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The Normative Implications of Personal Identity Theory The Normative Implications of Personal Identity Theory by Annette Sonja Dufner A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of Toronto © Copyright by Annette Dufner 2010 The Normative Implications of Personal Identity Theory Annette Sonja Dufner Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy Department University of Toronto 2010 Abstract This dissertation investigates the relationship between personal identity theory and normative ethics. There are a surprising number of contradictory arguments about the relevance of personal identity criteria for ethics and political philosophy. For example, writers like David Gauthier, Thomas Nagel and John Rawls argue that utilitarianism disregards the separateness, or non-identity, of persons. Derek Parfit claims the opposite. According to him, utilitarians respect the separateness of persons while also respecting the disintegration within lives. Also, Henry Sidgwick was under the impression that the separateness of persons supports egoism and disregard for the other-regarding demands of morality. David Brink claims the opposite. According to him, the resulting form of egoism would be nearly indistinguishable from altruism and therefore not at odds with the other-regarding demands of morality. Finally, both Rawls and Nozick argue that the separateness of persons speaks in favour of their own deontological view—despite the fact that their views are fundamentally opposed. Rawls hopes to gain support for his contractually derived principles of justice, while Nozick believes he can generate support for his deontological side constraints. This situation is rather surprising and in need of an explanation. Finally, there have also been skeptical arguments about the force of such appeals, such as Rawls’s claims that personal identity theory and ethics are independent, and his claim that personal identity criteria are inherently normative. This dissertation looks at these controversies in detail and comes to the conclusion that the force of appeals to personal identity is considerably more fine-grained and more complex than has been presumed. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank a number of people without whom this thesis would be substantially worse. Without my family and especially Daniel Becht this dissertation would not have been possible. Throughout my work on the project, I had helpful discussions with members of the philosophy community at the University of Toronto. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Helga Varden, Shelley Weinberg, Rachel Bryant, Lauren Bialystok and Stephen Thierman who also read near final versions of my chapters. I would also like to acknowledge Jaegwon Kim whose graduate seminar on self-knowledge at Brown University provided some of the inspiration for the choice of this topic. Among the faculty at the University of Toronto, my area committee members Jennifer Whiting, Wayne Sumner and Thomas Hurka helped me to sharpen the focus of the project. Wayne Sumner and Sergio Tenenbaum, my readers, have provided much needed help and advice on various drafts of the chapters. Finally, without the thorough and extensive comments by Thomas Hurka, my supervisor, the chapters would have never evolved into their current shape. I certainly received some of the most excellent, inspiring and encouraging feedback from him that I have had the privilege to receive. iii Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Personal Identity and What Matters 19 2.1 Self-Concern, Metaphysics and the Normative Realm 20 2.1.1 Is Identity What Matters to Us? 20 2.1.2 Identity and What We Are 22 2.1.3 Identity and Normative Questions 24 2.2 What Matters for Normative Judgments: The Lack of a Further Fact or Psychological Relations? 28 2.3 What Matters for Self-Concern: Psychological Continuity or Connectedness? 34 2.3.1 Why Connectedness Might Matter More 37 2.3.2 Successive and Overlapping Selves 40 2.3.3 Character Change and Memory Loss 44 2.4 First-person Access and Sharing Mental States with Others 49 3 Consequentialism and the Separateness of Persons 53 3.1 The Objection against Balancing and Uncompensated Sacrifices 54 3.1.1 Nozick on Prohibiting All Involuntary Sacrifices 56 3.1.2 Rawls on Prohibiting Particular Kinds of Balancing Acts 60 3.2 Parfit on Scope and Weight of Distributive Principles 68 3.2.1 Parfit’s Ambiguities 76 3.2.2 Agent-Neutral Quasi-Compensation: A Utilitarian Ideal? 