What Makes You You
7. Combining the Psychological and Bodily Accounts
of her may be exciting, just as it would be exciting to find out that a surprisingly large number of carbon atoms in your body used to be part of her. But neither of these would show that you’re the same person as her.
For these reasons, I don’t think that the Same Soul Account is any improvement on the physical and psychological accounts we have already considered and dismissed.
having to say that JoJo is numerically the same as two separate people, the Body-And-Mind Account is able to avoid the problem by denying that JoJo is numerically the same as either of those people (since neither has the same body as JoJo).
But the Body-And-Mind Account does fall victim to some of the other objections we considered. For instance, it gets the wrong result in TOTAL BLACKOUT. The conscious man at the earlier time is neither a psychological ancestor nor a psychological descendant of the unconscious man at the later time. So trivially, it’s not true that the conscious man both has the same body and is an ancestor or descendant of the unconscious man. The Body-And-Mind Account therefore wrongly says that he isn’t the same person as the unconscious man. Or take BODY SWAP.The person with the male body before the rewiring is the same person as the person with the female body after the rewiring. But they don’t have the same body, and thus the Body-And-Mind Account wrongly implies that they aren’t the same person.
How about the Body-Or-Mind Account?Here we get exactly the opposite results: the Body-Or-Mind Account escapes the problems that plagued the Body-And-Mind Account but is plagued by the problems that the Body-And-Mind Account does escape. The Body-Or-Mind Account correctly says that the conscious man is numerically the same as the unconscious man, since they do at least have the same body, and it correctly says that in BODY SWAP the person with male body on Tuesday is numerically the same as the person with the female body on Wednesday, since the one is at least a psychological descendant of the other. But now we get the wrong results in DOUBLE
TROUBLE. The Body-Or-Mind Account says that being a psychological ancestor is enough for personal identity, which is all we need to get the problematic result that JoJo is the same person as two separate people. And it says that having the same body is enough for personal identity, which is all we need to get the problematic result that Abby and Brittany are the same person.
In a way, it’s no surprise that neither of these hybrid accounts work. The Body-And-Mind Account says that both sameness of body and psychological descendance are necessary for personal identity, but we already knew (from BODY SWAP and TOTAL
BLACKOUT) that neither is necessary. The Body-Or-Mind Account says that sameness of body and psychological descendance are each sufficient for personal identity, but we already knew (from CONJOINED TWINS and DOUBLE TROUBLE) that neither is sufficient.
It’s no wonder that these hybrid accounts inherit the problems of the “pure” accounts they’re meant to replace.
8. Conclusion
We have seen that neither physical factors, nor psychological factors, nor appeals to souls can yield a satisfactory answer to the question of personal identity. And that’s puzzling, since it is hard to see what else could be involved in making a person the person that they are.
Not only is it puzzling; it’s also troubling. For there are pressing ethical and life-and-death issues that seem to turn on the question of what makes you you. Is it true that a person’s life begins at conception? In other words, was that fertilized egg cell in your mother’s womb you? If you are in a horrific accident, is that brain-dead person on life support in the hospital bed you?
And let’s not kid ourselves: we will get to a point, possibly even in your own lifetime, where we have the technology to replicate a person’s mind in a computer simulation. Would that simulated person—with all of your memories, preferences, and personality traits—be you? Would uploading your consciousness into such a simulation be a way of surviving the death of your body, or would that be a numerically different person—very much like you, but not actually you? It is hard to see how to answer any of these questions without an answer to the question of personal identity.
Reflection Questions
1. Can you defend the Same Body Account against the Conjoined Twins argument from section 4.1?
2. Would a Same Brain Account be any improvement on a Same Body Account? Why or why not?
3. Can the Psychological Descendant Account be defended against the Blackout Argument (section 5.1)? If so, how?
4. In section 7, I considered two different hybrid accounts of personal identity and raised problems for both. Can you articulate a superior hybrid account that avoids some of these problems?
Sources
The debate over personal identity largely traces back to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which advances a psychological account of personal identity and presents a version of the Body Swap Argument as well as an argument against the Same Soul Account. See Derek Parfit’s “Personal Identity” for a classic discussion of fission cases, and see Heather Demarest’s
“Fission May Kill You” for an exploration of the “one person, two bodies” strategy. Here are some additional resources:
• “The Twins Who Share a Body” (youtube.com)
• Elizabeth Camp: The Narrative Self (wi-phi):
• Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan: Animalism and the Varieties of Conjoined Twinning
• Robert Casati and Achille Varzi: Insurmountable Simplicities (pp.17-23)
• Crash Course Philosophy: Personal Identity (youtube.com)
• Clarence Darrow: The Myth of Immortality
• Michael Della Rocca: Locke on Personal Identity (wi-phi.com)
• Daniel Dennett: Where Am I?
• Amy Kind: Persons and Personal Identity
• Ifeanyi A. Menketi: Person and Community in African Traditional Thought
• John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
• Marya Schechtman: Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of the Life
• Mark Siderits: Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy
• Nina Strohminger: The Essential Self (wi-phi.com)
C
HAPTER4 Don’t Fear the Reaper
Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments advanced in other chapters. Different chapters represent different philosophical perspectives.
1. Introduction
My aim in this chapter is to argue for the surprising conclusion that you shouldn’t fear death. In short, the idea is that the only things that can be bad for you, ultimately speaking, are pains and other such unpleasant sensations. Accordingly, since you won’t be experiencing any unpleasant sensations once you’re dead, being dead isn’t bad for you, and you shouldn’t fear things that aren’t bad for you. In other words:
Against Fearing Death
(FD1) You cease to be conscious when you die
(FD2) If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead is not bad for you
(FD3) So, being dead is not bad for you
(FD4) If being dead is not bad for you, then you should not fear death
(FD5) So, you should not fear death
I should emphasize that I am not denying that dying is bad.
The process of dying can of course be quite painful—both physically and emotionally—and, thus, bad for you. If you’re going to be torn apart by piranhas tomorrow, that’s certainly bad for you and something to be afraid of. But you should fear it because the dying will be painful, not because you will be dead at the end of it. On the other hand, if you are about to be anesthetized for some surgery and there is a very good chance that you will die painlessly while under anesthesia, this is not bad for you and there is nothing to fear.
I’ll defend the opening premises in reverse order, first arguing (in sections 2-3) that if it’s true that you cease to be conscious when
you die then being dead is not bad for you, and then arguing (in sections 4-5) that it indeed is true that you cease to be conscious when you die. Then, having established that being dead isn’t bad for you, I defend FD4 (in section 6) on the grounds that it is irrational to fear things that aren’t bad for you.
Let me make one last preliminary remark before launching into the defense of FD2. Some readers may be strongly inclined to reject the first premise, FD1, because they think that they will go on, after death, to have conscious experiences in the afterlife.
Perhaps pleasant experiences, or perhaps painful experiences, depending on the will of their Creator. But even such readers have reason to think carefully about FD2. For the Creator may instead decide to punish sinners and nonbelievers, not by sending them to hell, but by permanently snuffing out their consciousness after they die. You probably think that this would be bad for you. But if FD2 is true, then it wouldn’t in any way be bad for you (and thus wouldn’t be any sort of punishment). So if you are inclined to say that being snuffed out by your Creator is bad for you, then you’ll need to find some way to resist my argument below for FD2.