REN MARIO MICALLEF

General Philosophy Tutor ial

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS PERSONAL IDENTITY?

IS THERE SUCH

THING

AS

PERSONAL IDENTITY?

Heythrop College, University of London

1 . I N T RO D U C T I O N

Ren Mario Micallef

Janes brain in the Wiggins case, or a copy of Janes brain contents in the Williams case (while the original brain is erased)).

D. Wiggins in his 1967 book Identity and Spatio-temporal continuity speaks about personal duplication using a brain-splitting technique (as yet not surgically feasible, though possibly feasible in the not-too-distant future). Since the human brain is composed of two hemispheres that are very similar, such that one hemisphere can take up the functions of the other (in certain cases of injury etc.) the question is what happens to a person should one or both of the hemispheres be transplanted into another persons cranium (removing the recipients brain in the process), or into the empty crania of two different recipients. Bernard Williams in his 1973 book Problems of the self has provided a psychological version of this situation using a science-fiction machine that scans the contents of the brain and stores all the information therein (memories, intentions, desires) and transfers all this information to another persons brain (or more than one person). Consider two cases: (C1) John is the original person; Alf is the recipient (he receives half Johns brain in Wiggins case , or Johns brain contents using Williams machine); (C2) Jane is the original person, Frieda and Claire are the recipients (each receive half of (1) Given that personal identity is one-to-one, in John-after-the-process is John-before-theprocess and Alf is supposedly another person, in (2) it is not so clear whether (a) Frieda is Jane; or (a) Claire is Jane; or (b) neither Frieda nor Claire is Jane; but clearly one has to exclude the possibility that (c) Frieda and Claire are both Jane (though one may claim that (d) both Frieda and Claire were in Jane, they were occupying her). The problems illustrated in the above examples are typical problems of personal identity. Nevertheless, before we delve any further into the issues, let us consider the metaphysical issue of identity.
2 . I D E N T I T Y A N D I T S P RO B L E M S

The kind of identity that concerns us in the first place is diachronic identity, persistence through time; in some cases, we are also concerned with synchronic identity, identity at a time. Prephilosophically, we consider John to be the same person he was 10 minutes ago yesterday 5 years ago. Yet, pre-philosophically, we also consider that John has changed, he has not remained identical to the person we knew 5 years ago (he may be taller, think differently, and possibly have a new job in a different city; he may have undergone religious

conversion, and now he would vote for a different party he also may have had plastic surgery). He is different from that John. We need to delve philosophically into the question to understand what lies behind these seemingly conflicting intuitions, regarding persistence through time. Questions regarding persistence at a time also arise when considering theses such as Multiple occupancy, which suggests that Frieda and Clare were two persons living in the same place at the same time: within Jane.
A. PERDURANTISM

tions of persistence through time, and is committed to a rigid determinism, since the future already exists: statements of modality are most consistently understood in Lewis sense of modal individuals (that are conceptual aggregates of different individuals living in close possible worlds). Assuming determinism when searching for criteria of personal identity, while heuristically acceptable from a metaphysical standpoint, would make one wonder what use could such a criterion serve, given that one of the major uses of a criterion of personal identity is in the field of ethics, and determinism makes nonsense of ethical discourse.
B. ENDURANTISM

The first thing to say about persistence through time is that there are two ways of dealing with time that provide two radically different ways of approaching the problem. Perdurantists consider time to be just another dimension of spacetime, and time is treated as we normally treat space. Usually, perdurantism comes with eternalism about time, i.e., all things exist in an equal degree: John of 5 years ago exists and is as real and as present in the universe as John of now and as John of 5 years from now into the future. John is a four-dimensional worm: just as Johns finger isnt John but simply part of John, so John at time t is not John, but just a temporal slice of the whole John, who is a temporally extended entity. Hence, for perdurantists, the question whether John-at-t1 is the same person as Johnat-t2 becomes one concerning whether the transtemporal John has temporal slices on the time axis at t1 and t2. This is probably the most elegant way of approaching problems of persistence through time, but it is very far away from our common-sense no-

