Reconfiguring the 'What Matters' Question in Parfit's Impersonal View — Epoche C1
The case that forces the question Derek Parfit asks us to imagine that the two hemispheres of one person's brain are separated and transplanted into two different bodies, each of which wakes with that person's memories, intentions and character. The example is not idle science fiction; it is engineered to make a logical point, and the point is the foundation of everything that follows in this essay. Because the earlier version of this piece stated Parfit's conclusion without the argument that produces it, the argument is set out here first. Two of Parfit's terms are needed. He is a reductionist about persons: in Reasons and Persons (1984) he holds that a person's existence just consists in the existence of a body and brain and the occurrence of a connected series of physical and mental events, and that once all of these are described there is no further fact about whether the person continues to exist. Against this stands the view he calls Non-Reductionism, on which personal identity is a deep further fact — a separately existing entity, or an all-or-nothing truth over and above the continuities. Second, Parfit calls the relation that reductionism puts in identity's place Relation R : psychological connectedness together with psychological continuity, with the right kind of cause. Connectedness means direct links — remembering an experience, carrying out an intention formed earlier, retaining a belief or a desire. Continuity means overlapping chains of such connections, each link strong even where the endpoints share nothing. Now the argument. Identity, in the logician's sense, is an equivalence relation, and in particular it is transitive and one-one: if $a = b$ and $a = c$ then $b = c$. So if the two survivors of the division, $b$ and $c$, are distinct people — as they plainly are, since each can be given news the other lacks — then $$a = b \;\wedge\; a = c \;\Longrightarrow\; b = c$$ and since $b \neq c$, at most one of the identity claims can hold. But there is nothing to choose between the survivors: whatever holds between the original person and the left-hemisphere survivor holds equally between him and the right. Three answers remain. He is identical with neither, so division is death; he is identical with one, arbitrarily; or identity is the wrong thing to be asking about. The first is hard to accept, because had only one hemisphere been transplanted and the other destroyed, we would ordinarily count that as survival — and it is strange that a second survivor should convert survival into death. The second requires a fact with nothing to make it true. Parfit takes the third: what matters in ordinary survival is Relation R, which can hold one-to-many and can hold in degrees, and it is not identity. The same conclusion follows without the surgery, from a feature of memory anyone can check. Connectedness is not transitive. The man of forty may remember the experiences of the man of twenty, and the man of sixty those of the man of forty, while the man of sixty remembers nothing at all of the man of twenty. Write $C(x,y)$ for direct connectedness: we may have $C(a,b)$ and $C(b,c)$ without $C(a,c)$. Identity is transitive by logic alone. So identity cannot consist in connectedness — and connectedness is what varies with the things we actually care about. What is dissolved, and what is not With the argument in view, the interpretation this essay opposes can be stated exactly, and it turns out to be a misreading that Parfit himself forestalls. It holds that once identity is shown not to be what matters, the question of what matters has been dissolved. But Parfit's argument has the form: the answer to question one is not the answer to question two, therefore question two needs its own answer — and he gives one, namely Relation R. Far from disposing of the question, he is the reason it must be asked separately. What is dissolved is only the assumption that metaphysics settles it in advance. The thesis defended here is that this separation is best described as a change of question rather than a change of answer, and Marya Schechtman's The Constitution of Selves (1996) supplies the vocabulary. She distinguishes the reidentification question — under what conditions is the person before me now the same person as the one who acted yesterday? — from the characterization question — which actions, values and experiences are genuinely this person's own, expressive of who they are? The two have been treated as one problem since Locke, and Schechtman's claim is that our practical concerns, about responsibility, self-interest, survival and compensation, attach mostly to the second while the philosophical literature has answered the first. Parfit's argument, on this reading, is the demonstration that the first cannot carry the practical weight. The earlier formulation here, that the question shifts from an ontological 'what' to an axiological 'why', is right in spirit and imprecise in a way that matters: what shifts is not from being to value but from a criterion of numerical sameness to a criterion of which contents belong to a life. The objection that concedes the most The strongest response to Parfit does not dispute the metaphysics at all, and it is worth taking seriously because it delivers what the earlier version of this essay wanted without the vagueness. Christine Korsgaard, in 'Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency' (1989), grants reductionism as a theoretical account and argues that it leaves the practical question untouched. An agent deliberating cannot treat her competing desires as a heap from which the strongest will emerge; she must decide, and deciding is unifying. She must also unify over time, because her projects — writing a book, raising a child — take longer than any span of strong connectedness and cannot be carried out by a series of only loosely related occupants of one body. On this account the unity of the self is not a metaphysical discovery that Parfit has refuted but a