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Introduction
Practical identity and narrative agency
Catriona Mackenzie
Introduction
Philosophical reflection on personal identity encompasses a number of distinct, but connected concerns.1 One set of concerns relates to questions about the conditions for personhood. What makes a being a person, as distinct from some other kind of entity? And which capacities are essential to personhood such that loss of these capacities might make someone no longer a person? Another set of concerns relates to numerical, as distinct from qualitative, identity. Which criteria are relevant in determining whether one individual should be counted as the same or as a different person from another individual who is qualitatively identical or extremely similar? This is the problem of individuation. And on what basis should we rei-dentify a person as numerically the same despite qualitative differences over time or under different descriptions? This is the problem of reidentification. Yet another set of concerns relates to questions concerning characterization. Which characteristics (character traits, motivations, values, mental and bodily capacities and dispositions, emotional attachments, commitments, memories, and so on) make a person the particular person that she is? And when might significant change to these characteristics warrant the judgment, whether by the person herself or by others, that she is a different or no longer the same person even if numerically she is the same?
Within the philosophical literature, these questions have been construed primarily as metaphysical. But the reason such questions are important to us, and sometimes quite urgently so, is that ultimately they are motivated by practical and evaluative considerations. Questions about the conditions for personhood are important because we think persons are due particular kinds of moral consideration. Such questions come to the fore in cases of persons in persistent vegetative states or with advanced dementia, who certainly no longer seem to be the same persons they once were. Practical and evaluative considerations also bear on concerns about numerical identity. For example, in determining moral responsibility and criminal liability, a court will need to determine whether Joe Smith, who was identified by a witness in the police line-up yesterday, is actually responsible for the crime or whether the culprit is his identical twin brother Ned Smith. Parents anxiously awaiting news of their daughter who went missing three days ago while bushwalking will want to know whether the body found at the base of the cliff is actually that of their daughter or of someone else.
The practical and evaluative interests that motivate our concern with personal identity are perhaps most evident in relation to questions of characterization, which focus on “who” a person is, or on those characteristics that make her the particular self-consciousness or first-personal perspective that she is. In this volume we adopt Christine Korsgaard's term “practical identity” to refer to this first-personal perspective and to the person's normative self-conception (1996a: 101). (I discuss Korsgaard's conception of practical identity below.) When a person undergoes dramatic personal change of the kind brought about by debilitating stroke or dementia, her family might well say of her “She is no longer there.” Such statements reflect a painful awareness that the person's particular first-personal perspective has been extinguished or altered so dramatically as to make her almost unrecognizable as the person they have known. Similarly, when a person undergoes a crisis of identity, whether brought about by changes of heart or mind or the experience of trauma, her self-conception is challenged and her relations to others are altered, sometimes prompting the judgment that “She is [or “I am”] no longer the same person.”
But how should such judgments be interpreted? On one interpretation, such judgments are metaphorical extensions from our more fundamental concerns with strict, numerical (metaphysical) identity. However, it is arguable that once practical and evaluative considerations are brought to the fore, it is questions of characterization and practical identity that are in important ways more fundamental to our interests in personal identity. When a court has to determine whether the culprit is Joe Smith or Ned Smith, its interest in numerical identity is shaped by its interest in determining “who” committed the crime and, therefore, which person, qua morally responsible agent, should be held criminally liable. Anxious parents awaiting news of their daughter want to know “who” it is that has fallen off the cliff; that is, whether it is their daughter, as that particular self-consciousness with her particular memories, commitments, characteristics, and attachments, whose life has been extinguished, or that of some other person. And our interests in the conditions of personhood arise from ethical concerns about our moral obligations towards human beings who do not yet, or may never, or no longer, have the kind of first-personal interest in their own lives that characterizes human personhood.
Questions concerning characterization and practical identity raise a number of interesting and difficult philosophical issues concerning the relationship between practical and metaphysical identity, the embodied dimensions of the first-personal perspective, the kind of reflexive agency involved in the self-constitution of one's practical identity, the relationship between practical identity and normativity, and the temporal dimensions of identity and selfhood. In shifting the focus of reflection on identity from solely metaphysical to practical and evaluative concerns, the chapters in this volume aim to address such issues. In doing so, they engage with questions arising from the philosophical literatures on personal identity, phenomenology, moral psychology, action theory, normative ethical theory, and feminist philosophy. A central theme of the volume is the role played by narrative self-understanding in self-constitution, agency, and practical reasoning.
In this introduction, I situate the concerns of the volume in the context of discussions of metaphysical, practical and narrative identity within the contemporary philosophical literature. In the next section, I discuss the impetus for articulating a notion of practical, rather than solely metaphysical, identity. In the third section, I explain why the notion of narrative self-understanding seems best suited to articulating the temporal, embodied, and relational dimensions of the lives of persons. In the final section I provide an overview of the main philosophical themes of the volume and outline the central concerns of each chapter.