The other position, held by endurantists, who normally hold a presentist (tensed) conception of time (this thing is, here and now; in the past it was but it is not (now) what is was in the past; in the future it will be but it isnt (as yet, now) what it will be: John was a child, is a law student, will be a barrister; he is not, now, a barrister, nor is he a child) claims that John, now, is fully John (not a temporal slice of a trans-temporal John), that John 5 years ago was also wholly and completely John, and that the John of now is the same concrete particular as the John of 5 years ago. The problem, here, concerns change. One may appeal to the distinction between qualitative sameness that comes in degrees, up to the point where two (or more) qualitatively identical things are indiscernible (in this sense we speak of identical twins) and numerical sameness whereby two different names or labels are discovered (or known) to designate the

same thing (the planet nearest to the Sun is Mercury). If I take a red brick and paint it white, it is still numerically the same brick though not qualitatively the same brick (the brick survives a change in properties). Similarly, if I chip off one of the bricks corners, it still is numerically the same brick (it survives a change in parts). This seemingly obvious distinction is nonetheless problematic: how may of these little alterations can I do to the brick in order that it remain numerically identical to the original red brick? In fact, though change in properties can be dealt with by building an essential-accidental distinction into ones concept of concrete particulars, most endurantists deny that a concrete particular can survive a change in parts (since this cannot but concern the essence), (Loux, 2002:241). In other words, if one seeks to avoid invoking an essential-accidental distinction in ones account of concrete particulars, one cannot maintain that a concrete particular can survive a change in properties (let alone in parts). For a bundle theorist (claiming that there is no more to the brick that the sum of its attributes: redness, shape, hardness, weight, density), changing an attribute does affect the structure of the concrete particular. If, on the other hand, the endurantist invokes some kind of essential-accidental distinction in ones account of concrete particulars, she may claim that change in properties does not affect the core of the particular (and allows numerical identity to be conserved), but how will she deal with the problem of change in parts? A bare substratum theorist must tell us something about the bare substratum: can a complex particular (a hill, a field) have a substratum? Can a living being have a substratum (that is over and

above the substratum of the physical complex constituting it)? Do persons have bare substrata? The problem, here, is that if we start saying what the bare substratum is and what it isnt, and by which things (encountered in ordinary language) can it be possessed and by which things it cannot, our substratum starts becoming essentially characterised it is no longer bare of any attributes. One may try to avoid these problems by being Aristotelian, and applying substance theory to concrete particulars. Aristotle did not however consider a substance every thing that ordinary language treats as a thing: tables, chairs, marble blocks, rivers Substances were, for Aristotle, living things and basic blocks of his physical paradigm (the four elements). Hence, even if we adopt some form of substance theory, we would still need to go down to the elements of our physical paradigm (say muons, gluons, quarks, assumed to be physical simples) to speak of substances. Being indivisible, these physical simples cannot undergo change in parts and hence can endure in time; hence Aristotelian endurantists may deny that something persists through a change in parts while claiming that the basic blocks of our universe do not undergo change in parts and hence endurance is possible. Yet the question whether living beings, and persons in particular, can be treated as substances still remains from Aristotle, and raises a plethora of problems, especially in the predominant physicalist view of the world. Is there something indivisible that constitutes the person, allowing a person to endure in time? Roderick Chisholm (cit. in Loux, 2002) suggests that a person could be something microscopic, lo-

cated somewhere in the brain. Whatever this might be, the important thing about it, according to the above reasoning, is that it be a simple substance. But if we have to postulate simple substances besides those invoked in explaining our physical paradigm, if there other simples in the universe besides quarks, muons and gluons, we are back into some form of dualism 1, precisely what Chisholm is trying to avoid. If on the other hand we want to maintain the claim that the person is ultimately a group of cells (some part of the brain) or else a series of memories, intentions and other psychological data stored in the states in which such cells are, then, claiming that the person survives a change in parts (e.g. permanent loss of some memories, death of some brain cells involved in consciousness) would have to be coupled with abandoning the use of the strict and philosophical reading of numerical identity when speaking of persons. The upshot of this is that it seems that unless one is a dualist or a perdurantist, one cannot render the intuitive I am the same person I was 10 years ago with the philosophical notion of numerical identity understood to apply in an all-or-none and one-to-one way. In other terms, a physicalist endurantist cannot speak of the persistence of persons through time as she speaks of the endurance of quarks. A person, it seems, may loose parts, and hence persistence of persons through time becomes a matter of degree (I am 80% the same person I was 10 years ago) and holds between more than one person (Frieda

and Clare are both Jane; they both derive from parts of the person Jane). One may claim at this point that such a notion of person is counter-intuitive; but this is a contentious claim, since we have, in everyday language, different notions of person. Clearly, in a normative context (law, ethics), and in a religious context, common language avoids indeterminate notions of the person, and does not easily admit that a person can be duplicated or divided, or that two person could be united into one. But certainly, there are also in common language less rigid notions of person that we may invoke in metaphysics 2.
3 . P E R S O NA L P E R S I T E N C E

