去解釋道德責任的歸屬呢？本文主要探討大腦移植手術對於人格同一性判準的挑戰與可能的回應。筆者認為，西方傳統以來在探討關於人格同一性的概念時，多從生物層次的個體以及心理層次的自我來思考問題，並沒有跳脫個人的視角。文章試圖從儒家思想對人格同一性問題，探討跳脫西方既有的將人化約的思維脈絡來重新思考人格同一性判準。Organ transplantation is now accepted as a common medical treatment. However, the potential for the transplantation of the brain, like any other organ, to become technically feasible gives rise to a series of ethical issues. This essay focuses on the challenges to the criteria for personal identity created by medical technology. Does transplantation preserve the integrity of personal identity? If not, how can we define moral accountability? The essay attempts to show that the traditional definition of personal identity in the West is both biologically and psychologically reductive, as it fails to deal with the issue of the preservation of personal identity in the case of brain transplants. The author argues for an alternative way (via the Confucian understanding of the person and relationality, for example) of responding to the new ethical challenges associated with brain transplantation.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 301 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Ethnic Identity and Personal Identity.

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 30 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Personal Identity
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