From metaphysical to practical identity
Over the past forty years, the philosophical literature on personal identity within the analytic tradition has been dominated by debates concerning whether bodily continuity or psychological continuity is the correct criterion for continuity of personal identity. Briefly, bodily continuity theorists hold that bodily continuity is a necessary and sufficient condition for continuity of personal identity, even despite radical psychological changes, for example, loss of memory or marked changes of personality and character.2 Thus person A at an earlier time t1 is the same as person B at a later time t2 if B is the same bodily continuant as A, by virtue of having enough of the same functioning brain and/or body or being the same human animal. In contrast, psychological continuity theorists hold that person A at an earlier time t1 is the same as person B at a later time t2 by virtue of the right kinds of psychological connection holding between A and B, for example that B remembers doing or experiencing things that A did or experienced, acts on intentions formed by A, exhibits traits of character, personality and temperament that are sufficiently similar to those of A, and so on.3
There are a number of interconnected assumptions underpinning much of this debate. The first is that the relation between person A at t1 and person B at t2 is a logical relation of identity. The second is that our fundamental interest in continuity of personal identity over time is primarily an interest in continuity of numerical identity.4 The third is that the concept “person” is structured around a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that must obtain for its correct application. The fourth is the reductionist assumption that what makes for continuity of personal identity over time is the causal connections between distinct temporal parts or stages of the person and that these connections can be described without reference to the first-person perspective. In what follows, I explain why philosophers who emphasize the importance of the practical dimensions of identity contest some or all of these assumptions.
Reidentification and characterization
In a detailed critique of standard metaphysical approaches to personal identity, Marya Schechtman calls into question the first two of these assumptions (Schechtman 1996: Part 1).5 She argues that the problem with standard views is that they conflate questions of reidentification and questions of characterization, construing our concerns about personal identity as concerns about reidentification while explicitly or implicitly invoking our practical interests in identity in arguing for one or another criterion of rei-dentification. The problem with this conflation is that the question of rei-dentification is concerned with the logical relation of identity and with specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for a person at one time being the same numerically identical person at a later time. The answer to this question must therefore be determinate and cannot admit of degrees. However, our practical interests in identity are focused on questions of characterization: moral responsibility, self-interested concern, survival, and compensation. Since questions of characterization are concerned with psychological, rather than logical, relations, the answers to such questions can and must admit of degrees.
Given the conflation of these two questions, she argues, it is not surprising that neither bodily nor psychological criteria prove satisfactory. Bodily continuity theories do not provide an adequate account of what matters to us about identity, because they are not sufficiently responsive to intuitions about the importance of psychological continuity for our fundamental practical interests in identity. However, psychological continuity theories cannot account for the importance we attach to numerical identity, collapsing the distinction between some past or future person being me and some past or future person being like me (Schechtman 1996: 52–4).6
Schechtman's solution to the problem, at least in The Constitution of Selves, is to argue that intuitions supporting the bodily continuity criterion are in fact responsive to the question of reidentification and that bodily continuity is the appropriate metaphysical and epistemic criterion to use when answering this question. Intuitions supporting the psychological continuity criterion are responsive to the question of characterization. It is identity in this sense that is the focus of our concerns about moral responsibility, self-interested concern, survival, and compensation.
The problem with this solution is that it reproduces, in a different guise, the stand-off between psychological and bodily continuity theories, treating questions of characterization as entirely psychological and representing the body in impersonal terms. This impersonal conception of the body, which pervades the literature,7 provides a foothold for the idea that we can make sense of science-fiction thought experiments such as teletransportation, bodily transfer, and fission. Schechtman's solution does not challenge such views because she conceptualizes our practical interests in the body almost entirely as an interest in reidentification. However, our practical interests in the connections between embodiment and personal identity are not just focused on questions of third-person reidentification but lie at the heart of many of our first-personal subjective concerns about identity, including, importantly, the first-personal significance of one's own body in the constitution of one's practical identity.8 Despite this objection, Schechtman's intervention into the debate has been crucial in distinguishing questions of reidentification from questions of characterization, in drawing attention to the practical interests underlying our concerns about personal identity and in underlining that what matters most is identity in the sense of characterization.
The structure of the concept “person”
The third assumption, that the concept “person” is structured around a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that must obtain for its correct application, is called into question by Tamar Gendler (1999), among others.9 Gendler's analysis focuses on the role of thought experiments within the literature, which function as puzzle or exceptional cases to test our intuitions. Such thought experiments require that, in imagining—from a first- or third-person point of view—radical physical or psychological changes to persons brought about via bizarre science-fiction technologies, we suspend many of our ordinary beliefs about the world and the conditions of human existence. Gendler argues that the implicit methodological justification for taking the intuitions elicited by these puzzle cases as evidence concerning what is essential to the concept “person,” is that they enable us progressively to strip away many of the characteristics ordinarily associated with the concept “person” until we identify those that are essential. This reasoning strategy is justifiable for concepts structured around necessary and sufficient cond...