Let us, at this point, take a moment to define our terminology. In the case of perdurantism, given that temporal slices of a person are numerically distinct, one can hardly speak of personal identity. Hence, a more general term, I suggest, would be personal persistence, that would cover both personal perdurance and personal endurance (according to the different interpretation of persistence through time). Within personal endurance, I distinguish between personal identity and personal contiguity, the former be-

1 Understood as the theory claiming that there exists in the universe something else beyond what is known empirically.

It is not so obvious, as some authors seem to suggest, that rigid notions of personal identity mirror our pre-philosophic notions. We often speak experiences of change (e.g. growth of a child, maturation of teenagers, adult conversion, repentance, radical transformation, moral corruption) using diversity language applied to persons: John is not the same person any more, Margaret is not the same person she was 8 years ago. In fact, ordinary language assumes personal identity in certain contexts and personal alteration in other, and assumes these to come in varying degrees. Hence, before claiming that ordinary language suggests a rigid notion of personal identity, one must account for these uses of diversity language.

ing a relation that is one-to-one and all-or-none, the latter being a relation of degree that can hold between more than two observed entities. Using a different way of subdividing personal persistence, one may say that personal identity is a type of rigid personal persistence, personal contiguity a type of nonrigid personal persistence. The notion of rigidity applied to perdurance becomes a question of whether the perdurantist allows overlap when cutting up spacetime or not. The 4-dimensional ontology of perdurance allows ample gerrymandering when cutting up spacetime, no particular way of cutting up spacetime is metaphysically privileged. Hence, we can define Alf II as the section of spacetime composed of John-before-the-procedure (and adjacent temporal slices extending backward in time) and Alf (and adjacent temporal slices extending forward in time), and define John II as the section spacetime occupied by John-after-the-procedure and adjacent temporal slices extending forward in time (with respect to the procedure). This is a non-overlapping way of cutting spacetime, that allows us to speak of rigid personal persistence (even though its rigidity may be very counter-intuitive, as shown by the example itself: to the common person in the street, the definitions of Alf II and John II state that Johnbefore-the-procedure perdures as Alf, and that John-after-the-procedure is not the same person as John-before-the-procedure.) One may, nevertheless allow overlap, by defining, say, John III as Johnbefore-the-procedure (and preceding slices) plus John-after-the-procedure (and successive slices) and defining Alf III as John-before-the-procedure (and preceding slices) plus Alf (and successive slices). Since John III and Alf III share sections of

spacetime, we may say that they are similar to a certain degree (according to the volume of spacetime they share): here we have a case of non-rigid personal persistence in the case of perdurance; note that the idea that a person may be a persistence in time of a contemporary person, or a even of a future person, is unproblematic in an eternalist conception of time.
3. SIMPLE AND COMPLEX VIEWS.

One may nevertheless contest the fact that everyday language supports metaphysical notions of rigid and non-rigid personal persistence, and one may want to stick to rigid personal persistence, insisting that any notion of personal persistence that comes in degrees and that is not a one-to-one relation is counter-intuitive. In this case, the most reasonable alternatives are perdurantism and some form of dualism. Let us consider a number of metaphysical universes to explore these possibilities 3. A) In group A of universes, there are things (tables, chairs, atoms, human bodies) and, separately, persons. Personhood and its persistence through time is an ultimate unanalysable fact; the observable persistence of body, brains, experiences, intentions, etc., does not ontologically constitute personal identity, but serves only as fallible evidence

3 The enumeration does not have the pretence of being exhaustive: I have in mind to represent the most popular positions and think that my arguments can be extended to more nuanced constructions.

in the evaluation of whether the person has persisted in the time span being considered. a. In universe Aa, unity of consciousness is not a sufficient criterion of personal persistence, though some degree of unity of consciousness is necessary for personal persistence. Two persons can therefore feel, consider themselves or be conscious of being the same person. The scenario allows the possibility of two separate persons (say Johann and Frederick) living in two different, but subjectively indistinguishable worlds, to have the same consciousness at time t0, which time marks the separation of their life histories. An intuitive rendering of this scenario is the situation resulting after a case of branch-line teletransportation whereby Johann is teletransported to the subjectively indistinguishable world 4, Twin-earth (hence instantiating Frederick) while the original body (and person: Johann) is not destroyed (and remains on Earth). After the procedure, both Johann and Fred-

