## 1. Historical Highlights of the Relation




For the most part, the philosophical history of the relation between 
identity and ethics up until the 17th Century is about the
relation between identity and self-regarding practical concerns. 
Plato is a prime example. He held in the *Phaedo* that I (and 
all persons) will survive the death and destruction of my body 
insofar as what I essentially am is a simple, immaterial soul, 
something whose own essence is being alive. This yields the direct 
implication that, insofar as I will survive the death of my body, I 
am justified in anticipating post-mortem experiences. Lucretius, on 
the other hand, while also focused solely on the relation between 
identity and prudential concerns, denied the Platonic view that I 
would be justified in post-mortem anticipation, simply because 
"if any feeling remains in mind or spirit after it has been torn
from body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into being by the 
wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced" (Lucretius 
1951, 121). In other words, I am essentially a union of body and 
soul, and so even if my soul lives on, and even if it is capable of 
having experiences, I am not justified in anticipating them given 
that my body - an essential component of *me* - 
will have disintegrated. For both, however, identity is thought to 
be what grounds prudential concern: the difference between Lucretius 
and Plato is only over what identity consists in (although for a 
contrasting interpretation of Lucretius, see Martin and Barresi 2003,
10).




It was not until John Locke that there was an explicit attempt to 
connect personal identity with broader ethical concerns. Locke 
famously called "person" a *forensic term*, 
"appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to 
intelligent agents capable of a law, and happiness, and misery"
(Locke 1694, 50-51). This means that an account of the 
*identity* of persons across time will have forensic - 
normative - implications. And so it does.




Locke's account of personal identity appealed to what seems a crucial
condition of moral agency, namely, self-reflective consciousness. On 
his view, a person - a moral agent - *Y* at 
*t*2 is identical to a person *X* at 
*t*1 just in case *Y*'s consciousness 
"can be extended backwards" to *X* 
(*Ibid*., 39), and this is typically taken to mean that 
*Y* *remembers* *X*'s thoughts and experiences. 
This is what we might call a *relational* account of identity,
for it maintains that persons at different times are identical to one another
in virtue of some relation(s) between them, where such relations 
might be psychological or physical. Locke thus rejected what we might
call a *substance-based* view of identity, which maintains 
that persons at different times are identical to one another in virtue of 
their consisting in one and the same substance.




Now once we have Locke's relational account of identity in hand, we 
can see what implications it will have for various normative issues. 
Start with prudential rationality. On Locke's view, I am 
appropriately concerned, both for the past stage of myself to whom my
consciousness extends, but also to some future person - me 
- to whom my consciousness will extend. This is the mechanism 
by which I would be justified, for example, in anticipating the 
afterlife, just in case at the resurrection there will be 
someone to whom my present consciousness extends. This person 
would be me even though he might have a very different body than I 
have now (*Ibid*., 44). It should be unimportant to me, on this view,
what *substance* (body or soul) I find my consciousness 
- myself - attached to. If, for example, my little finger
were cut off and my consciousness adhered to it, "that would
be the same self which was concerned for the whole body yesterday, as
making part of itself, whose actions then it cannot but admit as its 
own now" (*Ibid*., 46).




It is this sort of remark - about my ownership of certain
actions - that yields a connection between identity and moral
responsibility ("accountability," for Locke), for one is
justifiably held accountable only for those actions performed by a
self to whom one's present consciousness extends, that is, it is only
for those actions I  *remember* performing that I can
justifiably be held accountable. As Locke puts it, if I am punished
for the actions of a self whose thoughts and experiences I do not
remember, "what difference is there between that punishment, and
being created miserable?" (*Ibid.*, 51) Thus, on the Day
of Judgment, "The sentence shall be justified by the
consciousness all persons shall have, that they themselves, in what
bodies soever they appear, or what substances soever that
consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions,
and deserve that punishment for them" (*Ibid.*).