82 3.2.3 A Holistic Reading of the Early View 88 4 Egoism, Morality and the Separateness of Persons 101 4.1 Sidgwick: The Separateness of Persons makes Self-Bias Rational 102 4.2 Parfit: The Right View about Survival Undermines Rational Egoism 104 4.2.1 Consequence: A Smaller Scope and Less Weight for Self-Bias 105 4.3 Brink: The Right View about Persons Supports “Self-extended Egoism” 111 4.3.1 Consequence: A Bigger Scope for Self-Bias and Overlap with Morality 114 4.3.2 Brink’s Omission of First-Person Memories 116 4.3.3 Brink’s Asymmetry about Discount Rates 122 iv 4.3.4 Egoism, Self-referential Altruism, and Morality 128 4.4 A Hybrid Account about Overlap between Self-Bias and Other-Regarding Concern 133 5 Deontology and the Separateness of Persons 144 5.1 How Separateness might Support Deontological Side Constraints 150 5.1.1 Taurek and the View that Separateness Speaks against Adding in All Cases 153 5.1.2 Agent-Centred and Patient-Centred Perspectives on Separateness 158 5.1.3 Can Separateness Support Side Constraints that Avoid Taurek’s View? 161 5.2 How Separateness Might Support Contractually Derived Basic Rights and Liberties 163 5.2.1 Contractualism and Respect for Hypothetical Separate Persons 165 5.2.2 How a Benevolent Spectator Might Also Respect Separateness 167 5.2.3 Equal Rights and Liberties: Separateness as a Coarse Tool 171 6 What Can Appeals to Personal Identity Establish in Normative Ethics? 173 6.1 The Independence Thesis 174 6.1.1 Rawls’s Formulation of the Independence Thesis 174 6.1.2 Two Readings of the Independence Thesis 175 6.1.3 Independence and Purely Physical Criteria 181 6.1.4 Independence and Criteria Requiring only Minimal Psychological Content 183 6.1.5 Independence and Criteria Requiring Diachronic Psychological Content 187 6.2 The Plasticity Thesis 189 6.2.1 Rawls’s Formulation of the Plasticity Thesis 189 6.2.2 Non-realism about Personal Identity, Realism about Identity Criteria 192 6.2.3 Falsifying Plasticity with Conceptual Methods? 194 6.2.4 Falsifying Conceptual Analysis with Empirical Methods? 195 6.3 Is the Later Rawls at Odds with the Earlier Rawls? 199 6.3.1 The Rawlsian Appeal to Separateness Re-visited 199 6.3.2 Independence and Circularity in a Reflective Equilibrium 201 7 Conclusion: A Complex Fine-Grained Underdeterminacy Thesis 203 8 Bibliography 217 v The Normative Implications of Personal Identity Theory 1 1 Introduction 2 The last decades of the Twentieth Century have seen an almost incredible array of contradictory arguments about the relevance of personal identity for questions of justice, normative ethics and applied ethics. There have been cases in which polar-opposite moral viewpoints have been supported by appeal to one and the same aspect of personal identity or vice versa. Even though philosophy is an argumentative discipline, this is rather unusual. The obvious hypothesis that there must have been some fundamental oversights calls for a systematic assessment. One of these controversies arose in 1971 when John Rawls put forth his well-known argument according to which utilitarianism “does not take seriously the distinction between persons”1 and therefore needs to be rejected. Derek Parfit responded in “Later Selves and Moral Principles” 2 that a proper way of thinking about persons, namely his reductionist way of doing so, might in fact support utilitarianism. Without going into any detail for now, here are some more examples: While Rawls seemed to imply that proper regard for the separateness, or non-identity, of persons would support egalitarianism, Robert Nozick argued that it would in fact support his fundamentally opposed libertarian rights view.3 Long before them, Henry Sidgwick had drawn another, completely different conclusion: He had argued that the separateness of persons supports rational egoism.4 Parfit, on the other hand, was convinced that his reductionist way of thinking about persons would make the egoist’s self-interest theory less plausible.5 David 1 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., pp. 24-25. 2 Parfit, “Later Selves and Moral Principles,” pp. 137-69. 3 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 33. 4 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p. 498. 5 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, chapter 9. 3 Brink promptly countered this with the claim that Parfitian reductionism is in fact compatible with the self-interest theory after all.6 I argue that such contradictions are due to a lack of detail and subsequent ambiguities about the way in which personal identity matters in ethics. How people think of personal identity can indeed support particular moral principles rather than others, but the support is a lot more fine-grained than has been presumed. Very general appeals to the nature of persons and their persistence across time will establish comparatively little. This conclusion agrees partly with a restricted reading of the so-called independence thesis, which was first put forth by Rawls in his later writings.7 According to the independence thesis appeals to personal identity cannot determine theory selection in ethics. The reason is that proponents of each moral theory can appeal to their own criterion of personal identity that will then lend the most support to their own theory. I partly agree with the independence thesis in as far as the relationship between personal identity criteria and the choice between entire moral theories such as utilitarianism or justice as fairness is concerned.
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