erick feel that they are the same person as Johann-before-the-procedure, just woken up to continue with his life. (Furthermore, one may assume that the teletransporter and its operator are undetectable by the scientific instruments on both Earth and Twin-Earth, and that its operation does not leave any noticeable signs in either world: there is already Twin-Johann on TwinEarth, and the matter composing him is simply shaped into Frederick without affecting any other matter on TwinEarth. Neither Johann nor Frederick know anything about the teletransportation). b. In universe Ab, consciousness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for personhood: two persons cannot be conscious of being the same person. If at time t0, Frederick is conscious of being Johann for times before t0, they must be the same person; if they are separate persons, Frederick cannot ever be conscious of being Johann. B) In group B of universes, persons are not separate from the physical and mental states that indicate their presence to the senses; personhood does not transcend the observable. Furthermore, it is assumed that the mental rests on the physical, at least in the sense that if physical matter were to be re-

4 Subjectively indistinguishable means that all that is known by humans on both Earth and Twin-Earth is identical; but possibly, further investigations (e.g. in the nature of sub-atomic particles) would reveal in the future (after t0) that the two worlds are objectively different. For instance, emeralds have always been green on both Earth and Twin-Earth, but at tx (1 hr after t0), the emeralds on Twin-Earth become blue, while those on earth stay green. This is eventually traced to a difference in the nature of quarks: on Earth they are eternally stable, on twinearth, twin-quarks are such that they shift to a different configuration once every n years (n > (tx-tg); where tg marks the time when Twin-Earth came into being). The point, here, is to allow Johann and Frederick to have different histories after t0, which a rigid determinist might not otherwise allow.

moved from these universes, nothing would remain. a. Ba is an endurantist universe in which a person endures: he exists wholly and completely at each of several different times. b. Bb is a perdurantist universe wherein a person perdures: she has temporally different parts; Jane-of-8-years-ago and Jane-of-two-minutes-ago are temporal slices of Jane, just like Janes right hand and Janes external ear are spatial slices of Jane. The groupings A and B represent two different positions in matters of personal identity (or contiguity). Group A represents the so-called simple view of personal persistence: beyond the observable or empirical person, there is what I will call a transcendental person 5; empirically determined persistence in time is only fallible evidence for persistence on the transcendental level. In Group B of universes, one assumes the complex view, whereby there exists a criterion of personal persistence that a third party can observe. There is something (else) that personal persistence consists in: it is an analysable fact given that persons are not (to be considered as) separately existing entities; they are dependent on mental and/or physical entities 6.

I will argue that Aa and Bb are interesting ways of dealing with personal persistence, though not very useful in dealing with the real issues we are concerned with in the personal identity literature. Ab and Ba seem untenable, though endurantism may support a less rigid notion of personal persistence than personal identity. I will proceed here by arguing against Ab. The arguments apply also to versions of Bb (perdurantism plus complex view) that identify the person with consciousness.
A. PERSONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Many people holding the simple view tend to limit the transcendental person to consciousness, following a more general trend to identify personhood with consciousness, or at least to claim that persistence of self-consciousness is a necessary and sufficient condition to persistence of personhood. A
logical reductionism as characterized by Dummett. According to Noonan, the complex view only entails that there exist relations satisfying [a kind membership characterization] whose specification informatively constrains the class of possible personal histories. As I understand it, to specify informatively such relations is to give an empirically verifiable criterion, otherwise creation by creator-demon and not destruction by destroyer-demon could be a criterion that satisfies Noonans definition (provided we explain in a logically consistent way if and how these demons intervene, say, in a case of reduplication). Hence, if we claim that such empirically verifiable criteria (say having the same experiences, or possessing the same brain) are to be ontologically and conceptually dependent on persons (121) and not on independent as in the case of Parfits bundles of experiences, we need a theory of concrete particulars wherein what is ontologically and conceptually dependent on persons cannot be reduced to being ontologically and conceptually dependent on something simpler than a person. Though definitionally distinct, it seems that the complex view, some form of reductionism, and (I would add) perdurantism go together (given the above discussion). If one maintains that the informative criteria sought by the complex view must be empirical, or observationally accessible, one can hardly also maintain that such criteria belong to persons, understood, say, as observationally inaccessible simple substances.

