Kevin Tobia on how our intuitions about personal identity reflect moral norms

Tobia, Kevin

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Gauging Personal IdentityKevin Tobia on how our intuitions about personal identity reﬂect moral normsPhilosophers have long contemplated what conditions are required to maintain personal identityover time. Some have argued that identity over time might be broken by large and extremechanges, such as permanent and total memory loss or radical personality change. Consider avignette based on the well-known story of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth-century railroad worker:Phineas is extremely kind; he really enjoys helping people. He is also employed as a railroadworker. One day at work, a railroad explosion causes a large iron spike to ﬂy out and into hishead, and he is immediately taken for emergency surgery. The doctors manage to remove theiron spike and their patient is fortunate to survive. However, in some ways this man after theaccident is remarkably different from Phineas before the accident. Phineas before the accidentwas extremely kind and enjoyed helping people, but the man after the accident is nowextremely cruel; he even enjoys harming people.As the story famously goes, Phineas’s friends and family saw the man after the accident as ‘nolonger Gage’. Though aspects of the historical account are contested, the story is often told asrevealing that extreme changes seem to disrupt identity.However, in the historical case, the accident involves not just a large change, but speciﬁcally adeterioration: the man after the accident is seen as worse than Phineas before the accident. Thetypical Phineas Gage interpretation is that the magnitude of a big change disrupts identity. Butmight this other feature, the direction of change (‘improvement’ or ‘deterioration’), be partlyresponsible for judgements about identity?To test this suspicion, I conducted a short experimental philosophy study. Participants saw either a‘deterioration scenario’ (the example above), or the following ‘improvement scenario’, in which acomparably large change results in an improvement:Phineas is extremely cruel; he really enjoys harming people. He is also employed as a railroadworker. One day at work, a railroad explosion causes a large iron spike to ﬂy out and into hishead, and he is immediately taken for emergency surgery. The doctors manage to remove theiron spike and their patient is fortunate to survive. However, in some ways this man after theaccident is remarkably different from Phineas before the accident. Phineas before the accidentwas extremely cruel and enjoyed harming people, but the man after the accident is nowextremely kind; he even enjoys helping people.Participants evaluated whether the (improved or deteriorated) man after the accident is stillPhineas Gage. Compared to those participants who saw the classic ‘deterioration’ story, those whoread about Phineas improving were more inclined to see him as still the same person. This revealsthat big changes don’t affect perceived identity equally; instead, how we see identity depends onthe particular direction of change.(For those who are interested, the exact ‘numerical identity’ question participants were asked is thefollowing: ‘Art and Bart disagree over what happened in this story. Art thinks that Phineas beforethe accident and the man after the accident are different in some respects but are still the sameperson. To Art, it seems like one person (Phineas) experienced some changes. Bart disagrees. Hethinks that after the accident, the original man named Phineas does not exist anymore; the manafter the accident is a different person. To Bart, it seems like one person died (Phineas before theaccident), and it is really a different person entirely that exists after the accident (the man after theaccident).’)The same effect arises when considering Parﬁt’s famous Russian Nobleman case. Consider avignette of Parﬁt’s original thought experiment:In several years, a young Russian will inherit vast estates. Because he has socialist ideals, heintends, now, to give the land to the peasants. But he knows that in time his ideals may fade.To guard against this possibility, he does two things. He ﬁrst signs a legal document, which willautomatically give away the land, and which can be revoked only with his wife’s consent. Hethen says to his wife, ‘Promise me that, if I ever change my mind, and ask you to revoke thisdocument, you will not consent’. He adds, ‘I regard my ideals as essential to me. If I lose theseideals, I want you to think that I cease to exist. I want you to regard your husband then, not asme, the man who asks you for this promise, but only as his corrupted later self. Promise methat you would not do what he asks.’Parﬁt suggests some might think of the older Russian as a different person from the youngerRussian, noting that[…] if this man’s wife made this promise, and he did in middle age ask her to revoke thedocument, she might plausibly regard herself as not released from her commitment. It mightseem to her as if she has obligations to two different people. She might believe that to do whather husband now asks would be a betrayal of the young man whom she loved and married.And she might regard what her husband now says as unable to acquit her of disloyalty to thisyoung man.Although Parﬁt does not himself claim the young and old Russian are numerically non-identical,his Russian Nobleman case is a seminal thought experiment sometimes cited as evidence for theview that major dissimilarities appear to break personal identity. However, this judgement mightalso gain its force from a Phineas Gage effect, as