PLANEACIÓN DETERMINACIÓN DE NECESIDADES Y ELABORACIÓN DE PROGRAMAS

In the section above (2.1.b), I identified several distinct, yet interrelated concerns, raised by questions about personal identity. Rorty and Schechtman distinguish these questions within the context of 20th Century debates in personal identity dominated by the Anglo-American analytic approach, which adopts a metaphysical approach to the questions of identity, sometimes called the “standard picture”. This approach takes the question of identity to concern the numerical persistence of objects—how a single entity persists through change. Personal identity is framed as the more specific question of how a person persists through change. As Schechtman writes:

Contemporary philosophers of personal identity in the analytic tradition place their concern about personal identity within the context of more general worries about the identity conditions of changing objects over time—the ship of Theseus is replaced plank by plank, the acorn becomes a mighty oak, and persons change both physically and psychologically. The general problem then is the metaphysical question of how a single entity persists through change. The more specific

question is the question of how a single person does.91

As Schechtman explains, this metaphysical understanding frames the reidentification question which aims to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for identity, such that we can say what it is that makes someone the same person at two separate times. Schechtman identifies these claims as follows:

Put most simply, the goal of contemporary personal identity theorists is to provide a criterion of personal identity over time. … Their question is metaphysical, not epistemological; they want to tell us not just how we know when we have one and the same person at two different times, but what makes someone the same person at those two times.92

91 _{Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 7.}

92 _{Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 7-8. For an example of this view, see Parfit: ‘Many}

Schechtman offers a general description of ‘the reidentification theorists’ goal as that of providing a criterion of personal identity that defines the necessary and sufficient conditions for saying that a person-stage at t2 and a person-stage at t1 are stages of the same person’.93 _{Moreover, reidentification theorists take}

themselves to be addressing the fundamental problem of philosophical identity; if they are correct, then it is expected that their approach will capture all our basic intuitions about personal identity. This general approach, Schechtman argues, has lead to one of the most intractable debates in the literature - between those

arguing that personal identity consists in bodily continuity and those arguing that personal identity consists in psychological continuity. Bodily continuity theorists argue that personal identity should be defined in terms of the continuation of a single human body.

[B]odily continuity theorists hold that bodily continuity is a necessary and sufficient condition for continuity of personal identity, even despite radical psychological changes, for example, loss of memory or marked changes of personality and character. Thus person A at an earlier time t1 is the same as person B at a later time t2 if B is the same bodily continuant as A, by virtue of having enough of the same functioning brain and/or body or being the same human animal.94

Psychological continuity theorists argue that personal identity should be defined in terms of the continuation of a single psychological life, i.e. in terms of psychological connections between person-stages at different times.

[P]sychological continuity theorists hold that a person A at an earlier time t1 is the same as person B at a later time t2 by virtue of the right kinds of psychological connections holding between A and B, for example that B remembers doing or experiencing things that A did or experienced, acts on intentions formed by A, exhibits traits of character, personality and temperament that are sufficiently similar to those of A, and so on.95

Continuity theorists use thought experiments, which ask us to imagine, from a first- or third-personal point of view, radical physical or psychological changes to persons brought about via bizarre science-fiction technologies, in order to decide the appropriate criterion for personal identity. The thought experiments function as puzzle or exception cases to test our intuitions concerning whether it is bodily or psychological continuity. Normally we associate a person with one (and only

of telling whether some present object is identical with some past object’. But I shall mean what this identity necessarily involves, or consists in.’ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 202.

93 _{Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 12.}

94 _{Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” 3. Mackenzie cites Bernard Williams}

as an exemplar of bodily continuity theories, see: Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) and Eric Olson as a proponent of the animalist variant of this theory, see: Eric Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity with Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

95 _{Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” 3. Mackenzie includes the following}

as exemplars of the psychological continuity view: David Lewis “Survival and Identity,”

Philosophical Papers, Vol 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); John Perry, Personal Identity

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and, Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

one body); we think of people as human beings. Bodily continuity theorists take it that we are essentially human beings. However, psychological continuity theorists argue that whilst we normally associate people with their body, personal identity concerning our psychological continuity can come apart from human identity, and when this happens this shows that we are essentially persons. We can think of ourselves as human beings and as persons. Whilst we normally understand a person and a body go together, the thought experiments show how they can come apart. An early version of this argument is found in Locke’s mind swap thought experiment. The thought experiments used vary, however an original one can be found in Locke.96 _{Locke asks us to imagine the case where a Cobbler’s and} Prince’s minds are swapped - the mind of the Prince enters the body of the sleeping Cobbler whose own mind departs. According to Locke the individual who wakes up is the same human being as the Cobbler but a different person - the Prince.