5 In the Kantian sense of non (fully) empirically accessible in a direct manner.

Pace Noonan (1989:121-122)s claim (sustained by hardy any argumentation) that the complex view does not entail a metaphysical reductionism (or rather reductivism) but only a (footnote continued)
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person, according to Locke, is a thinking intelligent being with reason and reflection that can consider itself as itself, the same thinking being, in different times and places (Locke, cit. in Noonan, 1989:10). From this definition, one may deduce that the necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood are reason, reflection and consciousness; since reasoning and reflection are actions limited in time and their contents may change, it seems that only consciousness seems relevant to the issue of personal persistence. It is debatable whether we can use criteria for personal persistence that do not belong to our definition of the person, since if we claim, say, that mammals have episodic memory, continuity of episodic memory (or quasi-memory) may entail that a person is the same mammal as another person, but not necessarily the same person (if we want to maintain that there is something special about persons, and that issues of personal persistence are not reducible to ones of mammal persistence). However I shall side-step this issue, and return to the issue of consciousness, that has a considerable importance in the literature, given the widespread assumption of Lockes definition of person. I think that it difficult to argue for Universe Ab without postulating some more metaphysically stable substrate for consciousness. Seemingly, Ab overcomes the quietism of Aa by suggesting that though there is nothing observable which could tell us if Frederick is Johann or not, if Frederick is Johann then he must be conscious of being the same person as Johann, if not, he must be conscious of being someone else. Since there is something it is like being Johann to which one has no access if one does not know what it is like to be Johann and if

one has never been Johann we cannot, on this sole basis, tell if Frederick is Johann or not, except by asking him whether he feels he is Johann or not. This causes epistemological problems that make us fall into the metaphysical quietism of Aa (Frederick may or may not be Johann, we cannot really tell there is no way by which we can verify criteria of personal identity or personal persistence any logically coherent criterion is plausible and hence we have no one criterion to which we can appeal for fecund analysis of the problems of personal persistence) 7. But what is problematic with asking Frederick if he is conscious of being the same person as Johann or not? Imagine that Frederick finds out about the teletransportation, and has internally warranted belief that Twin-Earth came into existence at t0, and that Earth had been destroyed in the teletransportation process: one expects him to be conscious of being Johann, even though his belief might not track the truth. Or imagine that Frederick and Johann both become astronauts, and after being lost in space, find a planet which they think is their planet: Frederick lands on Earth, Johann on TwinEarth. Each would be convinced that he his the same person that left that planet on the spaceship a few years back: that the friendships he had, the places he visited, the quarks he is made of are those present in the world where he landed. Hence, the fact that Frederick feels he is Johann does not guarantee that there is personal identity between the two.

We shall return to this below.

B. A BROADER VERSION OF THE SIMPLE VIEW

metaphysical speculation, neither simply a taste for science-fiction thought experiments and even less a desire to justify metaphysically the various religious understandings of the person: we are rather concerned with having answers useful and relevant to normative philosophy, say, bioethics, we want to know what founds a persons rights and responsibilities. On this account, the complex view seems more interesting, since it claims to provide criteria that are empirically accessible.
C. PERDURANTISM AND ENDURANTISM ABOUT PERSONS

Let us now consider universe Aa. I think we cannot summarily dismiss Aa, if anything because most of our moral intuitions and laws belong to a linguistic and conceptual paradigm of religious origin, where such a conception of personhood is predominant 8. The problem with it is its quietism: if we cannot definitely determine if p1 at t1 is the same person as p2 at t2 through experience, we could find all sorts of criteria for determining whether p2, after a certain mind- or brain-involving process, possesses the same soul, cogito, psyche etc. as p1 that existed before the process, so long as the metaphysical structure is logically coherent. Such transcendental persons can be mortal or immortal, divisible or indivisible, created or eternal, etc. This pluralism, I feel, is not problematic from the metaphysical point of view (unless one holds the dogma that all but what is posited by the simplest and neatest theory is inexistent): we could have all sorts of internally coherent metaphysical notions of the person and criteria of personal persistence. The point, however, is that what has given rise to the personal identity literature is not simply a quest for endless
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Going over to Bb (after having discussed the problems with Ba above), I think that perdurantism does provide us with an attractive way of dealing with issues of personal persistence. Yet, it is not clear why a perdurantist should have any interest in issues of personal persistence at all. Since perdurantism insists on allowing ample gerrymandering of spacetime, it does not seem capable of providing an account of why cutting up spacetime in such a way that we have areas corresponding to the common sense notion of person should be preferable to any other way of cutting up spacetime (e.g. one which puts together bits of dogs, cars, buildings, persons etc. that are spatio-temporally adjacent). If persons are ontologically equivalent to any other entities resulting from a whatsoever system of cutting up spacetime, issues of personal persistence has no particular metaphysical significance. I have already argued against Ba in Section 1 of this essay (claiming that one cannot consistently be a endurantist about persons and not be a dualist,

