Locke's Contribution to Personal Identity — Epoche B2
The memory chain repair rescues Locke's logic and abandons his purpose Three readings, and what actually separates them John Locke's chapter on identity and diversity [1] , added to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the second edition of 1694 at his friend William Molyneux's prompting, has attracted three readings. On the first, personal identity requires direct recall [2] : I am the person who did a deed only if I can now remember doing it. On the second, it requires an overlapping chain: today's self is connected to yesterday's, yesterday's to the day before, and identity is the ancestral of these direct connections, so that the ends of a long chain need not be directly connected. On the third, identity is a matter of what a person's consciousness now reaches, and the criterion exists to fix accountability. The first reading has no serious defender and it is a waste of an essay to refute it. The interesting question is between the second and third, because the second is what is usually presented as the charitable repair of Locke and what makes him look like a forerunner of Derek Parfit [3] . This essay argues that the repair cannot be attributed to Locke, and not because the text is silent on it. Locke rules it out, at the point of application he cared most about. The claim is deniable, and the objection that comes nearest to refuting it is set out below. What Locke says Locke's first move is to relativise identity questions to a sortal. At II.xxvii.7 he argues that it is not unity of substance that settles all questions of identity, and that to judge rightly we must first fix what idea the word is applied to. He then separates three ideas that had been run together. The identity of a man consists, at II.xxvii.6, in the "participation of the same continued life" by particles of matter successively united to the same organised body. The identity of a substance is the sameness of a material or immaterial particular. The identity of a person is neither. A person, at II.xxvii.9, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places. And in the same section, the criterion: "as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person." The clause that fixes what the criterion is for Seventeen sections later Locke says why he wants such a criterion. At II.xxvii.26 he calls person a forensic term, one that appropriates actions and their merit, and says it belongs only to intelligent agents capable of a law, and of happiness and misery. This is not an aside. It states the work the criterion has to do: to determine who may justly be held answerable for a deed, and to do so in a way that connects punishment and reward to the agent who can feel them as hers. Everything in the chapter is shaped by that requirement, including the thought experiments about princes and cobblers, which are constructed to test whether accountability follows the body or the consciousness. The objection, and the repair The famous objection is Thomas Reid's [4] , in the essays of 1785, though Berkeley had made a version of it earlier [5] . A boy is flogged for stealing apples. He grows into an officer who, taking a standard in battle, remembers the flogging. The officer becomes a general who remembers taking the standard but has entirely lost the boy. By the criterion, the officer is the boy and the general is the officer; but the general is not the boy. Identity is transitive; consciousness, so understood, is not. The repair, developed in the middle of the twentieth century by H. P. Grice among others and given its most influential form in Part III of Parfit's Reasons and Persons , is to distinguish two relations. Psychological connectedness is direct: memories, intentions and traits that hold between one time and another. Psychological continuity is the ancestral of connectedness, holding wherever there is an overlapping chain. Identity goes with continuity, and the general is the boy after all. As a repair of a formal defect this is elegant and it works. The question is whether it repairs Locke. Why it changes the subject Look at what Locke does when he meets a case of exactly this kind. At II.xxvii.22 he asks whether a man drunk and a man sober are the same person. His answer is in two parts, and both matter. Human courts, he says, punish the drunkard as they punish the sober man, because they cannot certainly distinguish what is real from what is counterfeit, and so cannot allow the plea. That is an evidential concession, made because we cannot see into one another. Then the second part. In the great day, when the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think that no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of. Where the evidential problem does not arise, accountability stops exactly where consciousness stops. Now apply the repair to the general. He knows nothing of the apple-stealing; no consciousness of his reaches it. The ancestral relation nevertheless makes him the person who did it, and therefore answerable for it. That is the verdict Locke's sentence refuses, delivered at the tribunal where Locke thinks the truth about persons is finally applied. The repair does not extend Locke's criterion. It replaces it with one that is transitive because it is no longer about what any consciousness reaches. Two theories built for different jobs It is worth noticing how differently the two doctrines are aimed, because the resemblance between them is largely verbal. Locke wants accountability to be exact. His whole apparatus exists so that a just judge can attach a deed to the being who owns it, and so that no one is punished for what is not his. Parfit wants something close to the opposite. His conclusion in Part III is that identity is not what matters: what matters is psychological connectedness and continui