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.

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’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.

Psychological Connectedness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Strawson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Transitive Relation ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Fine Grained

This chapter examines John Locke's notion of psychological connectedness. It suggests that Locke is interested in the (nontransitive) relation of psychological connectedness, and not interested in the (transitive) relation of memory-link-based psychological continuity that has drawn the attention of many of the “neo-Lockeans.” It also suggests the psychological connectedness that matters to Locke is narrower—more fine-grained—than psychological connectedness as ordinarily understood; and this is not simply because consciousness is not the same as memory. The chapter concludes by considering Locke's theory of personal identity as a theory of moral responsibility—given the assumption that the notion of moral responsibility is a coherent one at all.

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.

CEO and CFO Equity Incentives and the Pricing of Audit Services

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Anthony Billings ◽  
Xinghua Gao ◽  
Yonghong Jia
Keyword(s):  
Positive Association ◽  
Audit Fees ◽  
Internal Controls ◽  
Audit Risk ◽  
Pricing Decisions ◽  
Equity Incentives ◽  
Accounting Scandals ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Distinctive Role

SUMMARY: The alleged perverse role of managerial incentives in accounting scandals, and the distinctive role of auditors in identifying and intervening in attempted earnings manipulation, highlight the importance of explicitly considering executive incentive plans by auditors in the auditing process. By empirically testing auditors' responses to CEO/CFO equity incentives in planning and pricing decisions using data from 2002 through 2009, we document compelling evidence that CFO equity incentives are positively associated with audit fees and CEO equity incentives are not statistically related to audit fees, suggesting that auditors perceive heightened audit risk associated with CFO equity incentives. Our further analyses reveal that the positive association between CFO equity incentives and audit fees is more pronounced in firms with weak internal controls, indicating heightened risk associated with CFO equity incentives in this setting perceived by auditors. JEL Classifications: G30, G34, M42, M52.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
The Right

This chapter lays out the book’s central question: Assuming agency reductionism—that is, the thesis that the causal role of the agent in all agential activities is reducible to the causal role of states and events involving the agent—is it possible to construct a defensible model of libertarianism? It is explained that most think the answer is negative and this is because they think libertarians must embrace some form of agent-causation in order to address the problems of luck and enhanced control. The thesis of the book is that these philosophers are mistaken: it is possible to construct a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within an agency reductionist framework that silences that central objections to libertarianism by simply taking the best compatibilist model of freedom and adding indeterminism in the right junctures of human agency. A brief summary of the chapters to follow is given.

Tongues of Fire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Farriss
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Indigenous Church ◽  
Cultural Gaps

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.

Spinoza’s Ethical Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Philosophical Naturalism ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good And Evil

This chapter analyzes Spinoza’s ethical theory in the context of his philosophical naturalism, his doctrine that the actual essence of each thing is its striving for self-preservation (conatus), and his psychology of the emotions as it concerns both “bondage to the passions” and the active emotions such as intellectual joy. It explains how Spinoza’s ethical precepts are expressed chiefly through demonstrated propositions about good and evil, virtue, the guidance of reason, and “the free man.” Particular attention is given to questions about (1) the meaning of ethical language, (2) the nature of the good, (3) the practicality of reason, (4) the role of virtuous character, (5) the requirements for freedom and moral responsibility (especially in light of his necessitarianism), and (6) the possibility and moral significance of altruism. The chapter concludes by briefly assessing the significance of Spinoza’s ethical theory and its place in the history of ethics.

How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892199807
Author(s):  
Jonathan Clifton ◽  
Fernando Fachin ◽  
François Cooren
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Communication ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Distributed Leadership ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Human Actors

To date there has been little work that uses fine-grained interactional analyses of the in situ doing of leadership to make visible the role of non-human as well as human actants in this process. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction as data, this study seeks to show how leadership is co-achieved by artefacts as an in-situ accomplishment. To do this we situate this study within recent work on distributed leadership and argue that it is not only distributed across human actors, but also across networks that include both human and non-human actors. Taking a discursive approach to leadership, we draw on Actor Network Theory and adopt a ventriloquial approach to sociomateriality as inspired by the Montreal School of organizational communication. Findings indicate that artefacts “do” leadership when a hybrid presence is made relevant to the interaction and when this presence provides authoritative grounds for influencing others to achieve the group’s goals.

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