the change described may be seen as not only abig change, but speciﬁcally a deterioration.To test this, I ran a second experiment. Participants read either the original Russian NoblemanCase as above, which is a ‘deterioration case’, or a slightly revised ‘improvement’ case:In several years, a young Russian will inherit vast estates. Because he has anti-socialistideals, he intends, now, to not give the land to the peasants. But he knows that in time hisideals may fade. To guard against this possibility, he does two things. He ﬁrst signs a legaldocument, which will automatically not give away the land, and which can be revoked onlywith his wife’s consent. He then says to his wife, ‘Promise me that, if I ever change my mind,and ask you to revoke this document, you will not consent’. He adds, ‘I regard my ideals asessential to me. If I lose these ideals, I want you to think that I cease to exist. I want you toregard your husband then, not as me, the man who asks you for this promise, but only as hiscorrupted later self. Promise me that you would not do what he asks.’Participants in the deterioration [improvement] condition were told about some changes that occurmany years later:Imagine this young man’s wife made this promise so the land would [not] go to the peasants.But years later, her husband, now the old Russian, asks her to revoke the document, so as tonot give [give] the land to the peasants.Compared with participants responding to Parﬁt’s original (deterioration) case, those responding tothe revised improvement condition agreed more strongly that the old Russian was the sameperson as the young Russian, free to release his wife from her promise.Further evidence that direction of change affects identity can be seen in popular examples. Take,for example, Star Trek’s ‘The Enemy Within’. A transporter malfunction splits a ship’s Captain Kirkinto two people, one with the properties of Kirk’s ‘negative side’, the other with the properties ofKirk’s ‘positive side’. Positive-Kirk and Negative-Kirk are both dissimilar from the original Captain,yet the ship’s crew refers to Positive-Kirk as ‘Captain Kirk’ and Negative-Kirk as ‘the impostor’.Improved Positive-Kirk is taken as identical and deteriorated Negative-Kirk as non-identical to theoriginal.Let’s take stock. There is a commonplace intuition about the classic (deterioration) Phineas Gagecase: it seems (at least to some) that post-accident Phineas is a different person from pre-accidentPhineas. The same is true of other cases like Parﬁt’s Russian Nobleman. And there is acommonplace explanation of these intuitions: a certain magnitude of dissimilarity disrupts personalidentity.The experiments and examples discussed here suggest that these classic thought experimentsare driven not only by the sheer magnitude of change, but also by the direction of change. Thistells us something about attributions of personal identity, but there still remains a philosophicalquestion of whether direction of change is actually relevant to the personal identity relation.There are interesting implications in either case. First, consider if direction of change is irrelevantto personal identity. In that case, the ﬁnding that direction of change impacts attributions of identityin these seminal thought experiments reveals that such attributions are produced, in part, by anirrelevant factor. This gives a reason to doubt the status of these commonly offered intuitions aboutseminal thought experiments.Now consider the other case: we deem direction of change as relevant to personal identity. Onechallenge for this view is to make sense of some seemingly plausible ways in which thedeteriorated individuals still seems to be the same person as the earlier individuals in thevignettes. For example, even if the post-accident man is no longer Phineas, it does seem that he isstill the son of pre-accident Gage’s mother, that he owns the same house, and that he owes thesame taxes. Perhaps someone accepting that the post-accident man is not Phineas might justreject these other judgements; we should conclude from that fact of non-identity that these otherintuitions are false. Alternatively, one might allow that certain relations or properties come apartfrom numerical identity. Perhaps (for example) the post-accident man is non-identical to pre-accident Phineas in some sense, but they are identical to each other in another sense relevant totax obligations and property ownership. The old Nobleman might be non-identical to the youngNobleman in the sense that he cannot release his wife from her promise, yet he does seemidentical to him in the sense that his wife is still his wife.Monday, 9 May 2016Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!Related PostsPersonal identity is often taken as a foundation upon which to apply moral and legal notions likeresponsibility, desert, and blame, but these results suggest the relationship between personalidentity and normative notions may be more complex. Personal identity and normativity do shareimportant relations, but these do not ﬂow purely from the foundations of personal identity tonormative conclusions: normative considerations exert inﬂuence from the start.Kevin Tobia is a joint doctoral student at Yale University, working in both philosophy and law. Thispost is based on his paper ‘Personal Identity and the Phineas Gage Effect’, published in Analysis.His research is in philosophy, psychology, and law, especially matters of personal identity, emotion,and expertise.Image credit: Henrietta Harris, ‘Makes Sense‘Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Gauging personal identity

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