We Are Not Human Beings - Andrew M. Bailey

We Are Not Human Beings1

DEREK PARFIT

1

We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. This information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and is in every other way just like me.

Of those who have thought about such cases, some believe that it would be I who would wake up on Mars. They regard Teletransportation as merely the fastest way of travelling. Others believe that, if I chose to be Teletransported, I would be making a terrible mistake. On their view, the person who wakes up would be a mere Replica of me.

This disagreement is about personal identity. To describe such disagreements, we can first distinguish two kinds of sameness. Two black billiard balls may be qualitatively identical, or exactly similar. But they are not numerically identical, or one and the same ball. If I paint one of these balls red, it will cease to be qualitatively identical with itself as it was; but it will still be one and the same ball. Consider next a claim like, `Since her accident, she is no longer the same person'. This claim involves both senses of identity, since it means that she, one and the same person, is not now the same person. That is not a contradiction, since it means that this person's character has changed. This numerically identical person is now qualitatively different.

When people discuss personal identity, they are often discussing what kind of person someone is, or wants to be. That is the question

1 This lecture is taken from material written with the support of a Foundational Research Grant from the Ammonius Foundation, for whose generosity I am very grateful. I hope to publish other parts of this material elsewhere. I have been much helped by comments from Eric Olson, Sydney Shoemaker, and Ingmar Persson.

doi:10.1017/S0031819111000520

Philosophy 87 2012

? The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2012

5

Derek Parfit

involved, for example, in an identity crisis. But I shall be discussing our numerical identity. In our concern about our own futures, that is what we have in mind. I may believe that, after my marriage, I shall be a different person. But that does not make marriage death. However much I change, I shall still be alive if there will be someone living who will be me. And in my imagined case of Teletransportation, my Replica on Mars would be qualitatively identical to me; but, on the sceptic's view, he wouldn't be me. I shall have ceased to exist. That, we naturally assume, is what matters.

In questions about numerical identity, we use two names or descriptions, and we ask whether these refer to the same person. In most cases, we use descriptions that refer to people at different times. Thus, when using the telephone, we might ask whether the person to whom we are speaking now is the same as the person to whom we spoke yesterday. To answer such questions, we must know the criterion of personal identity over time, by which I mean: the relation between a person at one time, and a person at another time, which makes these one and the same person. We can also ask what kind of entity we are, since entities of different kinds continue to exist in different ways.

Views about what we are, and how we might continue to exist, can be placed, roughly, in three main groups. On some views, what we are, or have as an essential part, is a soul: an immaterial persisting entity, which is indivisible, and whose continued existence must be all-or-nothing. Even if we don't believe in immaterial souls, many of us have some beliefs about ourselves, and personal identity, that would be justified only if some such view were true. Though such views make sense, and might have been true, I shall not discuss them today, since we have strong evidence that no such view is true.

Of the other views, some can be called Lockean. Locke famously defined a person as `a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places'.2 Lockean criteria of identity appeal to the kind of psychological continuity that, in my imagined case, holds between me and my Replica. The Lockean view that I have earlier defended, which I called

the Narrow, Brain-Based Psychological Criterion States: If some future person would be uniquely psychologically continuous with me as I am now, and this continuity would have its normal cause, enough of the same brain, this person would be me. If

2 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXVI, Section 9.

6

We Are Not Human Beings

some future person would neither be uniquely psychologically continuous with me as I am now, nor have enough of the same brain, this person would not be me. In all other cases, there would be no answer to the question whether some future person would be me. But there would be nothing that we did not know.

On this view, my Replica would not be me, since he would not have my brain. That, I claimed, would not matter, since being destroyed and Replicated would be as good as ordinary survival. I shall later return briefly to that claim. The other main kind of view appeals not to psychological but to biological continuity, and is now often called Animalist.

In considering this disagreement, I shall first describe some Animalist objections to the various Lockean views that were put forward, in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties, by such people as Shoemaker, Quinton, Perry, Lewis, and me. As Snowdon, Olson, and other Animalists pointed out, we Lockeans said nothing about the human beings ? or to use a less ambiguous phrase, the human animals ? that many of us think we are.

If persons are, in the Lockean sense, entities that can think about themselves, and whose continued existence essentially involves psychological continuity, a human embryo or fetus is not a person. But this fetus is, or becomes, a human animal. This animal's body, Lockeans claim, later becomes the body of a Lockean person. Animalists ask: What then happens to the human animal? It would be convenient for Lockeans if this animal retired from the scene, by ceasing to exist, thereby leaving its body under the sole control of the newly existing person. But that is not what happens. Most human animals continue to exist, and start to have thoughts and other experiences. So if Lockeans distinguish between persons and human animals, their view implies that whenever any person thinks some thought, a human animal also thinks this thought. Every thinking of a thought has two different thinkers. That conclusion seems absurd. As McDowell writes: `surely there are not two lives being led here, the life of the human being. . . and the life of the person.'3 We can call this the Too Many Thinkers Problem.

