Abstract
In this paper we argue that reflection on the patterns of practical concern that agents like us exhibit strongly suggests that the same person relation comes in continuous degrees rather than being an all or nothing matter. We call this the SP-degree thesis. Though the SP-degree thesis is consistent with a range of views about personal-identity, we argue that combining desire-first approaches to personal-identity with the SP-degree thesis better explains our patterns of practical concern, and hence gives us reason to endorse such an approach. We then argue that the combination of the SP-degree thesis and the desire-first approach are best modelled by a stage-theoretic view of persistence according to which temporal counterpart relations are non-symmetric relations that come in continuous degrees. Ultimately, we think that the overall appeal of this package of views provides reason to accept the package: reasons that outstrip the reasons we have to endorse any particular member of the package.
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Notes
Since the personal-identity relation comes with a various different kinds of metaphysical baggage attached, depending on your particular perspective, we’ve introduced the SP-relation in order to target the relation that we have in mind.
Note that some worm theorists take the view that personal-identity claims are numerical identity relations. According to them, the relation holds between the worm and itself. So if I see Martha at t1 I see the whole of Martha (via visual connection to a part of her, which is how we usually see wholes) and when I see Martha at t2 I see the same (numerically identical) worm, this time via visual contact with a different part of her. In this case the personal-identity relation does not hold between the person-stages, but between the worm and itself seen via contact with different stages. This way of organising talk is not metaphysically distinct, we take it, from talk of a “same-person relation” which holds between the t1 stage and the t2 stage in virtue of them both being temporal parts of the same worm, where that worm is a person.
Though we use the term ‘phase’ in this context, we don’t intend the sort of heavy-duty notion that Johnston (1989) introduces by his talk of phase sortals, or crypto phase sortals, etc.
This is Parfit’s view (1984, p. 206).
Of course, worm theorists allow that there can be some vagueness around the edges, but that is quite different to the claim we make, that the SP-relation itself comes in continuous degrees.
Again, ordinary vagueness aside.
For instance, Parfit (1984, pp. 206–207) thinks that there needs to be enough overlapping chains of direct psychological connectedness in order for there to be psychological continuity, and there being psychological continuity is what there being an SP-relation consists in.
A referee has pointed out that this process looks a lot like one described in the cyberpunk novel, Altered Carbon, (later turned into a TV series). These new bodies are called sleeves, and when a body is killed people are ‘re-sleeved’. As the referee helpfully notes, people reading the book or watching the show seem to have no problem in seeing that people survive by firs having their consciousness copied, and then later being re-sleeved.
With thanks to an anonymous referee (who did not frame this as an objection, so we have taken some liberties here).
With thanks to Gideon Rosen who made this objection.
We have plans to do this, but as yet we have no empirical results that we can share here.
Examples of desire-first accounts include White (1989), West (1996), Braddon-Mitchell and West 2001, Braddon-Mitchell and Miller (2004), Miller (2009), and Johnston (1989). Views of this kind have also been gestured towards in Nozick (1981, p. 69), Unger (1990, p. 66) and Whiting (1986). See also Shoemaker (2003) for a related view according to which “our identity as functioning, well-developed agents is constituted by our nexus of cares.” Eklund (2004) calls views of this kind self-concern relativism. Kovacs (2016, 2019) develops a view that is not metaphysics-first, but neither is it desire first: instead it is best thought of as first-person-thought-first.
We noted earlier that a relation counts as a CPC only if a person-phase could organise its conative attitudes of extension and origin around that relation under conditions of full rationality and relevant knowledge. What does this mean, and why does it matter? To some extent we want to remain neutral on exactly the right way to spell out this constraint. What is important is that it does not follow that if a person-phase, P, has primitive attitudes of anticipation towards a relation R, and some future inanimate object-phase, O, is R-related to P, then P is SP-related to O. For it might be that under conditions of relevant knowledge and rationality P could not organise it’s conative attitudes around R.
For instance, one might hold that for any future object-phase, O, that lacks mental states, P cannot, given relevant knowledge and rationality, anticipate the experiences of O, and hence P cannot organise its (relevant) conative attitudes around any relation R that connects P and O. Hence no such R is a CPC.
If so, no person-phase can bear a CPC to some future phase of a rubbish bin or a car, something we take to be a desirable outcome. Likewise though, no person-phase can bear a CPC to some future phase of a human being in a persistent vegetative state, or to a human corpse. If that is so, then CPCs do not include relations of bodily continuity, since such relations can obtain between phases at least one of which lacks mental states.
One need not, however, accept a claim this strong. One might hold that in conditions of full rationality and relevant knowledge, P cannot organise its conative attitudes around some relation R that connect P with an inanimate object that not only lacks mentality, but does so essentially, or at least, does so in all close worlds. Nevertheless, one could allow that under such conditions P can organise its conative attitudes around a relation R that connect P with a object which in fact lacks mentality, but where in close worlds that object has mentality (such as a human being in a vegetative state). There are various options here; the point is simply that SP-relatedness between P and P* does not straightforwardly follow from the attitudes that P (and P*) happen to have in conditions of ignorance of non-ideal rationality.
On some accounts of belief one might suppose that there is tacit belief recoverable from Freddie’s behavioural profile. But that profile is consistent either with a story about desires, such as the one we provide, or tacit beliefs about theoretical entities coupled with desires for the theoretical entities, such as the one provided by the metaphysics-first approach. Whether this is a sharp distinction, and if it is which view it favours, is an issue we do not have space for here. Suffice for now to say that the desire story is more theoretically economical.
Braddon-Mitchell and West (2001) and Sider (forthcoming) also argue for views with this feature.
There is a complication here. We have not discussed whether SP-relations hold only between neighbouring temporal stages (in which case they might hold in a derived way via the ancestral of the SP-relation) or directly between stages even where there are intermediate stages. The former view requires person-stages to be non-densely ordered, so there is a next stage. The latter view appears to create a prima facie problem for the fastenation view as it is most naturally understood as a relation between neighbouring stages. But the idea of fastenation could be extended to include direct relations between a stage and every other stage in the worm. Relatedly we have not discussed whether there is a unique pair of SP-relations that hold between two stages, or whether there is a potentially different relation from the perspective of a different third stage as a context of assessment. Many interesting first order questions hang on this choice, but sadly there is no space to discuss them here.
By analogy with Lewis’ view about mereological fusion.
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Acknowledgements
With thanks to Gideon Rosen, Alexis Burgess, David Kovacs, and audiences at the NUS and the University of Sydney.
Funding
Funding was provided by Australian Research Council (Grant Nos. FT170100262 and DP180100105).
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Braddon-Mitchell, D., Miller, K. Surviving, to some degree. Philos Stud 177, 3805–3831 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01410-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01410-0