Does Francis’ enhancement-seeking request threaten his identity in some signifi- cant way? Whatever the precise meaning of “identity,” the term carries a connota- tion of gravitas. This connotation and the sense that seeking a change in personality may pose a threat to one’s identity can provoke the feeling that something morally troubling is going on when one makes a request like Francis’. Some authors have clearly had this troubled feeling. For example, Carl Elliott writes:
What is worrying about so-called “enhancement technologies” may not be the prospect of improvement [one would hope not!] but the more basic fact of altering oneself, of changing capacities and characteristics fundamental to one’s identity…. Making him smarter, giving him a different personality or even giving him a new face—these things cut much closer to the bone…. They mean, in some sense, transforming him into a new person. (Elliott 2003:
28–29, emphasis mine)
Providing another example, the President’s Council on Bioethics states the follow- ing: “In seeking by these [technological] means to be better than we are or to like ourselves better than we do, we risk ‘turning into someone else,’ confounding the identity we have acquired through natural gift cultivated by genuinely lived experi- ences” (President’s Council on Bioethics 2003: 300). The basic idea seems to be that seeking a new personality and/or changing who one is (becoming someone else) poses a morally problematic threat to identity.
To evaluate these and similar claims, we need to be clearer about the relevant sense, or senses, of the term “identity.” Then we can ask whether Francis’ request or
4 See the American Psychiatric Association 2013.
5 See, e.g., Buchanan et al. 2000: Chaps. 4 and 5, Kamm 2009, and Buchanan 2011.
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some other types of enhancement using biomedical means would pose a threat to identity. If so, then we can proceed to the question of whether or to what extent the threat to identity is morally significant.6
Beginning with “identity”—or, as philosophers often say, “personal identity”—
this term has two importantly distinct senses. Identity in the numerical sense, the sense that is usually invoked when analytic philosophers discuss personal identity, is a relation that applies not only to persons, or human beings, but to any particular thing, including inanimate objects. Numerical identity is the relation a thing has to itself, both (1) over time and (2) across “possible worlds” (possible states of the world, both actual and counterfactual). Of a wooden desk, for example, we may ask when in the history of its wooden pieces it first came into existence (when fully assembled?) and under what conditions it will go out of existence (when entirely disassembled?). This concerns its numerical identity over time. We may also ask whether this desk would continue to exist if its wooden pieces were replaced, one by one, by plastic pieces of the same shape and size. And would this very desk have come into being if a different wood had been used to create a desk of the same shape and size as the actually existing desk in question? These are questions about the desk’s “trans-world” identity.
While perhaps only philosophers can get excited about the criteria of an inani- mate object’s cross temporal and trans-world identity, others are likely to join in the excitement when the issue is a human being’s numerical identity. When a person dies, for example, it is plausible to think—at least for those who do not believe in an afterlife—that the individual goes out of existence. Assuming this is correct, then knowing the criteria for numerical identity over time will allow us to determine when someone has died: at the moment when the individual’s identity is disrupted so that she no longer exists. According to a biological understanding of human beings’ numerical identity, each of us will die when her or his biological life comes to an end (a criterion that requires some interpretation to decide between whole- brain death and irreversible loss of cardiopulmonary functioning).7 According to the most plausible version of the psychological approach to understanding our identity, each of us will die upon irreversibly losing the capacity for consciousness.8 If this view is correct, then irreversible comas and irreversible vegetative states—which are compatible with spontaneous respiration and a functioning heart—are actually states of death (even though no jurisdiction treats them as such). Although the criteria for human beings’ numerical identity is a topic of vigorous disagreement among philosophers—and, in effect, among physicians, biologists, and laypeople who debate the definition of death and the criteria for a distinct human being’s com- ing into existence—it is a point of conceptual agreement that numerical identity persists as long as one stays in existence. So a genuine threat to identity in this sense would be a genuine threat to one’s continued existence.
6 The reflections on identity and enhancement that follow are developed more fully in DeGrazia 2005a: especially Chap. 6. See also DeGrazia 2005b.