There may also be an Epistemic Problem. If there are two conscious beings thinking all my thoughts, the person and the animal, how could I know which one I am? If I think I am the person, Animalists object, I might be mistaken, since I may really be the animal.

3 John McDowell, `Reductionism and the First Person', in Reading Parfit, edited by Jonathan Dancy (Blackwell, 1997), 237.

7

Derek Parfit

There is a third problem. Snowdon pointed out that, on Locke's definition, human animals qualify as persons.4 So if Lockeans distinguish persons from human animals, they must admit that, on their view, all of our thoughts and other experiences are had by two persons, one of whom is also an animal. This objection may seem decisive, by undermining the whole point of this Lockean distinction. We can call this the Too Many Persons Problem.

Several Lockeans have suggested answers to these objections. Shoemaker, for example, argues that, if we claim animals to be entities whose criterion of identity is biological, and requires the continued existence of much of their bodies, such animals could not think, or have other mental states, since the concepts that refer to mental states apply only to entities whose criterion of identity is psychological. Though these human animals might seem to have thoughts and experiences, that would not really be true.5

Baker argues that the animal and the person are both constituted by the same body, which gives them an ontological status that is in between being one and the same entity and being two, separately existing entities. For that reason, Baker claims, though there are, strictly, two different thinkers thinking each of our thoughts, we can count these thinkers as if they were one.6

We can next distinguish between concepts which are substance sortals, in the sense that they apply to some persisting entity whenever it exists, and phase sortals, which apply to some entity, in the present tense, only while this entity has certain properties. Two such phase sortals are `teenager' and `caterpillar'. When we reach the age of 20, we cease to be teenagers, but we don't thereby cease to exist. Nor do caterpillars cease to exist when they become butterflies.

I have earlier suggested that, in response to these Animalist objections, Lockeans should claim that the concept of a person is another phase sortal.7 On this view, we are human animals who began to exist as an embryo or fetus though we were not then persons in the Lockean

4 `Persons, Animals, and Ourselves', in The Person and the Human Mind, edited by Christopher Gill (Oxford University Press, 1990), page 90.

5 `On What We Are', in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, edited by Shaun Gallagher (Oxford University Press, 2011). In what follows, I shall not be rejecting Shoemaker's view, but proposing another, simpler way of thinking about ourselves.

6 Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

7 In my `Persons, Bodies, and Human Beings', written around 1992, published in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, edited by John Hawthorne, Dean Zimmerman, and Theodore Sider (Blackwell, 2008).

8

We Are Not Human Beings

sense. And if we suffered brain damage which made us irreversibly unconscious, we would continue to exist, though we would have ceased to be persons. One of Locke's aims was to describe persons in the way that makes most sense of our practical and moral beliefs. `Person', Locke writes, `is a forensic term', applying only to responsible rational beings. We could keep this part of the Lockean view if we claim that we have certain reasons, and certain principles apply to us, only while we are persons. For example, I might point to an ultrasound image of an embryo or fetus, saying `There I am. That was me', but adding that, since I was not then a person, it would not have been wrong for some doctor to kill me. We might make similar claims about the concept of a human being. We might say that, just as an acorn with one green shoot sprouting is not yet an oak tree, an embryo is not yet a human being. And some other moral principles apply to us, we might claim, only after we become human beings.

Lockeans, I now believe, need not retreat to any such claim. There is another, stronger Lockean view that can answer the Animalist objections that I have described. This view also avoids some problems that face Animalist views. So I shall next describe these other problems.

2

Most Animalists believe that we shall continue to exist if and only if our bodies continue to exist, and to be the bodies of living animals. Williams even claimed that persons are bodies.8 But suppose that, in

Transplanted Head, my body is fatally diseased, as is Williams's brain. Since we have, between us, only one good brain and body, surgeons bring these together. My head is successfully grafted onto the rest of Williams's headless body.

On Williams's view, he would wake up with my head, being psychologically just like me and mistakenly believing that he was me.

Most of us would find that claim incredible. Suppose that you knew both Williams and me, and you visit the resulting person in the post-operative recovery room. You see my head on the pillow, and have a long conversation with someone whom you assume to be me. If some nurse then lifted the blankets on the bed, and you saw the rest of what you knew to be Williams's body, you wouldn't

8 Bernard Williams, `Are Persons Bodies?' in Problems of the Self, (Cambridge University Press, 1973).

9

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download