Abstract
Jeff McMahan's impressive recent defence of the embodied mind theory of personal identity in his highly acclaimed work The Ethics of Killing has undoubtedly reawakened belief that physical continuity is a necessary component of the relation that matters in our self-interested concern for the future. My aim in this paper is to resist this belief in a somewhat roundabout way. I want to address this belief in a somewhat roundabout way by revisiting a classic defence of the belief that enormous changes in the contents of a person's psychology does not preclude justified fear of future pain. I have in mind Bernard Williams' The Self and the Future (1970) in which he argues, against the psychological view, that physical continuity is necessary for survival. I examine Williams' second thought experiment which ostensibly supports that intuition and afterwards defend two related claims. First, I argue that a close examination of the second thought experiment reveals that one's prior commitments to a particular criterion of personal identity can influence one's response to that thought experiment. Second, I argue that Williams' second thought experiment is set out in questionbegging terms. I do not claim, however, that the intuition under consideration lacks justification; I only claim that Williams' second thought experiment does not provide the needed support.
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Notes
Williams employs the term “physical continuity” to characterize the belief I am here addressing. In faithfulness to that text, I wish to retain the use of the term. Throughout, however, I shall be using the term “physical continuity” to refer to physical and functional continuity of the brain by which I mean the continuity of those regions of the brain that support and sustains the capacity for consciousness. Strictly speaking then this view is a minimal psychological criterion of personal identity insofar as it allows that the continuity of various psychological capacities is part of the relation necessary for survival. It is in contrast with a version of psychological criterion that allows for the continuity of the contents of psychology as well. For the purpose of this discussion, I follow Williams in describing this contents-based view as the “psychological view”. I am grateful to an anonymous referee of Philosophia for impressing upon me the need to clarify the use of these terms.
Although Williams claims that the thought experiments are the same, the question of whether they are relevantly similar is itself controversial. I shall return to it later.
Williams’ preference for the second description has been analyzed and rejected by Beck (1998) and Noonan (1989, 2003) for different reasons. I shall argue with them that the second thought experiment, which ostensibly supports the physical as I characterize it here, is flawed. In particular, I claim that its description of the scenario it portrays is question-begging.
The operative concept here is similar to the notion of “assimilation” employed by Unger “Identity, Consciousness and Value” (1990) in articulating the notion of physical continuity. The idea requires that the replacement parts coexist with the old parts for some time and contribute to the process of supporting mental life. See also, Unger, P. (1992). For other proponents of the view of identity that relies heavily on physical continuity see McMahan (2002), Unger (1990) and Noonan (2003).
Locke (1694) discusses a classical example of a thought experiment in which the soul of a prince enters and animates the body of a cobbler. According to Locke, we should expect that the person in the cobbler’s body is the prince having all of his memories, thoughts and beliefs. Most of us will intuitively interpret the scenario as an instance of body swap. The possibility of persons exchanging bodies in the manner suggested undermines in no small way the importance of physical continuity to our identity.
By “memories” I have in mind memories as well as all the other contents of A’s psychology (same goes for person B). At the end of the process, there are two persons that emerge: one that has a functioning brain continuous with A’s and another whose distinctive mental contents are continuous with A’s (again same goes for B). Although, in the latter case there is no continuity of the same functioning brain, we could still suppose that the relevant features of psychology are realized in the normal way by a brain.
The principle holds that if x is R-related to y and y is R-related to z, then x must be R-related to z (see Noonan (2003). Here, it implies that A-body person and B-body person are identical, which is outright false—one person cannot be two. The condition of uniqueness, the requirement that there is a sole inheritor of one’s psychology, is crucial given considerations the continuity referred to here could take a branching form as in Parfit’s much debated My Division scenario (1984) 254–255. Thus the uniqueness clause ensures that there is no other person Z who bears a similar relation to X as Y. As such, it ensures that the criterion captures the logic of identity.
This momentary assumption has to be made here because, I think, the debate between non-reductionism and reductionism on personal identity falls outside the immediate concern of this chapter and, in fact, is not part of Williams’ concern here. Even so, the view itself is hard to defend (See Parfit 1984).
Bernard Williams (1970: 167–168).
The inclusion of Noonan’s argument here is only to show one way of objecting to the success of Williams’ second experiment in the literature. I agree with him that that thought experiment fails without necessarily endorsing the very same argument he launches against it. For arguments against the success of Noonan’s case, see Beck (1998).
Engaging with this issue in depth will lead me to discuss some of the tensions between reductionists and non-reductionists commitments, which is outside the immediate scope of this paper. Parfit labels his view a reductionist view, according to which facts about persons and personal identity consist in the holding of more particular facts concerning brains, bodies, and series of interrelated mental and physical events. For a detailed discussion of the differences between reductionism and non-reductionism about personal identity and the problems of non-reductionism see Parfit (1984, see especially 210–211).
Williams suggests that the first thought-experiment is artificially described to allow easy description as a body-swap. It is artificial since it ignores other possible scenarios such as that in step v in the second experiment, where there are two survivors with B’s psychology. This may indeed offer a new problem for a psychological view, but it does nothing to prevent the described scenario from being a fatal counter-example to the alternative to the psychological view, the physical view. As a result I do not need to discuss his argument here. Whether the problem of reduplication is fatal to the psychological view has been well discussed elsewhere (See Parfit 1984).
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Oyowe, O.A. Physical Continuity, Self and the Future. Philosophia 41, 257–269 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9370-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9370-9