The key for Locke is that what grounds both prudential concern and
moral responsibility is the personal identity relation, a relation
uniquely unifying temporally distinct person-stages via
consciousness. And it was because Locke prized apart personal identity
from biological identity, and any other sort of substance-based
identity, that later philosophers like Joseph Butler and Thomas Reid
objected to it. So, for example, Butler accuses Locke of a
"wonderful mistake," which is that he failed to recognize
that the relation of consciousness
*presupposes* identity, and thus cannot constitute it (Butler
1736, 100). In other words, I can remember only my own experiences,
but it is not my memory of an experience that *makes it* mine;
rather, I remember it only because it's *already* mine. So
while memory can reveal my identity with some past experiencer, it
does not make that experiencer me. What I am remembering, insists
Butler, are the experiences of a substance, namely, the same substance
that constitutes me now.




Similarly, Reid affirms Butler's objection and then adds a few of his
own. One is that Locke's criterion implies the contradictory position
that someone could both be and not be identical to some past stage, 
an objection illustrated by the Brave Officer Case. Suppose that as 
he is stealing the enemy's standard, a forty-year-old brave officer 
remembers stealing apples from a neighbor's orchard when he was ten, 
and then suppose further that when he is eighty years old, a retired 
general, he remembers stealing the enemy's standard as a brave 
officer but no longer remembers stealing the neighbor's apples. On 
Locke's account the general would have to be both identical to the 
apple-stealer (because of the transitivity of the identity relation: 
he's identical to the brave officer, who himself is identical to the 
apple-stealer) and *not* identical to the apple-stealer (given
that he has no direct memory of the boy's experiences) (Reid 1785, 
114-115).




Another objection is based precisely on the link between identity and
ethics: how can identity - *sameness* - be based 
on a relation (consciousness) that changes from moment to moment? A 
person would never remain the same from one moment to the next, 
"and as the right and justice of reward and punishment are 
founded on personal identity, no man could be responsible for his 
actions" (*Ibid*., 117). But such an implication must be
absurd. And Butler concurs, expanding the point to include 
considerations of prudential concern:



> 
> [If Locke's view is correct,] it must follow, that it is a fallacy
> upon ourselves, to charge our present selves with any thing we did, or
> to imagine our present selves interested in any thing which befell us
> yesterday, or that our present self will be interested in what will
> befall us to-morrow; since our present self is not, in reality, the
> same with the self of yesterday, but another like self or person coming
> in its room, and mistaken for it; to which another self will succeed
> tomorrow (Butler 1736, 102).
> 




Both Reid and Butler, then, wind up rejecting Locke's relational view
in favor of a substance-based view of identity. (And Reid's objection
in particular anticipates Derek Parfit's "Extreme Claim,"
to be discussed later.)




What Butler and Reid retain in common with Locke, though, is the 
belief that identity grounds certain of our patterns of concern, both
prudential and moral. As Reid puts it, "Identity . . . is the 
foundation of all rights and obligations, and of accountableness, and
the notion of it is fixed and precise" (Reid 1785, 112). What 
they disagree over is just what identity consists in. Notice, though,
the methodological assumption here: a theory of identity's 
plausibility depends significantly on how well it accounts for our 
practical concerns. So if Locke's view were right, say Reid and 
Butler, it would require a host of radical changes to our practices 
of responsibility attribution and prudential deliberation. But, 
continues the argument, because making such changes would be crazy 
- we are strongly committed to the correctness of our current 
ways of doing things - Locke's view cannot be right. And 
although Locke disagrees that the implications of his view are crazy,
he does agree to the basic methodology. So while he admits that he 
has made some suppositions "that will look strange to some 
readers" (Locke 1694, 51), he is also at pains to show that our
practices are actually already in conformity with the implications of
his view, e.g., human law emphasizes the necessity of continuous 
consciousness, "not punishing the mad man for the sober man's 
actions, nor the sober man for what the mad man did" 
(*Ibid*., 47). And this is a methodological assumption that 
has been retained by most theorists on identity and ethics since.




