Grounding Personal Persistence

Modal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s possibly being F with its having a counterpart that is F at another possible world; temporal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s having been F or going to be F, with its having a counterpart that is F at another time. Benovsky, J. 2015. “Alethic Modalities, Temporal Modalities, and Representation.” Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 29: 18–34 in this journal endorses modal counterpart theory but holds that temporal counterpart theory is untenable because it does not license the ascription of the intuitively correct temporal properties to ordinary objects, and hence that we should understand ordinary objects, including persons, as transtemporal ‘worms’. I argue that the worm theory is problematic when it comes to accounting for what matters in survival and that temporal counterpart theory provides a plausible account of personal persistence.

What Matters in Survival

This work is about what matters in survival, that is, about what relation to a future individual gives you a reason for prudential concern for that individual. For common sense there is such a relation and it is identity, but according to Parfit, common sense is wrong in this respect. Identity is not what matters in survival. In this work, it is argued that this Parfitian thesis, revolutionary though it is, does not go far enough. The result is the highly radical view, “Survival Nihilism,” according to which nothing matters in survival. Although we generally have motivating reasons to have prudential concern, and perhaps even indirect normative reasons for such concerns—such as a commitment to find a vaccine for the Covid-19 virus—there is no relation that gives you a basic, foundational normative reason for prudential concern. This view goes beyond what Parfit calls the Extreme View. It is the More Extreme View, and is, in effect, something like an error theory about prudential reason as a special kind of normative reason.

Fission and Indeterminacy

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.

Introduction

In the Introduction, the main questions and line of argument of this work are outlined. A summary of the critical part of this work is presented, the focus of which is on improving upon Parfit’s “Divergence Argument” for the thesis that identity is not what matters in survival, but showing that this argument still fails. Second, the positive argument of this work, the “triviality argument,” is outlined. This argument appeals to the idea that the important cannot depend on the trivial. According this argument, identity never matters in survival but neither does any other relation. The result is what I call “survival nihilism.”

The Non-Triviality Principle and Objections to Its Application

In Chapter 6, six objections to the application of the Non-Triviality Principle in the triviality argument are examined. According to the first objection, the Non-Triviality Principle does not apply to the kind of facts referenced in the triviality argument. According to the second and third objections, the triviality argument depends on what are claimed to be false assumptions about causation—respectively, that causation comes in degrees and that probabilistic causation implies that causation is scalar. The fourth objection is that the relation that matters varies in strength with the strength of the causal connection, but the triviality argument wrongly assumes otherwise. The fifth objection is that the triviality argument works only if reasons externalism is true, but reasons internalism is true. The sixth objection is that the triviality argument fails if particularism or brutalism applies to what matters in survival. None of these objections, it is argued, hit their targets.