THE PROBLEM OF PERSONAL IDENTITY:
In fact, at least two problems, connected but
different:
1) A problem concerning RECOGNITION or
Re-Identification: our recognition
of ourselves and other people as the people that we are and the same people
over time.
E.g. I know her, I went to school with her, we
were in the same class.
Importance: (a) the business of life; (b) assigning ethical and legal responsibility
etc.
This can be taken as a question of epistemology: how do we know that it is the same person
that we met at another time; or as a question of ontology: what is a person and in what does their continuity
consist.
2) A problem concerning the CONSTRUCTION of (a)
personal (or a communal) identity:
how we make ourselves or are made the individuals (and also communities) that
we are, with the identity which we have.
The answer to questions of the kind, who am I?? what am I really, what do I stand for, where
do I fit in?
This presumes some kind of unity of process and a
capacity for re-identification (i.e. an answer to the first problem), probably,
but is not solved quite so easily as that.
The first, or easy problem is the one more
commonly meant in philosophy, though occasionally philosophers also think about
the second, e.g. Paul Ricoeur 'Oneself as Another', or Catherine Keller (From a
Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and the Self).
CRITERIA
FOR PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION or re-identification
Answers to the first problem are typically
construed in terms of WHAT CRITERIA WE USE OR SHOULD USE in order to determine whether
it is the same person or not.
Criteria generally may be classed into three
possibly overlapping kinds, necessary,
sufficient, or relevant. For example, for
it to rain it is necessary that there be clouds; however, it often happens that we have clouds
and don't have rain, so it seems that clouds by themselves are not sufficient
for rain. On the other hand, being shot
three times in the head with a high-powered weapon is quite sufficient for
getting to be dead, though there are lots of other ways of getting dead so it
is not exactly necessary. Finally, it
seems that one may smoke and not get cancer, also get cancer and not have
smoked; but still all except some die-hards acknowledge that smoking is a relevant
factor in the determination of the likely cancer rate in a particular community
or even in the probability of a particular person getting cancer.
Some
plausible candidates for criteria which we invoke
or should invoke in the determination of personal identity include:
1) The person has the same name;
2) Similarity of bodily characteristics, physical deportment, walk,
mannerisms - taking account of age difference since last time etc;
3) Similarity of behaviourial characteristics and qualities or dispositions
of character;
4) The person claims to be the same person and can report memories of events
which we share; (Cf. Mission to Mars)
5) In my own case, memory itself;
6) What other people say.
To what class of criterion do these belong? 1) is neither necessary nor sufficient but still
relevant, and probably 6) also. But what
about the others? How much change can we
tolerate?
This latter question of how much change we can
tolerate is also a practical question.
Should we hold people responsible for what they did 30 or 50 years
ago? What are we doing when we do
this? Paying tribute to the
victims?? But is it really fair to
punish an 80 year old for what was done by a 20 year old in another place and
time and culture? Or does paying tribute
to victims and righting old wrongs mean we have to go this way? Whatever about the perpetrators, the victims
seem to be the same? How can this be?
But how are we to solve problems like this?
One way of bringing out the limitations of our
everyday criteria is by reference to various special cases. This is actually
quite common in the philosophical literature.
Some
examples:
·
Amnesia - after a psychic
shock or a knock on the head; with or without a change in character; (Regarding
Henry with Harrison Ford as an example, of this and also the next one.)
·
Brain damage, e.g. the child
with brain damage on TV in 1996: his mother was depicted as saying something
along the lines, It's as if one child died and another was born;
·
Examples of massive plastic
surgery: suppose you woke up tomorrow for all intents and purposes in a body
you didn't recognize...
·
Kafka-esque and other such
examples, e.g. the movie The Fly;
·
Star Trek possibilities; enhanced Star Trek, where they don't send the
matter, just the information...
·
Head transplants, from The Australian,
·
The question of personal
identity across death and after death.
What such marginal examples illustrate, probably,
is that our common life criteria are adapted to common life cases; indeed, that
our common life concept of personal identity is a rough and ready notion good
enough for most common life cases but with lots of loose edges. Still, there are big issues at stake, e.g. of
moral and legal responsibility. If any of
the science fiction type cases stopped being science fiction, we might have to
sit down together and decide which way to jump.
Note also the film The Kid, with Bruce Willis.
What criteria did Bruce Willis and the 8 year old child deploy? What criteria did Bruce Willis' assistant
deploy?
How the problem is construed (in this case, either
problem) depends to some extent on the assumed metaphysics. In respect of this, we can divide theories of
personal identity into two large families, SUBSTANCE
THEORIES and BUNDLE THEORIES. Is a person e.g. a human person a particular
kind of substance or enduring thing, or a more or less well connected series of
events or happenings?
