Reading: Williams 'The Self and the Future' in Perry Personal Identity
Parfit 'Personal Identity' in Perry Personal Identity
Williams and Parfit both seek to give an account of personal identity which will explain certain examples which they discuss. Williams argues that it cannot be decisively proved whether personal identity can be equated with bodily continuity, or whether it is better to give a mentalistic account. In the example of the changing bodies case he is inclined to give more weight to the idea of bodily continuity, but he himself admits that the two differing presentations of the experiment create a problem which he cannot come up with a decisive answer to. Parfit, on the other hand, thinks that problems about personal identity rest on two false beliefs, which I will discuss in the main of my essay, and that personal identity can be explained in terms of the degrees of psychological connectedness. He abandons the idea of identity and argues that, in a brain division case, I would survive as both but be identical with neither. I do not find his account as persuasive as it might be and I will raise a number of suggested criticisms in my discussion of his paper. Neither Williams nor Parfit discuss the possibility that there may be something other than just the mind and body which contains the blueprint of who we are, namely the soul.
The case that Williams bases his discussion round is that of body swapping. We are asked to imagine that person A and person B go into a machine and all the information from A's brain is programmed into B's brain, and vice versa. (Williams introduces the limitation that A and B must be sufficiently alike for B's body to reflect A's personality and, likewise, for A's body to reflect B's personality). The important question that we have to ask ourselves is whether the resulting A-body-person is A or B. (Of course, calling the experiment 'body swapping' presupposes that the result will be that the A-body-person will be B, and so it is helpful not to use that name for the experiment). Williams then adds that before the experiment, A and B are asked which body they would like to be given $100,000 and which they would like to be tortured after the experiment has taken place (they are asked to make their choice on purely selfish grounds). It would seem as though the intuitively more appealing choice for A to make would be to choose for the A-body-person to be tortured, which gives weight to the idea that A and B do indeed swap bodies. This mentalistic account seems to suggest that caring about what happens to me in the future in not necessarily caring about what happens to the body I know have. So bodily continuity is not a necessary condition of personal identity on this view. However I would raise a criticism to this suggestion and that is that when I say 'I am holding a pen' I am not saying that my memories and my conscious experience are holding a pen, but rather I seem to be saying that my body is holding a pen. So it seems that bodies are important in personal identity and cannot just be dismissed.
Williams then looks at the experiment from a different angle. He considers person A fearing being tortured in the future. He claims that the person would fear being tortured even if they believed that all their memories would be swapped with someone else's beforehand. The fear of pain seems to extend through psychological changes and this gives weight to a bodily continuity argument. But this presents Williams with a problem because this latter example is simply one branch of our first experiment, and we had decided that it was rational for A to choose for the A-body-person to be tortured after the experiment. He now highlights two differences between the two cases. The first difference is that, in the second case, it is presented to person A that the torture is going to happen to him . But it seems as though the experimenter is not wrong in presenting it like this if we are to accept the principal that: "my undergoing physical pain in the future is not excluded by any psychological state I may be in at the time [except unconsciousness]" (P.187)
The other difference is that in the second case, person B is not mentioned. But Williams argues that knowing about him would not affect person A's expectations of the torture. Williams discusses six cases in which something happens to A and then he is tortured, and he knows about it beforehand. He argues that in the case of our initial experiment (case 6 here) A's fears reach through in the same way as they do in cases 1 - 5, because the experience that A has in case 6 is exactly the same as the experience that A has in case 5. And yet we had previously said that in case 6 the A-body-person is identical with B. In objection to Williams we could argue along the lines of Nozick's closest continuer view, that cases 5 and 6 differ significantly because extrinsic facts have a bearing on A's situation. In case 5 the A-body-person is still the closest continuer to A, whereas in 6 it would seem the B-body-person is the closest continuer and so the A-body-person is not A.
Williams concludes by saying that the two presentations of the experiment bring about contradictory conclusions, which cannot satisfactorily be reconciled (although Williams slightly favours the bodily continuity view in this case)
My main criticism of Williams is that he does not give a satisfactory explanation of what it is for there to be personal identity, and he does not seem to favour either a mentalistic or a bodily-continuity view of personal identity.
Parfit, in his article entitled 'Personal Identity', claims that the personal identity is only a problem if we insist on holding the beliefs that:
(1) The question of personal identity must have an answer, and
(2) Unless we can answer the question about identity we cannot answer other important questions (about survival, memory, responsibility etc.) Parfit seeks to formulate an account of personal survival which does not rely on the notion of identity. He bases his discussion round a case in which a brain is divided and each half of the brain is transplanted into two clones of my body. There seem to be three exhaustive alternatives as to what happens to me. Either:
(a) I do not survive, or
(b) I survive as one of the two resulting people, or
(c) I survive as both
Parfit argues that the first two suggestions are implausible, the first because a double success cannot be viewed as a failure, and the second because each half is exactly the same so nothing would make me one rather than the other. So Parfit argues that in this case I survive as both, although I am neither (in the sense that I am not identical with either, because I cannot be identical with two things that are not identical with each other). But Parfit can be criticised because it is still not clear who the 'I' is. Surely if I will be neither then it is death?
The crux of Parfit's argument is that survival does not imply identity and there are degrees of survival. He suggests that survival rests on the idea of psychological continuity, which includes lots of relations such as memory, intentions etc. which don't presuppose identity.
Parfit goes on to discuss the case of fusion, where two people's bodies grow into one while they are unconscious, and so only one person wakes up. He says that regarding this as death is less absurd than in the division case, although he thinks that this is not death. I do not think that he gives a convincing argument as to why we should not regard this case as death, and therefore it does not seem as though he has provided a conclusive argument against the all-or-nothing approach to survival. It seems as though he just relies on us agreeing with him that survival can have degrees. Parfit argues that if you have psychological connectedness (which is like psychological continuity but it is non-transitive), then you have personal identity. Therefore, in the brain division case, although I am neither of the resulting people there is a sense in which I survive as both, but I do not find this argument convincing.
To conclude I would argue that both Williams' and Parfit's approaches are flawed for the principal reason that both think that the question of personal identity can be explained purely in terms of body, brain and experiences without any appeal to the soul. The idea of a person looking forward to being duplicated does not seem to make sense. Neither Williams nor Parfit leave room for souls because they believe that everything that makes up you is in your brain and this is a highly contentious claim.
© Anne Witton 1996. No part of this article may be copied without my permission.