Both Butler and Reid believe Locke's view implies that no one exists
beyond the present moment, i.e., that Locke's view is just the
following: *X* at *t*1 is identical to
*Y* at *t*2 just in case *Y*'s
consciousness *is one and the same as* *X*'s
consciousness. But because consciousness changes from moment to
moment, *X*'s consciousness could never be identical to
*Y*'s. Unfortunately, this seems a misunderstanding of the
theory (even though Locke does sometimes use the phrase "same
consciousness," which doesn't foster clear
understanding). Instead, *X* and *Y* are, on Locke's
actual view, identical just in case
*X* and *Y* are *related* via consciousness,
i.e., just in case *Y* remembers the thoughts and experiences
of *X*. But if that is the view, then identity could be just as
strict, fixed, and precise as both Butler and Reid seem to want, for
*Y* could be identical to *X* only in case that relation
obtains, no matter how strongly or weakly.




Nevertheless, even if this objection to Locke is thwarted, the others
remain in force. For one thing, memory does seem to presuppose 
personal identity, and so cannot constitute a criterion of it. For 
another, identity is a transitive relation, while memory isn't, so 
the latter can't be a criterion of the former. Finally, there is the 
obvious worry that identity seems to persist through the loss of 
memory: it's hard to believe that I would cease to exist were I to 
undergo amnesia. It's for all these reasons that contemporary 
theorists working in the Lockean tradition have had to make 
significant changes to the theory to make it viable.


## 2. Contemporary Accounts of Personal Identity




There are four general accounts of personal identity that have been
taken to have some relevance to ethics by contemporary theorists:
psychological, biological, narrative, and a new one to be labeled
"anthropological." After discussing these four, as well as
a fifth view that identity doesn't matter for ethics, we will evaluate
the views in light of a challenging thought experiment: fission. After
that, we will discuss the relevance of both souls and a
four-dimensionalist ontology to the issues at hand.


### 2.1 The Psychological View




By far the most popular view of personal identity, until quite 
recently, has been a significantly amended version of Locke's 
relational memory criterion. To make such a view plausible, though, 
the three objections just detailed need to be addressed. Start, then, with 
Butler's complaint that memory presupposes identity, that I can 
remember only my own experiences, so memory just reveals to me my identity
relation to some past experiencer and cannot constitute that 
relation. Following Sydney Shoemaker (1970) and Derek Parfit (1984), 
one can introduce a more inclusive memory relation, called 
*quasi-memory*, or q-memory, defined so that it does not 
presuppose identity. I have a q-memory of some past experience 
just in case that experience occurred to *someone* and my 
memory of the experience was caused in the right sort of way by the 
experience I now remember. Regular memory, then, would just be a 
subset of q-memory (applying to ordinary instances when I was the 
person to whom the remembered experience occurred), and q-memory 
could be the relevant relation incorporated into the theory of 
identity in a way that avoids Butler's objection.




The second objection was Reid's, about transitivity of identity in 
the Brave Officer case. What gets Locke in trouble is that memories 
fade, so someone may no longer be capable of having direct memories 
of what is clearly his earlier life. But one may certainly have 
direct memories of some past stage that itself had direct memories of
an earlier stage, and so on, until every stage in the life is linked 
by a chain of overlapping direct memories. What one can then insert 
into the criterion of identity across time is a  *continuity* 
of direct (q-)memories, so that the retired general is the same 
person as the apple-stealer insofar as he directly remembers the 
experiences of the brave officer, who himself directly remembers the 
experiences of the apple-stealer. Of course, one direct memory of 
some past experience won't be sufficient to establish identity, it 
seems. Suppose I volunteered to have your memory trace of walking in 
Antarctica implanted in me (and I myself had never been there), and I
woke up having that q-memory of walking in the bitter cold and deep 
snow. Surely this would not make me you, even though there is a 
direct memory connection between us, so theorists taking this route 
will talk about the need for *strong* memory connections, 
where this just consists in a significant number of such connections 
(Parfit 1984, 205-206, 219-223). 




The third objection was that someone could persist through a loss of 
memory, a claim Locke's view denies. What can be done to render the 
Lockean view more plausible, then, is to incorporate more 
psychological features than just memory into the identity-preserving 
relation. So not only are there present-past relations of memory that
are relevant to my identity, but there may also be present-future 
relations such as intentions fulfilled in action, relations that 
persist across time such as beliefs, goals, and desires, and 
resemblance relations such as similarity of character.