Personal identity debates are not new to Philosophy; they have an old tradition. Ever since the Latin term persona (from gr. prosopon, a theatrical term for mask or character, e.g. personae dramatis) was applied to the Christian God, people have wondered how one could reconcile the idea of three persons with one substance (triune consubstantiality). More recent discussions in Theological Philosophy focus on the problematic fusion of the concept-experience of Christian Love (personal God) with the Greek idea of Unmoved mover, e.g. after Pierre Aubenques definition of the Aristotelian God as the unloving lover. These issues show how in Philosophy, the person has been linked to some non-corporeal metaphysical foundation, and how the discussion of personal identity issues has, in the tradition, presupposed such a notion of person. One wonders, at this point, whether such discussion can still make sense with a more physicalist notion of the person.

unless one gives some plausible account of concrete particulars to sustain ones view) An endurantist may claim that quarks endure, but not that persons endure in the same way as quarks, i.e. by remaining numerically identical to themselves through time. He may instead opt for personal contiguity, i.e. for a non-rigid understanding of personal persistence.
4 . W H A T I S T H E P O I N T O F R I G I D N OTIONS OF PERSONAL PERSISTENCE?

of view, rigid notions of personal persistence are of limited use, both in Ba and Bb. Keeping rigid notions of personal persistence within the limits of normative philosophy, I think that from the descriptive standpoint we should make do with nonrigid personal persistence. Physicalists often compare personal persistence with life as understood in contemporary AngloAmerican philosophy9: life is constituted by certain structures (prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells, defined in by necessary and sufficient criteria) capable of performing certain (necessary and sufficient) functions (respiration, growth, reproduction, sensitivity to changes in the environment), rather than by the presence of some elan vital. Life goes on as long as these structures are not destroyed and they continue performing the specified functions. Such a characterisation is certainly a rigid notion of life: one cannot be 50% alive. One may seek to establish a similar characterization of what is necessary and sufficient for personhood, and persistence through time would then be a question of continuity in these structures and functions. For instance, Stewart (2001) argues that there are three Great Criteria of personal identity and these are corporeal: episodic memory is based in the neocortex, continuity in the brain, subjectivity (consciousness) in the thalamus. Such an approach, however whereby one is either alive or dead, either 100% the same person or another person decides borderline cases (viruses, coma states) by appealing to the definition. The definition is the final court of appeal to find out if x is
9 David Papineau (cit. in Stewart 2001) compares consciousness to life in this way.

Though problematic and of limited use, a rigid notion of personal persistence does seem to make sense in Aa. However, I feel that within the more physicalistic paradigms (Ba, Bb), personal identity (as a one to one relation that does not come in degrees) is a fetish from the metaphysical point of view. Clearly, from the normative point of view, we need the concept of a determinate person (which is not the soul, as religiously understood), just as we need the concepts of good and bad (which are not the religious concepts of holy and evil), but this does not entail that we must postulate a corresponding metaphysical entity within a physicalist universe. Thomas Reid (cit. in Noonan 1989:20) notes:
[Identity] has no fixed nature when applied to bodies, and very often questions about it are questions about words. But identity when applied to persons has no ambiguity and admits not of degrees of more or less. It is the foundation of all rights and obligations and of all accountableness, and the notion of it is fixed and precise.

From such passages regarding the so-called determinacy thesis, it seems that what matters is the numerical identity of moral agents, not of metaphysical entities. Indeed, from a metaphysical point

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living or not. But such definitions in biology do not demarcate ontological differences or differences that correspond to clear natural difference; rather, since the borders are fuzzy, we need definitions to cut straight lines, to serve our convenience 10. If so, the criteria are normative ones, and we must not use them to sustain metaphysical distinctions. Consider the initial cases of John and Jane. Certainly, Alf and John-after-the-process are to some degree personally persistent with John-before-theprocess, and Claire and Frieda are personally persistent to some extent with Jane. If after the process John and Jane were found guilty of a horrible murder, non-rigid personal persistence would suggest that John, Alf, Claire and Frieda need psychological help and a programme of rehabilitation, while rigid personal persistence would most probably let Alf loose, as well as Claire, or Frieda, or both. Or consider that Williams machine is marginally defective (or the surgeon in Wiggins case causes minimal damage to a nerve) such that the aggressive part of Johns brain that was responsible for the murder is destroyed, or altered in the (99.8% successful) duplication process, and John becomes a peaceful, law-abiding, loving person with a normal life: he has no memories of being abused by a violent father, no desires of sadism, no criminal thoughts. On Alfs side, the duplication is 99.7% successful, however only some insignificant brain

