Locke’s Underlying Background Beliefs

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

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.

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

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.

Locke and his Early Critics and Defenders: Metaphysical and Epistemic Differences

Many of Locke’s early critics reject Locke’s account of persons and personal identity on metaphysical and/or religious grounds. This chapter focuses on a selection of these objections and thereby reveals metaphysical, religious, and epistemic differences between Locke’s view and the views of his early critics and defenders. It pays particular attention to two debates that led several critics to reject Locke’s thinking about persons and personal identity, but also prompted others to defend his view, namely debates whether the soul always thinks and debates whether matter can think. With respect to each debate the aim of the chapter is to identify factors why Locke’s early critics endorse metaphysical and epistemic views that differ from Locke’s view and how this leads them to reject Locke’s thinking about persons and personal identity.

Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines Locke’s innovative contributions to debates about persons and personal identity. His view builds, first, on moral and legal conceptions of a person, which can be found in natural law theory, second, on metaphysical debates about individuation and identity, and, third, on metaphysical and religious debates about the afterlife and the state of the soul between death and resurrection. The chapter shows that he not only builds on these debates, but also how he systematically brings the different debates together in new ways and how his distinction between the ideas of person, man, and substance makes it possible to advance the debates of his day. Moreover, this chapter presents the aims and scope of the book and offers a summary of the subsequent chapters.

Personal Identity, Transitivity, and Divine Justice

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.

Concluding Remarks

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....

Circularity and Insufficiency Worries

This chapter addresses circularity and insufficiency worries that have been raised against Locke’s same consciousness account of personal identity. The chapter distinguishes different versions of circularity problems and shows that Locke has resources to respond to Joseph Butler’s circularity objection. The more pressing worry concerns the question of whether sameness of consciousness is sufficient for personal identity, which is the so-called insufficiency worry. A response to this question calls for an examination of whether sameness of consciousness can ontologically ground personal identity. The chapter proposes that Locke has resources to accept, on the basis of probable reasoning, that same consciousness that has a metaphysical foundation that most likely has relational structure. The advantage of this reading is that it brings to light that he not merely criticizes substance accounts of identity, but also that he has the resources to develop a plausible—though probable—alternative that avoids circularity and insufficiency.

Moral Personhood and Personal Identity

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.

Problems with Other Interpretations of Locke’s Account of Identity

This chapter contrasts the kind-dependent interpretation with other interpretations that have dominated the secondary literature on Locke’s account of identity and aims to offer further support for why his approach to questions of identity is best interpreted as kind-dependent. It shows that alternative interpretations are often based on metaphysical assumptions that Locke would be reluctant to endorse. The chapter pays particularly close attention to disputes between defenders of coincidence and Relative Identity interpretations of Locke. The disputes are commonly traced back to a disagreement about the question of how many things exist at a particular spatiotemporal location. Rather than siding with one position, the author’s strategy is to identify problems that arise for both types of interpretations, and to show how the kind-dependent interpretation avoids them. Moreover, she argues that other interpretive options such as four-dimensionalism or mode interpretations are also based on questionable metaphysical assumptions.