Archive for the ‘Reasons and Persons’ Category
Friday, December 30th, 2011
Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons began, “Many of us want to know what we have most reason to do.” He aimed to establish a foundation for ethics, a project which required addressing the conflicts between morality and self-interest. In asking what the claims of self-interest really are, Parfit came to grips with the question of whether or not there is a rational basis for the special concern that persons feel for themselves. Although Reasons and Persons did not answer that question, Parfit tried to show that the Self-Interest Theory—which claims that each person has the “supremely rational ultimate aim: that his life go, for him, as well as possible”—is false.
Parfit went on to write On What Matters, following an honoured tradition of searching for a kind of Unified Field Theory of ethics—one law, from the correct application of which all moral precepts can be derived. Reasons and Persons famously argued that personal identity is not what matters in survival; and it is surely not coincidental that the phrase “what matters” recurred in the title of Parfit’s new book. Normative ethics consists of giving reasons for action; and reasons for action matter. Because the survival of persons is very important, what matters in survival can be presumed to be a significant part of what matters.
On What Matters says little about personal identity. Parfit’s primary interest is in discovering reasons for action—a rational basis for decision-making. My primary interest is in gaining a better understanding of human nature—of what we are. Parfit’s work is driven by prescriptive aims, mine by descriptive ones. Parfit and I would probably agree that reasons for action are rooted in values. But where he asks what has value, I ask what people actually value, and—a more interesting question—why they value what they do. (more…)
Tags: rationality, self-interest, what matters
Posted in Dennett, egoism, John Perry, morality, On What Matters, Parfit, prudential concern, rationality, Reasons and Persons, self interest, self-concern, The Extreme Claim | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
The Apparent Rationality of Prudential Concern
Consider the following apparently straightforward inference:
I do not expect to die soon. Therefore I expect to be alive in the future. I expect I will have experiences in the future. I anticipate having experiences in the future. Because experiences can be pleasant or unpleasant, I have reason to care about the quality of those experiences.
Notice the flow of argument: from a straightforward prediction of fact—that my death is not imminent—and the seemingly innocuous observations that persons persist through time, that persons have experiences, and that experiences vary in quality, to the conclusion that I have a reason to care about the quality of my future experiences. The steps in the argument seem innocent and deeply familiar. These ideas are so closely linked as to seem inseparable.
I suggest they seem inseparable because the core concept of a person is that of a subject of experience that persists through time. Because experiences can be pleasant or unpleasant, we think a subject has reason to care about their quality in the future.
By “subject of experience” I just mean whatever has experiences. I am not claiming that the concept of a person is that of a Cartesian ego, or a spiritual substance, or a biological organism, or its brain, or any sort of psychological entity. I claim only that the concept of a person is of something that has experiences. This claim is uncontroversial.
The above argument illustrates how a motivational idea—having a reason to care about something—can be embedded in what appears to be a straightforward factual description. (more…)
Tags: anticipation, Parfit, The Extreme Claim
Posted in anticipation, Cartesian ego, David Lewis, human replication, motivation, Parfit, prudential concern, Raymond Martin, Reasons and Persons, self interest, self-concern, subject of experience, teleportation, The Extreme Claim, unselfishness, Williams | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Paradigm Shift
I do not expect a theory of personhood to match all our pre-reflective philosophical intuitions, even if deeply considered and strongly felt (especially if strongly felt!) for two reasons: (1) our best intuitions on this subject are demonstrably unreliable, and (2) billions of otherwise sane and competent people hold beliefs about personal identity which are unsupported by empirical evidence, but to which they have strong emotional attachment. These two facts strongly suggest that there is something wrong with what we are naively inclined to believe about our identity. Hence we should not be surprised to find that a satisfactory solution, when it is found, will at first seem counter-intuitive. (more…)
Tags: evolution, Kuhn, neuroscience, paradigm, personal identity
Posted in Capgras, Cotard's, evolution, Kuhn, Metzinger, motivation, neuroscience, Open Individualism, Parfit, personal identity, psychology, Ramachandran, Reasons and Persons, self-concern | No Comments »
Friday, October 14th, 2011
The term “O
pen Individualism” has a positive ring. If Daniel Kolak hadn’t adopted it, I might have used the word “open” for my own theory of what persons are. I haven’t yet hit upon a term ending in “ism” to represent the idea that persons are informational entities, or (to say the same thing differently) bundles of attributes, as opposed to substances. Like rivers whose constitutive substance (water) is always changing, persons constantly gain and lose attributes. And attributes are easily shared, readily copied from one individual to another. When you learn something from another person, you absorb part of himself. He is a collection of attributes, just as a book (the intellectual work, not the bound volume made of paper) is a sequence of sentences. To learn from another person is like incorporating a quotation from someone else’s book into one’s own composition. In learning from him, we take on part of what he is. The fact that attributes (or information, if you prefer) flow so freely between persons, makes the word “open” appropriate. We are open vessels, not closed ones. (more…)
Tags: distributive justice, Kolak, Open Individualism, personal identity
Posted in distributive justice, Golden Rule, Kolak, morality, Open Individualism, Parfit, personal identity, Reasons and Persons, self interest | 7 Comments »