Putting all these replies together, then, we have *The 
Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity*: *X* at 
*t*1 is the same person as *Y* at 
*t*2 if and only if *X* is uniquely 
psychologically continuous with *Y*, where psychological 
continuity consists in overlapping chains of strong psychological 
connectedness, itself consisting in significant numbers of direct 
psychological connections like memories, intentions, 
beliefs/goals/desires, and similarity of character (Parfit 1984, 
207). We will see the meaning and importance of the 
"uniqueness" clause later.




This criterion of identity (and its variants) has been taken to fit
particularly well with our practical concerns, both self-regarding 
and other-regarding. For instance, what seems to matter for 
self-concern and rational anticipation is that my 
*psychological* life continue. Anticipation and self-concern
are psychological states, as are their objects (future experiences),
so a theory of identity that ties those states together by virtue of
tying distinct stages of *me* together seems initially quite
plausible. In addition, concerns having to do with moral
responsibility are also about the relations between various
psychological states - including intentions to perform actions,
memories of past doings, desires and beliefs explaining actions, and
so forth - and so if personal identity is a necessary condition
for moral responsibility, the Psychological Criterion provides a
plausible and satisfying account of that condition: I cannot be
responsible for the actions of some person if I'm not the inheritor of
that person's psychology.


### 2.2 The Biological View




What could motivate alternative approaches to our identity, then,
given the seeming successes of the Psychological Criterion? One
important problem stems from worries about our *essence*. For
instance, I am many things, including an adult, a professor, a driver,
a voter, and so forth. None of these is my essence, however, for I
either did or could exist without being them. If we could identify my
essence, however (and generally the essence of individuals like me),
we would be able to identify the conditions for my persistence across
time as well. Now the Psychological Criterion seems to imply
that *personhood* is my essence, that I couldn't exist without
being a person, and given that personhood is a psychological matter,
psychological continuity is what preserves my identity. But as Eric
Olson and others have pointed out, this seems quite wrong (Olson
1997a, 1997b, DeGrazia 1999a, 1999b, Carter 1982, Snowdon 1990,
Wiggins 1980). After all, just as I was once a teenager, and before
that an adolescent and a child, wasn't I also an infant, and
ultimately a fetus? Furthermore, suppose I were in a horrible accident
and went into a permanent vegetative state (PVS). Wouldn't *I*
then be in a PVS? If so, then if personhood necessarily involves
having a certain sort of developed psychology (e.g., a psychology
capable, at the least, of self-reflection), it can't be my essence;
instead, being a person would be like being a child, or a teenager,
something one becomes and may also outlive (called a "phase
sortal" in the literature).




If personhood isn't my essence, then what is? The most 
plausible answer seems to be that I am a biological organism, a human animal. 
And if this is my essence, it will also provide the conditions of my 
persistence across time. From this move, then, we get the 
*Biological Criterion of Personal Identity*: if *X* is 
a person at *t*1, and *Y* exists at any 
other time, then *X*=*Y* if and only if *Y*'s 
biological organism is continuous with *X*'s biological 
organism (Olson 1997b, DeGrazia 2005). Note that *Y* may or 
may not be a person, which allows that *X* might be one and 
the same as a fetus or someone in a PVS. This view is also sometimes 
called *animalism* (e.g., Noonan 1998, Olson 2003, Blatti and Snowdon 2016).




