What Makes You You
6. Souls
I can imagine someone objecting to FS4 by saying that after the rewiring, JoJo is a single person with two bodies. If that were true, that would mean that she has four eyes, two of which are looking down at the sidewalk and two of which are looking up at the ceiling. If you ask her “are you walking down the street right now?” she might say yes or she might say no, depending on which of her two bodies you ask. But when Alex’s original body (which is in the lab) answers ‘no’, that’s a mistake according to the view in question. For on this view, AlexRW is walking down the street, since AlexRW—the person with Alex’s original body—is a person who has two bodies, one of whose bodies—the one that used to belong to Chad—is walking down the street. So, the idea goes, we don’t have a case of a single thing with conflicting properties after all, thus clearing the way to denying FS4 and insisting that ChadRW and AlexRW are the same person, namely JoJo.
This is an incredibly weird way of thinking about the DOUBLE TROUBLE case. And it can’t be right, for the very same reasons that it can’t be right to say that conjoined twins Abby and Brittany are the same person (see section 4.1). Suppose that ChadRW goes on to marry a man named ‘Emir’. Emir later kisses AlexRW, and then kills ChadRW so he can be with AlexRW. If ChadRW and AlexRW were the same person, then Emir isn’t cheating on ChadRW, since Emir was kissing ChadRW (a.k.a. AlexRW); and Emir didn’t kill anyone, since ChadRW is AlexRW, and ChadRW is still alive (all Emir did, on this view, is destroy one of ChadRW’s two bodies). But surely that’s wrong. Emir did cheat on ChadRW, and the district attorney would be right to charge him with homicide—all of which presupposes that FS4 is right, and that ChadRW and AlexRW are two different people.
The Same Soul Account could then be put to work in addressing the various challenging cases we have been discussing. Abby and Brittany, one might say, are different people because they have two different souls. The conscious and unconscious man on the island are the same person because they have the same soul. MaleT
and MaleW in the BODY SWAP case are different people because Raúl’s soul left the male body and now inhabits the female body.
But what exactly is “a soul”? I suspect that when people talk about their souls, this is just a roundabout way of talking about themselves. For instance, if you’re talking about souls in the first place, you probably think that your soul is something that will eventually come apart from your body and that will (if you have behaved yourself) go to heaven. Certainly, though, you don’t think it’s something other than you that goes to heaven. It’s you yourself who will go to heaven. In that case, saying “my soul will go to heaven” is just another way of saying “I will go to heaven,”
and maybe calling yourself “a soul” is just a way of signaling that you take yourself to be a ghostly thing that merely inhabits—but isn’t the same thing as—your physical body.
Let’s suppose that’s what you mean: you are your soul. But then the Same Soul Account doesn’t actually answer the question of personal identity. For suppose that “A’s soul” is just a fancy way of referring to A herself, and “B’s soul” is just a fancy way of referring to B herself. In that case, all that the Same Soul Account is saying is: A is the same person as B if and only if A is the same person as B. And while that’s true, it’s also completely trivial and uninformative. It’s like answering the question of what makes someone a bachelor by saying that A is bachelor if and only if A is a bachelor. That’s true, but it’s trivial, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything about what makes someone a bachelor.
Nor, in that case, does the Same Soul Account actually shed light on the cases we have been discussing. You say that Abby and Brittany are different people because they have different souls.
But that’s just a fancy way of saying that Abby and Brittany are different people because they’re different people, which isn’t much of an explanation at all. The same goes for TOTAL
BLACKOUT: saying that the conscious and unconscious man are the same person because they have the same soul is just a roundabout way of making the utterly uninformative claim that they are the
same person because they’re the same person. The Same Soul Account is particularly unhelpful in DOUBLE TROUBLE. The Same Soul Account says that whether JoJo is ChadRW or AlexRW depends on which of those two people has JoJo’s soul. But that just means that whether JoJo is ChadRW or AlexRW depends on which of them is JoJo—which is exactly what we’re trying to figure out!
Perhaps you don’t want to say that a person is the same thing as their soul. Suppose, instead, you want to say that the soul is merely one part of the person (their body being the other part). In that case, saying that Abby and Brittany are different people because they have different souls would be saying something nontrivial, namely that they are different people in virtue of failing to share a certain special immaterial part. Still, there are problems with the account, so understood.
The first problem is that it’s still entirely unhelpful for settling questions of personal identity. Even if you think JoJo and her soul are two different things, what could possibly determine whether JoJo’s soul went into ChadRW’s body or AlexRW’s body? Both of them think and act just like JoJo, so there would seem to be nothing at all to settle the question of which one acquired her soul.
Indeed, the account leaves us with no way to assure ourselves that we persist from one moment to the next. You can check whether you are a psychological descendant of the person who was reading this page a moment ago, or whether you have the same body as that person, but there’s no way to check whether you have the same immaterial part as that person—and therefore (if the Same Soul Account is right) no way to know that you are the same person who was reading this page a moment ago!
The second problem involves the separability of the soul from the body. If these really are different parts of a person, there should be nothing in principle to stop the immaterial part of one person from coming apart from that person and combining with another body at a later time. Suppose it turns out that your immaterial part (your “soul”) is the same one that used to be part of Harriet Tubman. You don’t look like her. You didn’t inherit any of her memories and personality traits. All that’s happened is that an immaterial thing that used to be part of her is now a part of you. Certainly, we shouldn’t say in that case that you are Harriet Tubman. Finding out that your immaterial part used to be a part
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.