SUBSTANCE Theories have been
pretty common in both West and East since early times, in the West going back
particularly to Aristotle. According to
this idea, human society and the world in general is composed of different
substances or more or less enduring things relating to each other in various
ways. A person, meanwhile, is a
particular kind of substance or enduring thing, namely an individual substance of a rational nature (= Boethius' famous
definition of a person). As long as the
particular individual substance with its rational nature is maintained, you
still have a person and indeed the same person. (This analysis might apply, for example, to
a person from outer space.)
What then are the criteria for individuation of one person from another, equivalently the criteria for re-cognition or re-identification? Here there is debate. According to the medieval doctor Duns Scotus, we are individuated even on the level of form or core characteristics, a certain this-ness entirely peculiar to the individual person in question and shared by no other - like a smell for a dog perhaps. According to Aquinas on the other hand, it would be possible for two or more people to share exactly the same characteristics, e.g. precisely identical twins. They would still be individuated, however, in so far as those characteristics would be incarnated in different bits of matter and in different places. According to this latter idea, matter rather than form is the ultimate principle of individuation. Whether this latter is conceivable however is yet another question: things in different places by that very fact are subjected to slightly different causal influences and will therefore be slightly different (the philosopher Leibniz, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernables). Also, we exchange our matter every seven years or so (the skin every seven weeks apparently), so how can matter be what makes us the peculiar persons we are? Probably part of the point is that spatio-temporal co-ordinate continuity helps a lot to determine substance identity.
However, both solutions are probably rather
abstract and theoretical and removed from our everyday practices.
A further complicating factor for determining what
exactly and precisely has to be maintained in order to have the same person, is
the stance one takes on the mind-body
problem. A Platonic or a Cartesian
dualist might be inclined to identify the real person with the mind or
soul. This would make it rather easy to
maintain personal identity across death and after death: as long as the soul or
mind is there, you still have the person.
Various kinds of non-dualists would tend to require the body to be involved
somehow in the definition of a person, and would typically have considerable
problems with disembodied human persons.
However, the matter is quite complicated, with some non-dualists e.g.
David Griffin, arguing for an afterlife with a rather different relationship
with matter. But he is a Bundle Theorist
anyway.
'BUNDLE' Theories have been
rather rare in the 'West', until David Hume in the 18th Century. They have become fairly common this century
both in the Process tradition (William James, A.N. Whitehead, Charles
Hartshorne) and among certain analytic philosophers. Meanwhile, they have been common in the
so-called East since early Buddhism with its doctrines of No-Self and
Co-dependent Origination. Human beings,
like everything else, are a connected series of events or happenings. There is no string, no soul, self or
substance under it all, just the connected happenings. Identity is not the endurance of a thing, but,
at best, the continuation of a certain cognizable and re-cognizable project or
process.
This connectedness is revealed in and indeed
partly produced by memory. Memory
reveals a certain resemblance of style of happening and also a causal
connectedness even with temporal gaps.
This latter, a kind of inheritance, itself makes for a certain style and
perhaps even a certain continuity of mental project or process - without there
being any particular thing or substance e.g. a 'mind', maintained through the
project. Memory and perception, meanwhile,
also reveals similarity and continuity on the level of body - or the bodily
events or happenings whose complicated connected bundle or spatio-temporal
society we call the body.
The bundle is further cemented into one by the existence of a certain kind of care or concern as a prominent feature of the bundle. There is a care or concern for the happiness or misery of what we are here calling the bundle. This care is for its past and future pains and pleasures (as Hume has it). Whether this care is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion: for classical Buddhism it is the cause of our troubles, making suffering inevitable. On the other hand, the object of ones self-care can shrink or it can expand: Self can take in the neighbours in the Christian sense and indeed the whole of creation (compare Arne Naess' notion of Self-Realization).
Also this Care can express itself as a striving
for virtue and esteemed qualities of character.
The self is also conceptualized from within the bundle itself as a character in a story or a series of connected
stories which makes up 'my life'. We
want our life to be a good story. Or if
this is not possible, if tragedy intervenes, at least that the character or
characters we play in the story be qualified as having esteemed qualities. [This notion, already in Hume for example, is
nowadays conceptualized under the term, Narrative Identity. For this notion, cf. esp. Paul
Ricoeur. Though it has become quite
common.]
By this stage, it appears, the answer to the
Second Question helps with the answer to the first.
For more on how much one can do, eventually for
both problems, even with a 'bundle' theory, see my (now rather ancient and
always fairly inadequate) paper, "Hume's Positive Contributions on
Personal Identity", Humanity and the
After Life (Sydney College of Divinity, Kensington, 1989), pp. 66-81. An advantage of bundle theories is that they
presume less. Significant difficulties
include: 1) can they really cater for the notion of personal responsibility?
And 2) can they really make sense of knowing, or does one need at least a
'transcendental ego' in a Kantian or Cartesian/Husserlian sense?