Persons and Personal Identity

Amy Kind

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781509500246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

As persons, we are importantly different from all other creatures in the universe. But in what, exactly, does this difference consist? What kinds of entities are we, and what makes each of us the same person today that we were yesterday? Could we survive having all of our memories erased and replaced with false ones? What about if our bodies were destroyed and our brains were transplanted into android bodies, or if instead our minds were simply uploaded to computers? In this engaging and accessible introduction to these important philosophical questions, Amy Kind brings together three different areas of research: the nature of personhood, theories of personal identity over time, and the constitution of self-identity. Surveying the key contemporary theories in the philosophical literature, Kind analyzes and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. As she shows, our intuitions on these issues often pull us in different directions, making it difficult to develop an adequate general theory. Throughout her discussion, Kind seamlessly interweaves a vast array of up-to-date examples drawn from both real life and popular fiction, all of which greatly help to elucidate this central topic in metaphysics. A perfect text for readers coming to these issues for the first time, Persons and Personal Identity engages with some of the deepest and most important questions about human nature and our place in the world, making it a vital resource for students and researchers alike.

1
The Nature of Persons

On the list of the world's most famous gorillas, King Kong probably takes the top spot. Right behind him in second place we might likely find Koko, an eastern lowland gorilla whose fame owes not to Hollywood – though she has been featured in several films – but rather to her prowess at American Sign Language. Since the age of one, Koko has been learning to sign as part of her participation in The Gorilla Language Project, a study led by developmental psychologist Francine Patterson that aims to gather information about the intelligence and linguistic capabilities of gorillas. Now in her forties, Koko reportedly has a working vocabulary of over 1,000 signs and understands approximately 2,000 spoken English words. According to her handlers, she exhibits self-awareness, a sense of humor, empathy, and a wide range of emotions. On IQ tests, she has scored between 70 and 95 (where a score of 100 is considered to be normal for humans). Demonstrating considerable linguistic creativity, Koko has created new signs, modified existing signs to extend their meanings, and combined signs in novel ways. To mention one such example that is especially interesting for our purposes here, she has referred to herself using sign language as a “fine gorilla person.”

On the face of it, Koko's self-description might seem to be a contradiction in terms. In ordinary speech, we frequently take the term “person” to mean “human being” – member of the species Homo sapiens – and there can't possibly be any such thing as a gorilla human being, fine or not. But there's another sense of the word “person,” one often employed in philosophical discussion, in which there is no contradiction in referring to a non-human individual as a person. Our interest in this chapter, and throughout this book as a whole, is in personhood in this latter sense. In the philosophical sense of personhood, the terms “person” and “human being” should not be taken to be synonymous, and it is at least conceptually possible both that there be non-human persons and that there be non-person humans. That's not yet to say that Koko is right to call herself a person – whether any existing non-humans should be considered persons (and if so, which) is a question that we'll consider later in section 1.3. But for now, what's important to note is that the issue is not settled simply as a matter of definition. Although we can specify what a human being is in biological terms, we cannot give a similar biological specification of what a person is. The nature of persons is not something that can be revealed by genetic testing or other laboratory analysis.

Our inquiry into persons and personal identity throughout this book will be a metaphysical one. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and structure of the world. It's perhaps easiest to understand the study of metaphysics by contrasting it with epistemology, another branch of philosophy. In epistemology, philosophers are concerned with the nature of knowledge and justification. We might ask, for example: What justifies the belief that God exists? Or: Can we have knowledge of God's existence? By contrast, in metaphysics, philosophers are concerned not with our knowledge of the world, but with the world itself. We thus might ask: Does God exist? Or: What is the nature of God?

There are many interesting epistemological questions about persons, prime among them the question of how an individual can know of the existence of any person other than herself. Perhaps I am the only person who exists, and the apparent persons around me are really just mindless automata. What justifies me in believing otherwise? (In philosophy of mind, questions of this sort are often discussed under the framework of the problem of other minds.) In this book, we'll put these epistemological questions aside to focus on metaphysical questions about persons. We'll focus on three questions in particular:

• The identification question: What properties must a being have to count as a person?
• The reidentification question: What makes a person the same person over time?
• The characterization question: What makes a person the person that she is?

It is probably not surprising that there is considerable philosophical disagreement about how these questions should be answered. What may be more surprising is that there is also considerable disagreement about how these questions should be properly formulated and how they are related to one another – in fact, there is even disagreement about whether they are related to one another. As we take up these questions over the course of the book, we will see how these disagreements come into play. We start, however, with the identification question.

1.1 Notions of Personhood

In exploring the properties necessary for a thing to count as a person, the target of our investigation in this first chapter is what's often referred to as metaphysical personhood. Unfortunately, this is not the only notion of personhood in play in philosophical discussion. Philosophers talk not only of metaphysical personhood but also of moral personhood, and they are not always careful to distinguish the two. Moreover, the notion of personhood plays a central role in many legal systems. Thus, before we can begin our inquiry into metaphysical personhood, we need first to disentangle these various notions.

The notion of person has always been of central importance to Western legal systems. Consider, for example, the all-important due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution: “[No State shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” To be a person before the law – to be a legal person – is to be the subject of legal rights and obligations. But who counts as a person in this sense?