Consider, then, this criterion of our identity. While it obviously
does well with the essence question, it seems to do less well when we
consider its relation to ethics. Again, what seems to ground the
rationality of my anticipation of future experiences is the fact that
that future person will be the inheritor of my psychology. That he's
also the inheritor of my biological organism seems irrelevant. Indeed,
our reactions to certain thought experiments strongly suggest that we
think rational anticipation, self-concern, moral responsibility, and
the like can be justified even in the absence of biological
continuity. We can see this most dramatically in considering
the *transplant intuition* (Olson 1997b, 43-51, DeGrazia
2005, 51-54). Suppose my cerebrum were transplanted into a
different living body and the resulting person turned out be exactly
like me psychologically. Suppose also that my cerebrum-less organism
were kept alive. What would have happened to me? Most people share the
intuition that the recipient of my cerebrum would be me, simply
because he would have my psychology and survival of my psychology
seems to be what matters in my survival. The advocate of the
Biological Criterion, however, has to maintain that I remain the
cerebrum-less donor, essentially in a PVS, while the other person
- the person who seems to remember my experiences, and seems to
be carrying out my intentions, and seems just like me psychologically
in every respect - is just a deluded imposter. But this is hard
to believe. Suppose further that I had committed some crime and then
donated my cerebrum in this way. The person who woke up would seem to
remember my crime and anticipate enjoying getting away with it for a
while, but if identity is what's necessary for responsibility, he
could not be responsible for my actions, on the Biological Criterion,
and so he wouldn't deserve blame or punishment for the crime. Again,
this seems hard to believe. What accounts for the practical concerns
we have seems to be grounded in psychological relations, and the
Biological Criterion thus targets a relation for identity that is just
irrelevant for those concerns (a key exception will be discussed
later, however).




There are a couple of replies here. DeGrazia, for one, admits that 
the transplant intuition is a thorn in the side of the Biological 
Criterion (DeGrazia 2005, 54). But when it comes to that criterion's 
seemingly poor fit with our practical concerns generally, he suggests
that, "in the world as we know it," there's much less of 
a problem than we might think (DeGrazia 2005, 60-61). After all, in 
nearly all everyday cases, a necessary condition for the 
psychological continuity grounding our practical concerns is 
biological continuity. So if the grounding for our practical concerns
requires psychological continuity, but psychological continuity 
(ordinarily) presupposes biological continuity, then the grounding 
for our practical concerns (ordinarily) requires biological 
continuity as well.




This reply, however, seems to overlook the original motivation, 
which was to find a somewhat closer relation between identity and our
practical concerns than this. While biological continuity may 
track the patterns of ethical concerns, it doesn't provide any real 
*explanation* for them. It may be rational for me to 
anticipate only the experiences of my biological continuers, for 
instance, but it won't be *in virtue of* my biological 
continuity with them that it's rational to do so; rather, it seems 
rational only in virtue of the psychological relations they are 
expected to bear to me. And so one might be tempted to reject the 
Biological Criterion of identity because of this poor explanatory fit
with our practical concerns.




Nevertheless, there is another reply available for the advocate of the
Biological Criterion, namely, to deny that personal identity has this
purported fit with our practical concerns at all. Instead, while
biological continuity preserves our identity across time (this
advocate might say), psychological continuity is the relation
grounding our practical concerns. This move would still preserve the
thought that identity has an impact for ethics, just not the one we
thought. As Olson, puts it, if it's right that "the relations of
practical concerns that typically go along with our identity through
time are closely connected with psychological continuity ...,
then the Biological Approach does have an interesting ethical
consequence, namely that those practical relations are not necessarily
connected with numerical identity" (Olson 1997b, 70). Obviously,
this would be very surprising for theorists like Butler, Reid, and
even Locke to hear, but if we had overwhelming metaphysical reasons to
adopt the Biological Criterion, it could well be true. This stance is
a version of the Identity Doesn't Matter (IDM) view, to be discussed
later.


### 2.3 The Narrative View




Thus far we have been assuming that the criterion of identity relevant
to our practical concerns will answer to what Schechtman 1996 calls
a  *reidentification question*: What are the conditions under
which a person at one point in time is properly reidentified at
another point in time? Answering this question calls for a criterion
of *diachronic numerical identity*, a criterion of what makes
something one and the same thing as itself at different times. But
according to Schechtman, what is actually more appropriate for the
relation between identity and ethics is an answer to the *characterization question*: What are the conditions under which
various psychological characteristics, experiences, and actions
are *properly attributable* to some person?




