Reconstructing the Person: Parfit, Ethics, and the Korean Self — Epoche C1
Derek Parfit's fission argument — the case in which one brain is divided and each half transplanted, so that two people wake up, each psychologically continuous with the original — is usually reported as showing that personal identity is unimportant. Reported that way, it is unfollowable: a reader is told a conclusion without the steps that force it. This essay first reconstructs the argument so that its steps can be inspected, then sets out the ethical conclusions Parfit draws from it, and only then turns to the comparison the earlier version of this essay proposed, between Parfit's impersonal account of what matters and the relational conception of the self expressed in Korean by the word uri (우리, 'we'). The comparison turns out to be real but much narrower than that version suggested, and the correction is given plainly below rather than buried. What the Fission Argument Actually Establishes Three of Parfit's terms have to be in place before the argument can be stated. Reductionism about persons is the thesis that a person's existence just consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental events; there is no further entity, no separately existing self, over and above these. Psychological connectedness is the holding of direct psychological relations between one time and another — remembering an experience one had, carrying out an intention one formed, retaining a belief or a desire. Connectedness comes in degrees and does not chain: my memories overlap richly with those of my self a year ago and hardly at all with those of my self at six. Psychological continuity repairs this by chaining: it is the holding of overlapping strings of strong connectedness. Continuity therefore does chain, whereas connectedness does not — a distinction that will do real work in a moment (Parfit 1984). Now the case. My brain is divided and each half is transplanted into a body indistinguishable from my own. Both survivors are psychologically continuous with me, and each is continuous through a physical cause of exactly the kind that ordinarily underwrites survival. Call the survivors $A$ and $B$. Four answers to 'what happened to me?' are available, and Parfit argues that each of the first three fails: I did not survive. This is hard to accept, because had only one half been transplanted and the other destroyed, that would have been an ordinary case of survival — the standard hemispherectomy-and-transplant story. It is odd that a second success should constitute my death. Doubling a good outcome does not usually produce a bad one. I am $A$. I am $B$. These two answers are indistinguishable in every respect that could bear on the question. The two halves are, by stipulation, symmetric in their causal history, their contents and their subsequent trajectories. Any verdict favouring one is arbitrary, and arbitrariness in a metaphysical claim is a defect rather than a discovery. I am both. This is the option that formal considerations close off. Identity is an equivalence relation, and in particular it is transitive: if $x = y$ and $x = z$, then $y = z$. If I am identical to $A$ and identical to $B$, then $A$ is identical to $B$. But $A$ and $B$ walk out of the theatre, live in different cities, and can meet each other. They are two people, not one. So I am not both. Something has to give, and Parfit's proposal is to give up the assumption that identity is what we care about when we care about survival. What matters, on his account, is Relation R : psychological connectedness and continuity, with any reliable cause. The crucial structural point is that Relation R is not required to be one-one. It can hold between me and $A$ and, at the same time, between me and $B$, because nothing in its definition forbids branching. Identity cannot behave that way; Relation R can. Fission is therefore not a case in which I lose what matters. It is a case in which what matters is preserved twice over while identity, which cannot be preserved twice over, drops out. One clarification corrects a phrase in the earlier version. Parfit does not claim that our ordinary concept of identity is 'trivial'. His claim is narrower and stronger: in cases like fission the question 'will I survive?' is empty , because once all the physical and psychological facts are described there is no further fact that the question could be about. The concept has not been shown to be worthless; it has been shown not to track what our concern was really directed at. Why This Is a Normative Project The earlier version asserted that Parfit's move is 'deeply normative' without saying which norms change. Parfit is explicit about three, and each follows from the argument just given rather than being appended to it. The first concerns prudence. If what matters is Relation R, and connectedness is a matter of degree that weakens with time, then the rational force of concern for one's own distant future weakens with it. Parfit draws the consequence himself: it can be defensible to care less about a self with whom one will share little. This is not a licence for recklessness so much as a demotion of the special authority that self-interest was thought to possess simply in virtue of being self-interest. The second concerns desert. If the person who committed a crime forty years ago is connected to the person now in the dock only by long chains of weak links, the retributive claim that he is the one being punished loses some of its grip. Parfit does not conclude that punishment is unjustified; he concludes that one common justification of it depends on a view of identity his argument undermines. The third is the most consequential and is the one the earlier version gestured at when it spoke of blurring self-interest and altruism. The standard objection to utilitarian aggregation — that adding up benefits and burdens across persons ignores the separateness of persons, since no one experiences the total — pre