Friday, September 30th, 2011
People who think deeply about the puzzle cases of personal identity have come up with a variety of bold and radical responses. Like Alexander hacking through the Gordian knot, Parfit wielded an analytical scalpel to divide personal identity from what matters in personal survival, reaching the conclusion that ordinary survival is about as bad as being destroyed and replaced by a replica. Robert Nozick was so impressed by the difficulties posed by fission cases that he decided personal identity must depend on extrinsic factors: you are identical to whatever person is your closest continuer at any future time, a thesis with the odd consequence that, if your closest continuer after fission dies, you may suddenly find yourself being someone who until that time was someone else, your second-closest continuer. David Lewis’ solution to was to abandon the tried-and-true principle that persons can be counted by counting heads. Since there are two persons after fission, there were two all along, even though, before fission, they occupied the same body and were unaware of their duality. (Bizarre though it sounds, I support Lewis’ solution as one that inflicts the least damage to the traditional concept of a person.) Thomas Metzinger’s analysis led him to conclude that “no such things as selves exist in the world.”
In his book, I am You, Daniel Kolak offers yet another radical theory of personal identity: There is only one person, and that person is all of us. What are commonly understood to be boundaries between individuals, he says, do not “merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded to them.”
Our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. [Kolak, 2010, p 1] (more…)
Tags: fission, Kolak, Open Individualism, personal identity
Posted in Cartesian ego, consciousness, David Lewis, Dennett, ethics, human fission, Hume, Kolak, Metzinger, Nozick, Open Individualism, Parfit, personal identity, Reasons and Persons, teleportation, thought experiment, Williams | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
We cannot understand the self by examining people in isolation. Too many important aspects of personhood only appear in a social context.
Thomas Metzinger’s work describes the self-model in which our ideas about ourselves are rooted. The model is (usually) transparent, in that we operate through it without (usually) any awareness of a distinction between the model and the underlying reality. It is a model to which we have a profound emotional attachment—most of us care, deeply, about ourselves in the past, present, and future. As a result, our self-models are motivational. They spur and shape our actions. We evaluate possible courses of action by putting our self-models through various simulations, and responding emotionally to the different outcomes we imagine. The research of Antonio Damasio has begun to show how our emotions must inform our executive decision-making processes in order for us to make what are commonly recognized as ‘rational’ decisions.
Most of what Metzinger and Damasio have to say about the self is as true of isolated individuals as of human beings immersed in society. But a case can be made that the concept of the self could only have emerged in a social context. I have argued that our concepts, particularly the entities recognized by our ontology, reflect what is important to us. The spatio-temporal boundaries between ‘things’ are artificial, not natural; they do not exist in nature, but are imposed upon nature by human beings. A person is an entity whose boundaries roughly coincide with those of a human biological organism. A person is commonly considered to begin sometime around birth; sooner in some traditions, later in others. The person is usually thought to persist until biological death; but many people believe that it continues much longer than that; and some believe that if the organism is sufficiently damaged, then the person may cease to exist before its organism dies.
Among other things, a person is a unit of moral and legal responsibility—a bearer of enduring rights and privileges, duties and obligations, merits and demerits, assets and liabilities, debts and credits. Those attributes of individual persons result from, and depend on, the fact that individuals are members of a larger society. If a human being is isolated for a long time from other human beings, legal obligation disappears from his life, and moral obligation, if it does not entirely disappear, is vastly curtailed. I would not go so far as to say that an isolated human being ceases to be a person; only that certain central and important aspects of personhood simply disappear from his or her life. Having moral and legal rights and obligations is a central and important aspect of personhood. (more…)
Posted in Damasio, death, human replication, life insurance, Metzinger, morality, motivation, Parfit, personal identity, Reasons and Persons, self interest, self-concern, teleportation | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Published in 1998, Raymond Martin’s Self-Concern set a new direction for the philosophical discussion of personal identity by shifting the focus from “the normative question of whether this or that should matter in survival to the largely descriptive question of what…actually does…matter.” Martin questions the philosophical goal of trying to show that we all should (rationally) respond in the same way to the puzzle cases – a goal shared by Parfit and his opponents – calling the attempt “survival-value imperialism.” In examining how people actually value their own survival, his book goes a long way towards characterizing the conditions that make it difficult or easy for people to self-identify across time. It is largely about the psychology of self-concern. (more…)
Posted in anticipation, death, fission rejuvenation, human replication, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, psychology, Raymond Martin, Reasons and Persons, religion, self, self interest, self-concern, teleportation | No Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
To find the right answers, ask the right questions. I have skated around the question, “Is there a rational justification for self concern?” without coming up with a solid argument that settles it one way or the other. But there is a related question which can be answered.
