Surviving matters : pluralism and the self

Abstract

The concept of personal identity or survival is intimately entwined with a whole host of our self- and other- directed beliefs, concerns, and practices. We naturally and habitually believe and judge certain people to be the same persons over time; identify and reidentify them; trust them; love them; punish them; are angry with them; care about them; attribute them certain ongoing rights and obligations; ascribe to ourselves and others actions, beliefs, intentions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions and physical traits; expect to remember directly our own experiences; have a special and intense interest in what befalls ourselves; feel remorse, embarrassment, guilt, regret, pride, shame; and so on almost ad infinitum. Call all these many self- and other-directed beliefs, concerns, attitudes, expectations and practices, our person-directed practices. For persons, and their continuing existence over time, are the object of all these beliefs, concerns, attitudes, expectations and practices. So all these many person-directed practices are organized around our concept of personal identity. And it is this special and distinctive role which the concept of personal identity plays in our social network and in our own concerns that would seem to mark it off from concepts like squareness, for example, which do not play this special kind of role in subjects' practices and concerns. As J.M. Shorter, for example, writes, Why is it important to determine the identity of a given person correctly? From this point of view the importance of the concept is obviously immense. Our views about how we ought (morally speaking and otherwise) to behave towards other people depend very largely upon who we think those people are. How I think it proper to treat the person before me depends upon whether that person is (the same person as) my old friend, my employer, my wife, the homicidal maniac who escaped from detention last week, my father, my mother, my son, the man who did me a good turn yesterday, the Prime Minister, the man who robbed the bank six months ago, and so on. There is, therefore, a close connexion between the way I treat people and the sentences containing personal identity expressions which I believe to express true propositions. For example if I think that "Smith is not the person who embezzled the funds" expresses a true proposition, I shall not think that Smith should be punished for embezzling the funds, for something he did not do. As long as I retain this connexion between my attitudes and the sentences to which I assent, any decision of a verbal character that I make in a puzzle case will involve the taking up of certain attitudes. If I decide to call A and B the same person I will not debar myself from blaming A for what B did. If I call them different people, then I shall be so debarred. Given how richly and intimately our concept of personal identity is bound up with our person-directed practices it's prima facie somewhat surprising that nearly all accounts of personal identity to date, and certainly all those which seem to have gained widespread currency, have appeared to assume that the concept of personal identity is in exactly the same conceptual boat as primary quality concepts like squareness: a concept which is only contingently associated with all these manifold person-directed beliefs, attitudes, concerns, expectations and practices; a concept which is wholly constituted by some or other independently determined set of facts served up by nature (or God) alone. They have been, what I will call, practice­ independent accounts of personal identity. In this thesis I set out to argue for a fundamentally different kind of account of personal identity-a practice-dependent account-according to which all these person-directed practices are not merely accidentally associated with the concept of personal identity, as practice-independent theorists have it, but are, in a crucial sense, constitutive of it. Survival, for any community, in any world, involves there holding among person-stages some relation around which the community in question organizes their person­ directed practices and concerns. This sort of view might initially strike some as unlikely. As Eli Hirsch writes, The ordinary distinction between "me" and "not-me", between that which does and that which does not lie within the boundaries of a single self, seems at least on first reflection completely inevitable. It is difficult even to understand the suggestion that this distinction might be arbitrary, or that it might legitimately be redrawn in some other way. Here, if anywhere, a "conventionalist" attitude is likely to strike us as intuitively incredible. However intuitively incredible at first sight it might seem to view personal identity as (like the identity of corporations, nations or artefacts) a conventional matter, by the end of this thesis, I hope, it will seem incredible to think that we might ever have thought otherwise. Of course, there are various explanations for why we might have thought otherwise. Perhaps we thought that our survival conditions were determined by God, the all­ powerful creator of all things, and so scarcely something which might be determined by the cares and concerns of mere mortals. Or perhaps we thought that nature played God's role as independent, all-powerful arbiter of when we live and die. Or perhaps we thought that something as important as the difference between life and death couldn't depend on something as apparently comparatively lightweight and dangerously contingent as the way in which a community happens to organize their person-directed practices. Or perhaps, as the vast majority of discussions about personal identity would suggest, we have assumed much, without really having paid much thought to the question of in virtue of what a relation earns its right to the name 'personal identity' at all. For, to date, discussion of the question of personal identity-the question of what makes a person identified at one time the numerically same person as a person identified at another-has focussed almost exclusively on the question of what relation it is to which the term 'personal identity' necessarily refers. To this one question, philosophers have offered a bewildering array of competing answers. Some insist that the privileged relation to which 'personal identity' necessarily refers is sameness of soul; others that it is some other irreducible, further fact; others that it is continuity of a person's brain and/or body; others that it is continuity of a person's psychology; and yet others that it is some or other subtle mixture of the above. And so, notoriously, the personal identity debate has raged on with philosophers designing more and more sophisticated puzzle cases designed to support their preferred answer to the question of what relation it is to which 'personal identity' necessarily refers, and engaging in more and more elaborate and desperate attempts to explain away the appeal of other competing accounts. Show more