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Animalism and the varieties of conjoined twinning

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Abstract

We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning: dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.

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Notes

  1. I (McMahan) briefly discussed this phenomenon and its implications for our identity in an earlier work [15, pp. 292–293], though I now realize that my appeal to this case was anticipated by Hershenov [11, pp. 35–36, note 14].

  2. Thanks on this latter point to Ralf Bader.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Jacob Ross and Dean Zimmerman for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, 1 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Tim Campbell & Jeff McMahan

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  1. Tim Campbell
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  2. Jeff McMahan
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Correspondence to Jeff McMahan.

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Authors Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan are “equal” co-authors. Their names are listed in alphabetical order.

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Campbell, T., McMahan, J. Animalism and the varieties of conjoined twinning. Theor Med Bioeth 31, 285–301 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9150-0

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