7 See Olson 1997 and DeGrazia in Luper 2014: 88–99.
8 See McMahan 2002: Chaps. 1 and 5.
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With this much clear, it quickly becomes apparent that Francis’ request cannot possibly pose a threat to his identity in the numerical sense, because it is obvious that the desired changes in his personality and inner life would not be tantamount to his dying or literally going out of existence. If he becomes sunnier in outlook, more extraverted, and better able to focus on tasks that require sustained concentration, it will be he who has undergone these changes and he who will remember how things were before the changes, and no one who loves him will have reason to grieve his passing. Even if one of his associates finds it apt to say he has become “a new per- son,” the term “new” cannot literally mean “numerically distinct”; it would just mean “qualitatively different.” This observation takes us to the second sense of
“identity.”
Unlike numerical identity, the second sense of identity—narrative identity—
applies only to persons.9 That is because only persons have life-narratives from a first-person perspective, that is, implicit (if not also explicit) autobiographies.
Narrative identity involves one’s self-conception: one’s sense of what is most impor- tant in one’s life and what therefore defines who one is or what sort of person one is in a qualitative sense. Although a person suffering from amnesia may ask “Who am I?” and have the numerical sense of identity in mind, usually those who in everyday life ask “Who am I?” are trying to figure out what is most important to them as they seek self-given direction in life. Relatedly, it is identity in the narrative sense that falls apart, or threatens to do so, in an identity crisis. In deciding whether to be a teacher or corporate lawyer, whether to be a workaholic or to leave plenty of room for pastimes, whether to marry so-and-so or remain single, whether to become a parent, and what sorts of associates one wants to become close to, a person is defin- ing her narrative identity. Insofar as Francis wants to become a somewhat different sort of person—in the way he relates to and thinks about others and in his capacity to remain focused on particular tasks—he might be described as undertaking to change his narrative identity.
As noted earlier, some commentators have expressed moral concerns about seek- ing enhancements with an eye toward changing one’s identity. But why is this “wor- rying,” to use Elliott’s term, and why should we speak of the “risk” of “turning into someone else,” as the President’s Council on Bioethics does? One way to under- stand such concerns is in terms of a conflation of numerical identity and narrative identity, as in this argument:
1. This use of enhancements threatens one’s identity.
2. Threatening one’s identity is morally problematic.
3. Therefore, this use of enhancements is morally problematic.
By now, the reader should be able to see the fallacy in this argument. Consider Francis’ proposed use of an SSRI and a stimulant. Like other proposals to use enhancements that are likely in the real world within the foreseeable future, this use of enhancements would not threaten his identity in the numerical sense—it would not threaten to end his existence and create a numerically distinct person in his
9 See Schechtman 1996.
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wake—but would at most “threaten” his identity in the narrative sense. That is, it would have the prospect of changing his narrative identity. But premise 2 says that threatening one’s identity is morally problematic. This seems true if we are talking about numerical identity: ending someone’s existence is a big deal. But to make premise 2 plausible by understanding it in terms of numerical identity is to render the argument fallacious, for by switching the meaning of “identity” from the narra- tive to the numerical sense, the argument commits the fallacy of equivocation. On this reading of the argument, it is straightforwardly unsound.
It is possible, however, that commentators who are worried about the use of enhancements to alter one’s identity are focused entirely on narrative identity. If so, the above argument does not equivocate. But the question then arises, what would be wrong with a threat to one’s identity, at least when the “threat” is autonomously chosen? What, that is, is wrong with intending to change one’s narrative identity with the use of such enhancements as SSRIs and stimulants? As far as I know, the commentators in question have never furnished a cogent answer to this question.
It is important to realize that we frequently seek to change our narrative identi- ties, by changing ourselves, in ways that do not seem particularly problematic or concerning. A Christian who feels repentant about his sins may want to “turn back to Jesus” and become a better person in his own eyes. If he succeeds, he will regard the change as very important and self-defining—an important change in who he is.
Someone else may want to become more philanthropic and less self-centered, and try in this way to become a different person. A dentist may feel that she has had it with her professional trajectory up until the present moment and decide to dedicate herself to her true passion, sculpting. There is nothing morally problematic in these desires for self-change; indeed, they may strike us as admirable. As for Francis’
plan to change his personality, it, too, seems unobjectionable. Or, at least, the fact that it seeks to change him in a way that might be important to his self-told inner story, his narrative identity, does not seem inherently problematic.