For should the Soul of a Prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the Prince’s past Life, enter and inform the Body of a Cobbler as soon as deserted by his own Soul, everyone sees he would be the same Person with the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s Actions.97

On the psychological account, if your mind were transplanted into a new body, you would think of this as getting a new body rather than somebody else getting a new mind. So, identity goes with the mind in transplants. Our intuitions show that a single person can inhabit more than one body. Locke’s solution is to propose that personal identity tracks psychological continuity. On a biological account, he would remain the Cobbler as he is the same human being. So, identity goes with the body and not the mind in these thought experiments.

Schechtman acknowledges the intuitive appeal of both bodily and

psychological continuity approaches. In everyday practice, a person is identified with one and only one body; we observe people’s actions and behaviours and reidentify people by reidentifying them with their bodies, for example, we might look for a scar to identify the person with the human being/body before us.98 _The psychological continuity approach however, by focussing on psychological continuity, pays attention to psychological aspects of identity that we value, and the practices based around these, which become particularly salient in cases of advanced dementia, for example. Despite the intuitive appeal of both, Schechtman

96 _{Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch XXVII, 340. I recognise that}

Locke’s discussion takes place in the context of being held responsible at the Resurrection and so involves concern for who will be held responsible and to whom actions will be attributed. Whilst I will not be concerned with Resurrection per se, I will have more to say about Locke’s concerns with attribution, and how we should understand the relation between attribution and identity, below.

97 _{Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch XXVII, 340.} 98 _{Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 130.}

concludes however that both share a fundamental methodological problem which proves their efforts futile. Schechtman writes:

The goal contemporary reidentification theorists have set for themselves— providing a reidentification criterion for persons that captures the relation between identity and the four features—survival, moral responsibility, self- interested concern, and compensation—is incoherent and ultimately impossible to meet. This has led some reidentification theorists to conclude that the relation we assume in our daily commerce between identity and the four features is illusory. I have suggested that this conclusion is too hasty—no reidentification criterion can capture the four features, but that does not mean that there is no identity theory of any kind that can. The intuitive connection we make between identity and the four features can be vindicated and understood if we recognize that the question of personal identity is not monolithic, and that our intuitions linking identity to the four features arise not in the context of questions of reidentification, but rather in the context of questions of characterization.99

Schechtman argues that the reidentification project is incoherent because it tries to answer the characterisation question with reference to the reidentification question, but each has a different logical form and demands a different kind of answer. By addressing questions that are properly questions of characterisation, in terms of the criteria for reidentification, both biological and psychological

continuity approaches are unable to explain the continuity of identity. Focussing on psychological approaches Schechtman demonstrates that the well-known problems concerning transitivity and branching result from attempting to meet the constraints of the reidentification question.100 _{In contrast, Schechtman argues that} the solution is to understand that both questions speak to our intuitions about identity - the characterisation question addresses concerns about personal identity, the practical question, and the reidentification questions about human identity, the metaphysical question.101 _{My aim here has been to draw attention to Schechtman’s} claim that these questions have been conflated in the analytic literature using thought experiments, I will return to Schechtman’s analysis of this conflation in the following chapter, through her argument that questions of characterisation are best answered via a narrative approach to identity.

Mackenzie identifies four interconnecting assumptions underpinning much of the analytic debate on personal identity, concerning whether bodily continuity or psychological continuity is the correct criterion for continuity of personal

identity.102 _{These assumptions are:}

The first is that the relation between person A at t1 and person B at t2 is a logical relation of identity. The second is that our fundamental interest in continuity of personal identity over time is primarily an interest in continuity of numerical

99 _{Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 73.} 100 _{Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 26ff.}

101 _{Schechtman’s solution mobilises the distinction between human being and person, in a}

similar way to how Locke distinguishes between man or human as a biological category and person as a forensic or moral concept.

identity.103 _{The third is that the concept “person” is structured around a set of}

necessary and sufficient conditions that must obtain for its correct application. The fourth is the reductionist assumption that what makes for continuity of personal identity over time is the causal connections between distinct temporal parts or stages of the person and that these connections can be described without reference to the first-person perspective.104

As Mackenzie notes a number of theorists have questioned some or all of these assumptions. In what follows, I focus on the reductionist assumption and its conclusion that we can explain a person and the continuity of their life without reference to the first-personal perspective. I focus on reductionism because it is presented as the only methodological alternative to nonreductionism (understood as the idea that there is some non-material essence or soul that provides a person with continuous identity through change). Secondly, Parfit’s claim that numerical (of one’s body) identity is not essential to survival, gives us a way to critique his understanding of embodiment, which I do in section 2.3 drawing on Atkins’ account of practical identity.