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Relational Personhood, Extended Diachronic Personal Identity, and Our Moral Obligations Toward Fragile Persons

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Relational Personhood, Extended Diachronic Personal Identity, and Our Moral Obligations Toward Fragile Persons University of Alberta Shadow People: Relational Personhood, Extended Diachronic Personal Identity, and Our Moral Obligations Toward Fragile Persons by Bartlomiej A. Lenart A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of requirements for degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy © Bartlomiej A. Lenart Spring 2014 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. To Miranda for continuous encouragement and support and for always authentically holding me in my identity and to Urszula, Andrzej, and Kamil for never ceasing to care Abstract This Dissertation argues for a care-centrically grounded account of relational personhood and widely realized diachronic personal identity. The moral distinction between persons and non-persons is arguably one of the most salient ethical lines we can draw since many of our most fundamental rights are delineated via the bounds of personhood. The problem with drawing such morally salient lines is that the orthodox, rationalistic definition of personhood, which is widespread within philosophical, medical, and colloquial spheres, excludes, and thereby de-personifies, a large number and a great variety of human beings such as neonates, young children, the elderly who suffer from dementia, individuals with severe cognitive disabilities, and patients in vegetative states. The reconceptualization of personhood necessary for a more inclusive definition ought to originate with an appropriate moral grounding. To this end, this Dissertation grounds the notion of personhood in the care ethical sphere, thereby emphasizing the role of care relations in the maintenance of the moral consideration of vulnerable individuals. This Dissertation argues that grounding the concept of a person in care relations entails a relational account of personhood, which, along with the insights of the Extended Mind and Social Manifestation Theses, leads to an extended and externalized understanding of diachronic identity, which allows fragile people to be held in their personal identities even if they themselves lack the capacities usually associated with moral personhood. As we trace a person’s identity through time, we track the various relational properties, which constitute personal narratives and thus act as a glue that binds such dynamic and often unique properties into stable, trackable narratives. Since care relations are morally relevant on a care-centric account of personhood, what is lost in cases where such care relating ceases is not merely of sentimental value, but of great moral importance as well. Morally meaningful care relations are not replaceable, and, by extension, neither are the narratives that are constituted by such unique and irreplaceable instances of relating. This Dissertation argues that the constitutive care relational nature of personal narratives makes such narratives irreplaceable and is precisely what makes persons so morally precious. Acknowledgments First and foremost, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my dissertation supervisor, Professor Robert A. Wilson, for his steadfast support, enthusiasm, encouragement, patience, suggestions, and insight throughout the entire process of conceptualizing and writing this dissertation. I would also like to sincerely thank him for his tireless and supererogatory effort to ensure that his graduate students have access to the most recent scholarship and excellent formative academic experiences, many of which, had they not been personally subsidized by him, would not have been accessible to me or his other graduate students (we are all indebted to his farsightedness and generosity). Completing this dissertation would not have been possible without his passion for mentorship, commitment to student growth, and his guidance. I would like to offer a sincere thank you to the members of my thesis committee, Professors Wendy Austin, Wesley Cooper, Eva Feder Kittay, and Howard Nye, for their discerning comments, questions, and suggestions, as well as for their enthusiasm for the project. I would also like to thank Professor Michael Tooley for his helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this dissertation. I am grateful for the generous funding received throughout the course of my doctorate. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research (FGSR) for awarding the Queen Elizabeth II Doctoral Graduate Scholarship in 2008 and 2009 as well as the President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction in 2011. Table of Contents Chapter 1 Shadow People: Exemptions from Personhood 1.1 Persona 1 1.2 Personhood and Exemptions 6 1.3 Faded Personhood: Severe Cognitive Disabilities and Permanent Vegetative States 13 1.4 Shadow People 22 1.5 Sketching the Argument 24 Chapter 2 Moral Motivations 2.1 Asking the Right Questions 31 2.2 Who Am I? 34 2.3 The Moral Fabric of Personal Identity: Picking out the Moral Threads of Personhood 38 Chapter 3 Moral Agents 3.1 Defining Personhood: A Moral Project 52 3.2 Aristotle’s Function Argument 54 3.3 Lockean Persons 61 3.4 Kantian Rationalist Elitism 74 3.5 The Singerian Preference Hierarchy 79 3.6 The Trends Continue 95 3.7 Psychologism and Biologism 100 Chapter 4 Beyond Psychologism and Biologism 4.1 The Biological Account: Olson’s Animalism 102 4.2 Revisiting Animalism: Some Shortcomings of the Biological Account 109 4.3 The Psychological Account and Its Dangers 117 4.4 Noonan’s Neo-Lockeanism 123 4.5 Resetting the Bearings: Where to Go from Here? 127 Chapter 5 Externalizing Personhood: Self-Conception and Externalized Meaning 5.1 The Closest Continuer Theory and the Problem of Excessive Subjectivity 130 5.2 Nozick on Value and the Meaning of Life 142 5.3 The Closest Continuer Theory Extrinsically Bounded and Socially Expanded 145 Chapter 6 Relational Personhood 6.1 Campbell’s Relational Personhood: Ratio-Centrism Veiled in Relations? 151 6.2 Memory: A Brief History 160 6.3 Memory Systems 162 6.4 Episodic Memory and Personhood 165 6.5 Taking Memory Seriously 168 6.6 Relational Personhood 176 6.7 Narratives, Extended Diachronic Personal Identity, and Care Relations 179 Chapter 7 Fragile Personhood: Our Moral Obligations to Care About and Personify Vulnerable Individuals 7.1 Moral Fibres: The Moral Grounding of Personhood 195 7.2 Personalizing People 203 7.3 The Moral Obligations of Carers 224 7.4 Patients in Permanent Vegetative States (PVS) 228 7.5 Summary 236 Chapter 8 Questions, Objections, and Replies 8.1 The Problem of Mistaken Identity 241 8.2 The Great Apes and Feral Children 244 8.3 The Problem of Context Dependence and the Absence of Inclusive Narratives 251 8.4 The Problem of Exclusionary Narratives 255 8.5 The Question of Emotionless Rational Humans 257 8.6 Personhood and Permanent Vegetative States 267 Conclusion 274 Bibliography 278 Appendix 291 Chapter 1 Shadow People: Exemptions from Personhood All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts (As You Like It, William Shakespeare, 1623) 1.1 Persona1 In As You Like It, the great English playwright William Shakespeare, likens the human life to a play in seven Acts (Shakespeare 1623, II.vii.138-142), thereby comparing the human person to an actor who assumes several different personas throughout his or her life.2 Being a playwright, Shakespeare may have found it natural to draw analogies between acting on a stage and living life as a person. However, the roots of such analogies are fixed much further in the past. The term person has its origin on the stage, making Shakespeare’s analogy not only fitting, but also instructional. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) traces the word person to persona, and suggests that the word is likely derived from Etruscan (ɸersu), meaning mask 1 The following is not meant to be an argument from etymology since I will offer other, more philosophically acceptable arguments for the properties I assign to personhood, but I think an etymological sketch of the term in question can help point the reader to the kind of understanding of the concept of personhood for which I will be arguing. 2 Each act or age represents a different stage of life: the infantile stage, the whining schoolboy stage, the lover stage, the soldier stage, the wise or just stage, the elder stage, and finally a second childishness. 1 (or masked figure) and was used to render the Greek prósōpon, meaning face, mask, or dramatic part, from the words prós meaning ‘to’ or ‘towards’ and ṓps meaning ‘face.’ Ernest Klein’s A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language states that the Etruscan ɸersu is itself of Greek origin (Πɛpσɛφóvƞ), which is the name of the chief goddess of the underworld, Persephone. According to Ernest Klein (1967), ɸersu refers to “the embodiment of a god of the nether world whose office it was to receive the soul of the dead and to accompany it to Hades” (Klein 1967, 1163-1164). The term person, as The Concise Oxford Dictionary (2001) tells us, was also adopted in Christian Theology to stand for the three modes of being of God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), thereby continuing the tradition of essentially embodying abstract concepts such as divinity.
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