Personal Identity Without Persons

Abstract

The project takes as its starting point our conflicting intuitions about personal identity first exposed by Bernard Williams’ thought experiment involving the switching of bodies in “The Self and the Future,” and debated in the literature in various forms since, most famously by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons. The conflicting intuitions are identified as animalist and psychologist and correspond roughly with the two major approaches to personal identity in the philosophical literature. The traditional strategy to resolve the conflict—thought experiments—is critically examined and the project concludes that proper thought experiments will reveal the conflict but are unlikely to resolve it. A new reading of the conflict is therefore proposed. The concept of the person is a cluster concept with distinct components: biological human beings, rational agency, and psychological continuity, where the latter is construed as the temporal analog of phenomenological unity at a time.

The project then suggests that moral and legal theory is best pursued not by a naturalist conception of persons that unites the components of the cluster, but by a novel conception that separates them. This can be accomplished best by eliminating the concept of the person altogether. Objections that the concept of the person is ineliminable are considered and rejected, as are objections that the nature of the conflict is not reason enough to abandon the concept. Personhood’s centrality for value theory (including the positive law) is questioned and the eliminativist strategy is defended on the grounds that responsibility, self-concern, and moral rights are best analyzed with the component concepts instead of the cluster concept. Eliminativism is therefore preferable to competing accounts of personal identity because the former is better suited for moral theory. Among the advantages are the ability to: attribute responsibility to group agents without calling them persons, make sense of our conflicting demonstrations of self-concern without taking them as evidence for conflicting theories of personal identity, and attribute moral rights to entities who fail to meet traditional criteria for personhood but who are nonetheless entitled to moral respect.

Keywords: personal identity, personhood, persons, agency, moral rights, Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, thought experiments