Personal Identity

This is the third chapter of my book Transformation of the self, which covers Schleiermacher's reception of Kant on the problem of personal identity

Personal Identity

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity

Morality Grounds Personal Identity

There is a connection between moral facts and personal identity facts: morality grounds personal identity. If, for example, old Sally enters a teletransporter, and new Sally emerges, the fundamental question to ask is: is new Sally morally responsible for actions (and omissions) of old Sally? If the moral facts are such that she is morally responsible, then Sally persisted through the teletransporter event, and if not, Sally ceased to exist

Personal Identity, Numerical and Qualitative

In the analytic tradition, "the problem of personal identity" is usually taken to mean a question of numerical identity over time: what makes X at one time the same person as Y at another? But the title also fits a set of questions - at least as interesting - which concern what may be called qualitative identity. A person"s qualitative identity comprises his defining properties (DPs): these are properties that he must mention in a full answer to the question "Who am I?", taken in a special sense which can be discerned by contrast with the ordinary sense of the third-person "Who is X?" If you and I are watching a ceremony and I, pointing to one of the participants, ask "Who is she?", my purpose is likely to be to find out that person"s role in the ceremony: the question and the appropriate answer are relative to my purpose, which is set by the context. In the sense relevant to DPs, "Who am I?" is not thus relative to context and purpose: rather, in answering the question I identify properties of mine that determine my purposes. There is, however, no simple asymmetry between the first-person and the third-person questions; the third-person question can, although it rarely does, take this sense, and conversely the first-person question can be relative to purpose and context, as for example where roles in a game are being assigned and one of the players is unsure of his role. Nevertheless the special sense is more prominent in the first-person case

Personal Identity and What Matters

Identity is not what prudentially matters in survival (this is originally and most famously argued in Parfit 1984, 245-280). Consider the case of division. a is one of three identical triplets. In World 1 his equipollent cerebral hemispheres are removed from his head and each is inserted into the (suitably emptied) skull of one of his brothers, resulting in the existence of two persons, b and c. In World 2, only one of his hemispheres is transplanted (while the other is destroyed), resulting in the existence of b*. Note that, assuming the necessity and transitivity of identity, b* is identical to neither b nor c

A Dilemma for Personal Identity

Some theories of personal identity allow persons to lose their identities in processes of qualitative change, i.e., to become a numerically different person by getting new physical and/or psychological properties. I shall call these theories strong. Weak theories, in contrast, do not allow for such a loss of identity. In general, weak theories put less restrictions on personal identity than strong ones. I will argue that each type of theory faces a serious problem

Strong Evaluations and Personal Identity

Charles Taylor draws a distinction between weak and strong evaluations. They are two kinds of evaluative attitudes persons can have towards a variety of objects of evaluation. The possible objects can vary from individual desires, emotions and acts to whole ways of life. Strong evaluations are stable preferences based on qualitative distinctions concerning the worth of the options. Strong evaluations are responses to the non-instrumental value of the options, and they can be mistaken, because the value of the options is not based on the response. By contrast, what Taylor calls "weak evaluations" cannot be mistaken. Weak evaluations make any of their objects weakly valued. This means that strong evaluations are value-based, and weak evaluations desirebased preferences. Taylor also says that strong evaluations, unlike weak evaluations, are central to one's identity. One's identity is constituted through a strong adherence, a strong identification with and commitment to the values. Thus strong evaluations are stable preferences that are strongly adhered to, and which are based on strong values

Personal identity and the radiation argument

Sydney Shoemaker has argued that, because we can imagine a people who take themselves to survive a 'brain-state-transfer' procedure, cerebrum transplant, or the like, we ought to conclude that we could survive such a thing. I claim that the argument faces two objections, and can be defended only by depriving it any real interest

Memory and Personal Identity in Spinoza

Locke is often thought to have introduced the topic of personal identity into philosophy when, in the second edition of the Essay, he distinguished the person from both the human being and the soul. Each of these entities differs from the others with respect to their identity conditions, and so they must be ontologically distinct. In particular, Locke claimed, a person cannot survive total memory loss, although a human being or a soul can