and connectedness must apply. These conditions are not met in teletransportation. So if identity is what matters in survival it would seem the teletransportation case would hold little interest for us. The simple fact is, the person who walks out of the teletransporter is not the same as the person who walked in. But I would contend that, on the contrary, there is plenty to interest us in the case. Let us imagine that Star Trek is not a work of fiction but an accurate representation of what is going on in outer space. The Starship Enterprise returns to earth and the crew members go to be reunited with their families. But they are stopped by law enforcers who tell them that, since they have been away, philosophers have shown that the teletransporter they have been using destroys personal identity. Therefore, the crew of the ship is not the same as the crew that left earth previously. They are not biologically related to the families they thought they had and the high court has ruled that they have no claims on the property of the original crew. Doubtless the crew would be stunned. From their point of view such a declaration would be absurd. And it is also hard to believe that the families, no matter how intellectually convinced by philosophers, would find it hard not to think of these people as their relatives returning from space. The crew would doubtless conclude that, no matter what lack of formal identity there is between them and the original crew, everything that matters in ordinary survival was present within them and that they have the right to be treated in the same way as those original people.
Who is right? By the end of this thesis perhaps we will be in a position to tell. But there is certainly nothing in the fact of non-identity which automatically dispels the puzzling issues surrounding teletransportation. The reason for this is that we have not been offered any reasons why identity should be all that matters. The problem is that it has been assumed too easily that by solving the problem of personal identity we will have found out what matters about our futures. What this science fiction case shows is that we can think of the identity issue as being solved without giving us all the answers. What if I discovered that
I was the result of such a process? Does this mean that I must think of ‘my’ family and ‘my’ past differently to others? The fact of non-identity does nothing to eliminate a posteriori the fundamental questions that would face those who
underwent, or knew someone who underwent, the teletransportation process. These questions about what matters about being a person and what matters in survival, which I put in section one, still apply. Identity may play a role in the answers, but it is not our starting point. Insistence that identity must be what matters fails to explain why teletransportation seems so problematic.
My argument could be criticised for being emotive. But in this case, we cannot detach the emotive elements in the issue, because the issue concerns what matters for us in survival. If it was identity that mattered, then the fact of non-identity should make us view teletransportation as death. But when we know all the facts, the issue is not so clear cut. So it is hard to see why identity could be all that matters. Again, it may well be part of what matters, but all that means is that it is one factor amongst others and is not in itself the key focus of our study.
5 .C o nclusion.
In this chapter I spent some time outlining some of our concerns in the personal identity debate and what it means for something to be identical over time. Once I did this, I discussed two cases. In the fission case, in deciding which perdurer should count as a person, or whether there is a single endurer before and after fission, we were forced to question more deeply whether we were right to assume our continued existence depends on a single person continuing to exist. In teletransportation, identity was a clear cut matter, where what matters for us, as persons, was not. What do these cases together show? It shows that identity cannot be assumed to be the crucial factor when we consider our futures. My approach does share some common features with Parfit. In particular. Parfit claimed that the fact that there are cases where
questions of identity are empty - which is to say that there are cases where there is no determinate answer to the question, “does X at = Y at tz?" - supports the view that identity is not always what is important about our continued existence. My approach differs in two ways. Firstly, because I have argued that the factual question of identity can be distinguished from the first personal question of survival, the former question does not arise only when questions of identity cannot be solved, but rather as a question worth answering in its own right. Secondly, I have argued that even when there is a determinate answer to the question of identity, which I believe there is in the teletransportation case, important questions concerning our first personal view of survival are not necessarily also answered. So even if there could be some way, in the fission case, of resolving the identity issue, there is no reason to believe that this would resolve what is important when we consider ourselves in the fission situation. To sum up, Parfit’s arguments rely heavily on the supposed indeterminacy of identity. My arguments, however, rely not so much on the indeterminacy of identity, but on the logical distinctness of the factual question of identity and the first personal question of survival.
This conclusion has important consequences for how we approach the philosophical issue of persons. Personal identity may well turn out to be something that is very important and is certainly a distinct area of study. But we cannot simply assume that all of what we refer to as “the question of personal identity" is primarily concerned with identity at all. Parfit concluded that personal identity was not what mattered. In my view, what we should be trying to clarify is to what questions identity is relevant and to which questions other factors, such as survival, are relevant. The debate which started with Locke must not just be slavishly continued. We must distinguish the different questions and decide which are relevant to our particular concerns.
As my concern is with the first person question of survival, the relevance requirement can be stated thus: Any account of personal identity which solves
the factual question of identity but not the first personal question of survival falls to meet the relevance requirement. This Is not to say that the Identity question Is not Important. But as I claimed In section 3, from our point of view as persons ourselves, the Identity question does not appear to be In Itself the most Important one. Unlike the Klerkegaardlan requirement, the relevance requirement will be used throughout this thesis as well as at the end to assess the final position reached.
Chapter Three
Persons and Thought Experiments
In the previous chapter I introduced some examples from Derek Parfit’s
Reasons and Persons. As I indicated in the introduction, this thesis is to a large extent a critical development of Parfit’s work. Before we look at any of the details of his arguments, we have to consider his general approach to the subject, which several philosophers have found objectionable. They have done so primarily for two reasons. The first is his reliance on the concept of ‘person’. What kind of sortal term is this supposed to be? Does it refer to a natural kind, for example? The second is the importance of thought experiments to his arguments. We have already been introduced to the ideas of fission and teletransportation in chapter two. But how much can we infer from these fantastic science fiction stories? Several writers have wanted to deny the validity of both features of Parfit’s approach and many, notably Johnston, Wilkes, Williams and RobinsonT have seen the two ‘errors’ as being somehow related. Their unease can by summed up in the idea that fanciful thought experiments about ill-defined ‘persons’ lead us too far away from what we actually are and how we actually do continue to exist. Thus the critique can be seen as an attempt to make the philosophy of persons less speculative and more empirical. In particular, they recommend ditching ‘person’ in favour of a more naturalistic sortal such as ‘human being’.
In this chapter I defend the Parfitian approach against such objections. With such a growing body of criticism directed at these foundations, it is necessary to check if they are sound. First, I describe the thought experiments that feature most prominently in the remainder of this thesis. At this stage I do not draw any conclusions from them, as our present concern is the validity of using them in argument at all, not what conclusions they are taken to support. Then I consider