Two Views of Teleportation
As we have seen, teleportation by means of information transfer can be viewed in two ways. The facts of the case are: I am scanned in North Vancouver and my information is sent to Omaha, where it is used to construct a living replica of me. Meanwhile, the original in North Vancouver is destroyed. Two views of these events are:
SURVIVE: I am transported from North Vancouver to Omaha.
DIE: I am killed in North Vancouver, and someone else – my replica – is constructed in Omaha.
People who think about teleportation disagree about whether SURVIVE or DIE is an accurate description of the case. How can it be settled which view is true – or whether neither is true?
People who disagree about SURVIVE and DIE do not disagree about the facts of the case. The facts are not in question. No scientific experiment can be devised to settle which of SURVIVE and DIE is an accurate description of the facts. (more…)
Posted in death, Hazlitt, identity, itravel, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, Reasons and Persons, self, self interest, teleportation, thought experiment | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Imagine, in the early days of books, a small library consisting entirely of original manuscripts. Some of them are very old, and have been attacked by mice. Some have deteriorated so much that their pages crumble to dust when the custodian of the library tries to read them. He mourns the loss of these books, and contemplates the inevitable decay of the remaining books with sorrow. To be sure, new manuscripts are occasionally added to the library, but they cannot replace the volumes that are lost forever. This goes on until, one day, the young assistant librarian has an idea. “This book will be unreadable in five years,” he tells his elder. “But I can read it now. If I copy the words of this book onto sheets of new vellum, and bind them in a strong new binding, we will be able to read it for many decades to come.” The old librarian tenderly strokes the cracked spine of the crumbling volume, and shakes his head. “What good is a copy? It wouldn’t be the same book.”
In the previous post, I summarized one of Derek Parfit’s main arguments that personal identity – being the same person over time – is not what matters in survival.
Human fission – one person ‘splitting’ into two – is clearly imaginable. It is physically possible, and is not far from being technically possible. Parfit argues compellingly that fission would preserve what is important in survival. Specifically, if Parfit knew that both of his cerebral hemispheres were about to be separately transplanted into two separate bodies, he would have the same rational justification for anticipating the experiences of both of the post-op survivors as each of us has for anticipating his or her own future experiences. This, despite the fact that the original Derek Parfit ceased to exist when he was divided. In this case, ceasing to exist is very unlike ordinary death. Ceasing to exist just consists in the fact that the two post-op survivors are different persons from one another, and neither one is the same person as the pre-op Derek Parfit. Loss of identity of this kind does not matter. (more…)
Posted in David Lewis, death, human replication, identity, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, Reasons and Persons, replication, self, self interest, teleportation, thought experiment | No Comments »
Friday, January 1st, 2010
Part Three of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is titled “Personal Identity”. One of its central claims is what Parfit calls the Reductionist View: that persons are not “separately existing entities” over and above their brains and bodies. What is important about being the same person at different times consists primarily in psychological continuity and connectedness.
Another, related claim is that being the same person is not in itself very important. In particular, it is not a rational justification for self-concern. If I know that someone in the future will not be myself, that is not a good reason not to anticipate having that person’s experiences. What is important are the underlying, real relations of psychological continuity and connectedness. And even they do not have exactly the same importance that we tend to believe personal identity has.
Part Three of Reasons and Persons contains 150 pages of closely-reasoned arguments which are by and large original, compelling, and illuminating. I will not try to restate all of Parfit’s arguments, or to comment on them all; instead, I strongly recommend his book to anyone interested in this subject. In this post, I will review one of Parfit’s more important lines of argument in Chapter 12, “Why Our Identity is Not What Matters.”
Brain-Splitting
Parfit begins this chapter by making a refreshing break from the philosophical practice of thought-experiments, building instead on actual cases documented in medical literature. These are the famous ‘split-brain’ cases, in which surgeons severed the corpus callosum, the main bundle of nerve fibres connecting the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, as a treatment for epilepsy. Cutting the connection reduces the severity of epileptic attacks by preventing seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to the other. But there are side-effects.
The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness’. (p 245) (more…)
Posted in Bauby, brain transplant, consciousness, death, Fechner, human replication, neuroscience, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, psychology, Reasons and Persons, replication, self, self interest, split brain, thought experiment | 2 Comments »