First, it's clear that being human is not itself sufficient for being a legal person. At various times, and in various societies, legal personhood has been denied to classes of human beings such as women and slaves. British law prior to the middle of the nineteenth century did not recognize married women as legal persons. As explained by Sir William Blackstone in his famous eighteenth-century Commentaries on the Laws of England, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous Dred Scott case of 1857 that the US Constitution considered slaves to be property, not persons. In recent decades, the notion of legal personhood has been a hotly contested issue with respect to human fetuses. Ruling on this issue in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared that the word “person” as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to the unborn.

Second, it's also clear that being human fails to be necessary for being a legal person. Perhaps the most obvious example stems from the granting of legal personhood to corporations. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in the nineteenth century that corporations were explicitly declared to be legal persons in the sense of the Fourteenth Amendment. Given that a corporation consists of a collection of human beings, this declaration might not seem to fully sever the link between being human and being a legal person, but there are also numerous examples of legal systems having granted personhood to inanimate objects such as temples, church buildings, and ships. Moreover, in recent years, legal scholars have contemplated whether we might appropriately extend legal personhood to the great apes (Francione 1993), computer systems with artificial intelligence (Solum 2008), and natural objects such as forests, rivers, and oceans (Stone 1972). In a historic ruling in late 2014, an Argentinean appeals court recognized Sandra, a captive orangutan, as a non-human person who accordingly has the basic right of bodily autonomy. As a result of the ruling, Sandra will be transferred from the Buenos Aires zoo to an animal sanctuary.

As this suggests, an entity might be a legal person relative to one legal system yet not a legal person relative to another. Whether a given entity counts as a legal person does not depend solely on the entity's nature but rather on facts about a given legal system. This sharply differentiates the notion of legal personhood from the notion of moral personhood, in which facts about the nature of the entity are taken to be paramount.

Generally speaking, when we say that an entity has moral personhood, we include it as part of our moral community and treat it as deserving of moral consideration. Sometimes moral personhood is identified specifically with having the right to life. In this way of viewing the notion, what it is for an entity to be a person in the moral sense is for it to have the right to life. More commonly, however, the notion of moral personhood is understood more broadly so that what it is for an entity to be a person in the moral sense is for it to be an agent with rights and responsibilities.

Suppose that Bill has come to visit his friend Jack and that, after a few too many drinks, Bill becomes increasingly belligerent for no apparent reason. First he picks up Jack's favorite lamp and smashes it to bits. Next he kicks Jack's cat. And finally he slaps Jack across the face. Clearly, each of these actions was wrong, and Bill is probably not going to be invited over again anytime soon. But while it was wrong to slap Jack because it wrongs him, and while I suspect that many of us would agree that it was wrong to kick the cat because it wrongs the cat, matters are different when it comes to the lamp. What makes the smashing of the lamp wrong was not that it wrongs the lamp. The fact that the lamp belongs to Jack, and that he values it, makes it unacceptable for Bill to smash it. But the lamp, lacking any interests of its own, cannot be morally wronged. It is not the kind of thing that can have any rights, and likewise, not the kind of thing to which we have any moral obligations. Unlike Jack and the cat, the lamp lacks moral status.

Treating both Jack and the cat as having moral status does not commit us to saying that the wrong done to Jack and the wrong done to the cat were on a par. There are all sorts of reasons that it might be worse to harm a human being than to harm a cat. For example, some philosophers have claimed that moral status – and hence moral personhood – comes in degrees, so perhaps a human has a fuller degree of moral personhood than a cat (see, e.g., Warren 1997). That said, it's also worth noting that not everyone agrees that a cat has any degree of moral personhood at all. Historically, this latter view has been closely associated with Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher. On Kant's view, the cat, like the lamp, is a mere thing.

Our stance on issues of this kind depends on our account of moral personhood – that is, on what feature or set of features we think an entity has to have in order for it to be a moral person. Accounts of moral personhood attempt to specify its necessary and sufficient conditions. To say that a condition is necessary for moral personhood is to say that all entities counting as persons in the moral sense must have met that condition; meeting the condition is required for moral personhood. To say that a condition is sufficient for moral personhood is to say that any entities meeting that condition count as persons in the moral sense; meeting the condition is enough for moral personhood. Thus, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for moral personhood specifies the conditions such that all and only entities meeting those conditions are moral persons.

What I'll call species accounts treat membership in a particular species – typically, the human species – to be both necessary and sufficient for personhood. Such views, which seem to have their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, are frequently defended on religious grounds. Often cited in this context is the following biblical passage from the book of Genesis:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

(Genesis 1:27–1:28, American Standard Version)

This passage seems to suggest two different considerations relevant to the defense of species accounts: (1) humans have special moral status because they (and only they) are made in God's image; and (2) humans have special moral status because God gave them dominion over the animals.

Species accounts have been subject to considerable criticism in contemporary discussion of moral personhood. Apart from a theological justification – i.e., apart from simply taking it to be true as a matter of religious faith – it is difficult to see how such an account could be defended. Moreover, many philosophers have charged that a focus on species seems as arbitrary as a focus on race or sex or nationality. For example, Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1975 book Animal Liberation has been extremely influential in the fight for animal rights, argues as follows:

Racis...