cells (or brain data) were damaged; Alf follows in the steps of John-before-the-process and becomes a trigger-happy gangster. The police manage to find evidence only for the murder before the duplication process, and both John and Alf stand trial. Rigid personal persistence would supposedly demand that Alf be acquitted and John be convicted. Non-rigid personal persistence, however, could allow that even if John-after-the-process is overall more physically contiguous with John-before-the-process than Alf, for legal and moral purposes, Alf is more contiguous with John-before-the-process than Johnafter-the-process. Consider, furthermore, Jane writes a will leaving all her possessions to herself. After the procedure, a Claire and Freida go to court, each claiming that she is Jane and the other isnt. Of what use can a rigid notion of personal persistence be in such cases? All these cases, and the above discussion, suggest that we abandon rigid notions of personal persistence in metaphysics (in particular, all talk of personal identity) and adopt a non-rigid language to describe and deal with the cases in the personal identity literature.
3 . PA R F I T A N D W H A T M A T T E R S I N S U RV I VA L

This position was proposed, in a famous paper

For instance, the distinction between animals and plants is there to there to specify what should be studied by botanists and what by zoologists; that between living and non-living organisms specifies what organisms are to be studied by virologists and what by bacteriologists and mycologists.
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by Derek Parfit (1971) who argued that the notion of personal identity (or rigid notions of personal persistence) has little value in what we are philosophically concerned with when we are dealing with cer-

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tain problems regarding the human self. He targets two dogmas of personal identity: a) that in [the] cases [where we have no idea how to answer a question about personal identity], the question about identity must have an answer; b) that unless the question about identity has an answer, we cannot answer certain important questions (questions about such matters as survival, memory, responsibility) (3-4). One can immediately recognize (a) as the determinacy thesis (Is x identical to y, or not?), that motives the search for internally coherent rigid notions of personal persistence, and (b) as regarding the use we can make of our notions of personal persistence. In the above discussion, we argued that universes Ab and Ba could not provide answers since they are not tenable as such (they do not coherently allow for a rigid notion of personal persistence), and that while universes Aa and Bb could logically allow the possibility of a rigid notion of personal persistence, such notion would not answer questions like those in (b) above and hence are of little use. In other words, criteria derived from such ontologies either would not help us when dealing with (a) or, if they do, they are of no use in tackling the issues of (b). The way out of this deadlock seems to be denying the truth of (a) and (b). In the paper, Parfit adopts a non-rigid notion of persistence, and proposes, as a criterion, psychological connectedness. He then show how such a non-rigid criterion can be used to solve problem cases, and how it is useful in dealing with the issues of (b). Unfortunately, some authors have reduced Parfits original intuition to the thesis that contrary to

what we are all naturally inclined to believe, we do not have a basic and non-derivative concern for our future existence and well-being (Noonan, 1989: 2324) and summed up his position to the motto identity is not what matters in survival. Parfit, however, uses the issue of survival only as an example (1971:4) to show that personal identity because of its rigidity is a concept of little use and should be replaced by notions that are not one-to-one and allor-none. Hence, the main thesis in his paper is much wider that sub-thesis (identity is not what matters in survival) from which the paper gained its fame. Parfit claims that when we use the language of personal identity, what matters (e.g. when we are considering a case of someone surviving a brain operation) isnt really personal identity as Locke understands it, but rather another sort of persistence of persons through time. Discussing survival, Parfit states:
The relation of the original person to each of the resulting people contains all that interests us all that matters in any ordinary case of survival. [] Most of the relations which matter can be provisionally referred to under the heading psychological continuity. [] I said earlier that what matters in survival could be provisionally referred to as psychological continuity. I must now distinguish this relation from another, which I shall call psychological connectedness. [] Now that we have distinguished the general relations of psychological continuity and psychological connectedness, I suggest that connectedness is a more important element in survival. Parfit (1971:10-11.20-21)

Hence, Parfits intuition is that we need a different language, since the language of identity, [though its use] is convenient [] can lead us astray (p 11); judgements of personal identity have

