Abstract
This chapter defends certain recent kinds of accounts of personal identity that I call non-traditionalist. These non-traditionalist accounts aim to make sense of resilient disagreements between disputants by appealing to certain features of language, the world, or our knowledge thereof, more familiarly found in the literature on vagueness. Recently, however, it has been argued that when we reflect on the nature of persons at, and across, time, we see that problems arise for two of the three standard accounts of vagueness, namely, for both semanticism and epistemicism. Though not intended as such, these arguments would, if successful, be equally powerful objections to many non-traditionalist accounts of personal identity. This chapter argues that these objections fail, both as objections to the standard accounts of vagueness and, therefore, as objections to non-traditionalist accounts of personal identity. Instead, it argues that non-traditionalist views are live contenders in the debate over personal identity and their consideration is suggestive of new ways of thinking about diachronic prudence. In particular, they offer independent support to the idea that the distribution of utility of person-stages, and not merely the sum of the utility of person-stages, matters to wellbeing.
With thanks to Sam Baron, David Braddon-Mitchell, Michael Duncan, Johann Harriman and James Norton for the helpful discussion of these issues.
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Notes
- 1.
Or, if you prefer, many of our ordinary predicates appear to be such that their extension is not a precise set of objects.
- 2.
A paradigm defender of which is Williamson (1994).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Olson (1997b) describes some such views as being relativist and offers a critique of views of this kind.
- 6.
See, for instance, Braddon-Mitchell and Miller (2004).
- 7.
See, for instance, Braddon-Mitchell and West (2001).
- 8.
- 9.
For discussion of the various kinds of conventionalism, see Miller (2009).
- 10.
A paradigm example of this is Sider (2001b).
- 11.
Where this is the case I will say that it is indeterminate whether P survives E at t. More generally, I will say that where ‘P’ is semantically imprecise such that there are candidates O1…O n that are equally eligible to be the referent of ‘P’, then the reference of ‘P’ is indeterminate. Moreover, if some, but not all, of the candidates have feature F, then I will say it is indeterminate whether P is F. It is determinate that P is F iff every candidate to be the referent of ‘P’ is F. One could embrace semantic indecision without also accepting these claims about indeterminacy and determinacy but nothing of import to the paper hangs on such a choice.
- 12.
To say that at most one of the parties to the dispute is correct is not, of course, to say that that party is in any position to know that they are correct.
- 13.
One might contend that they are really not involved in any dispute at all in this case, since they are not truly disagreeing with one another. In that case one might say that (2) is strictly speaking false, but we can explain why it seems to be true.
- 14.
Some aspects of the problem of the many, for instance, lend themselves to type I disputes.
- 15.
The following discussion is framed in terms of a four-dimensionalist, and largely perdurantist, view about persisting objects. I take it, however, that nothing in principle debars one from translating everything said here into terminology that is friendly to a three-dimensionalist perspective on persistence. (See, e.g. Miller 2005.)
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
See, for instance, Williamson (1994).
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
Olson (2002) makes both objections.
- 22.
This is Smith’s shorthand for the claim that follows.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
See Broome for a good discussion of these issues.
- 26.
This terminology is borrowed from David Braddon-Mitchell, in conversation.
- 27.
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Miller, K. (2014). Vague Persons. In: Akiba, K., Abasnezhad, A. (eds) Vague Objects and Vague Identity. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7978-5_5
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