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great importance [but] what gives them their importance is the fact that they imply psychological continuity [? i.e. connectedness ?] 11 (p 12). This, I think, is quite different from the thesis regarding whether my concern that I survive wholly and completely (in the problem cases of the personal identity literature) and not someone else, and not as two persons, and not as 49% of a person and 51% of another is originary or derived. What is the purpose of the thesis regarding my concern about my survival in Parfits paper? At the onset of the paper, speaking about the first dogma Parfit (pp. 3-4) states: My targets are two beliefs [ ; t]he first is that in these cases the question about identity must have an answer. [..] I cannot see how to disprove this first belief. I shall describe a problem case. But this can only make it seem implausible. Parfits example mirrors the John and Jane cases at the beginning of this essay, and illustrates the difficulties one encounters in attempting an answer. What I have tried to do in this essay is to show that the difficulty to providing such an answer is inherent in our ways of understanding time and concrete particulars. Rigid personal persistence claims that it respects the fact that, intuitively, Jane sees herself after the procedure only as dead, as Claire or as

Frieda, but not as somewhat both 12. I contest this by saying that this is not true (she can see herself as being somewhat both) and even if it were, this does not justify rigid personal persistence as a descriptive theory unless one can argue for the internal coherence of rigid personal persistence; and demonstrate that Jane is not using a normative or religious idea of person to evaluate a hypothetical situation that nobody, as yet, has gone through. Parfit, on the other hand, introduces the aspect of concern for my future existence claiming that contrary to what certain rigid theorist claim, such concern does not cause problems for the non-rigid notions of personal persistence; it can be analysed in terms of the entities posited by such notions. Hence, Parfit analyses this concern in terms of the entities posited by his psychological connectedness criterion (that Noonan calls Parfitian survivors). However, if such an analysis may appear not convincing to some, one should nonetheless point out that the idea of what we are concerned with has limited use in deciding metaphysical issues 13. Clearly, if we have two theories of logically equal standing, we may find one more interesting if it reflects what we are concerned with. But one can hardly claim that my concern can ground metaphysical entities and relations. Many people are concerned with surviving death in an afterlife, but

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Multiple occupancy seems to be an alternative, but it seems to imply that every time we use Williams machine, we have to postulate another occupant in the original brain. This, I think, is more counter-intuitive than the appeal to non-rigid personal persistence, given that different notions of person and of sameness are co-present in ordinary language, some of which do support non-rigid personal persistence. That is, one cannot reject a metaphysical notion, say, of personal persistence simply because it does not account for what we are concerned with.

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In the first part of the paper, Parfit uses the concept of psychological continuity as a first approximation before introducing that of psychological connectedness. Hence my addition in square brackets.

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this does not prove metaphysically that there is an afterlife and that these persons will be related to their counterparts in the afterlife in a one-to-one and all-or-none fashion. Unless there is a metaphysically coherent explanation of the entities I am concerned with, unless metaphysics can provide an ontology wherein what I am concerned with exists and makes sense, one cannot invoke metaphysics to deal with such concerns, but should rather appeal to theology, psychology and other disciplines 14. Noonan,
9. CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

Honderich, T. (ed.). 1995. The Oxford companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Oxford. xx+1009 pp. Loux, M. J. 20022. Metaphysics. A contemporary introduction. Routledge. London xiv+303pp. H. W. 1989. Personal Identity. New York.

Routledge. London New York. x+262pp. Parfit, D. 1971. Personal Identity. In The Philosophical Review 80:3-27. Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press. Oxford. xvi+543pp. Perry, J. (ed.). 1975. Personal Identity. University of California Press. Berkeley (CA) Los Angeles (CA) London. vi+248pp. Stewart, W. 2001. Personal Identity. On the www at site: http://mbdefault.org/8_identity/3.asp

In this essay, I have argued that the known metaphysical construals of personal identity, and of other rigid notions of personal persistence (those that insist that the relation be one-to-one and all-ornone) are either inconsistent or not useful in dealing with what we are concerned with in the issues of the personal identity literature, and that we should consider using non-rigid notions, such as personal contiguity. Furthermore, I have claimed that this is the main point underlying Parfits 1971 paper.

Some rather vitriolic critics of Emmanuele Severino (Univ. of Venice)s grotesque neo-parmenidean ontology claim that he built his whole system in order to cope with the tragic death of his brother (who is reported to have committed suicide in front of him when he was still a child). In Severinos metaphysics, things (that are) are neither created nor destroyed, they simply appear and disappear as we move through time (compare with the 4-d perdurantist ontology). Even if these critics were right, this does not mean that Severinos concern with the continued existence of his brother explains the plausibility and the fame of his ontology; rather one must admit that his theory has a value in itself, and that to Severinoit could have an added value in that it helps him deal with his childhood trauma.
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