One reason to turn to this question may stem from recognizing the 
difficulties various theories of numerical identity run into, both 
metaphysically and in terms of fitting with our practical concerns 
(Schechtman 1996, 26-70). But another may be the natural fit between 
the characterization question and our practical concerns. So in 
searching for an account of the rationality of anticipation, we seem 
to be asking, "What makes those expected experiences 
mine?" Or in searching for an account of the special concern we
have only for ourselves, we seem to be asking, "What makes 
those future states I'm specially concerned about 
*mine*?" And the same seems true of responsibility and 
compensation: "What makes those actions for which I'm 
responsible, or those burdens for which I'm to be compensated, 
*mine*?" And in each case, what makes some feature mine
may be a non-numerical type of identity, the type of identity we are
thinking of when addressing the familiar question of an identity
crisis: "Who am I really?" This is the question of
identity as proper attributability, an account of the nature of one's
deep or true self and the various attributes genuinely belonging to
it. (For early and influential discussion of proper attributability
and identification, see various essays in Frankfurt 1988; for
discussion of different theories of the deep/true self over the years,
see Shoemaker 2015).




So what is the right account of this sort of identity? According to 
theorists attracted to this general approach, it is the  *Narrative Criterion of Personal Identity*: What makes an action, 
experience, or psychological characteristic properly attributable to 
some person (and thus a proper part of his or her true self) is 
its correct incorporation into the self-told story of his or her life
(MacIntyre 1984, 1989, Taylor 1989, Schechtman 1996, DeGrazia 2005). 
Narrative identity is thus really about a kind of psychological 
unity, but not just an artless or random unity. Imagine, for 
instance, a subject of experiences to whom various experiences merely
happened over time. The events would be unified in a purely passive 
respect, simply as the experiences contained within the life of that 
subject of experiences. But for that subject to be a *person*,
a genuine moral agent, those experiences must be actively unified, 
must be gathered together into the life of one narrative ego by 
virtue of a story the subject tells that  *weaves* them 
together, giving them a kind of coherence and intelligibility they 
wouldn't otherwise have had. This is how the various experiences and 
events come to have any real meaning at all - rather than being
merely isolated events - by being part of a larger story that 
relates them to one another within the context of one life 
(Schechtman 1996, 96-99).




This view purports to account for our practical concerns in a far more
adequate way than the previous accounts of numerical identity. So it
makes sense for me to rationally anticipate some future experiences
only if they will be mine, where what makes them mine is that they
will fit coherently and accurately into my own ongoing self-told
story. What explains my special sort of concern for myself is that I'm
in fact an extended narrative ego - not some present time-slice
concerned about the well-being of some different future time-slice
- and I'm constantly extending that narrative into the future,
so my concern is *global*, a concern for the whole self I'm
creating via this story, the whole self whose various parts are
*mine*. And as for responsibility, the Narrative Criterion 
implies that what makes some past action mine (for which I'm eligible
for praise or blame) is that it flowed from my central values, 
beliefs, and experiences, that there's a coherent story I may tell 
uniting it to the other elements of my life. And a similar story may 
be told to account for compensation (Schechtman 1996, 136-162).




There are, nevertheless, problems with the account. For one thing, it
is not entirely clear why a self-told narrative is necessary to unite
the various experiences and events of one's life into a coherent
whole. I may have robust psychological unity without having told
myself any kind of story. But even if we allow for hypothetical
narratives to do this work, it remains unclear just what role a
narrative actually plays in our practical concerns. After all, some
narratives get it wrong - it can't just be that whatever I say
about the way the events of my life fit together is what goes -
and if we correct for that, then it seems we must admit that it isn't
the narrative itself that *makes* the various events and
experiences united with one another; rather, they must be united with
one another independently, and the (correct) narrative just serves as
a kind of post hoc overlay, an aesthetic articulation of the
pre-existing metaphysical unity.




But perhaps the most serious worry comes from the fact that, as it
stands, narrative identity depends on numerical identity (as DeGrazia
2005, 114, admits). What matters to us with respect to all of our
practical concerns is that we ourselves continue to exist: it's a
necessary presupposition of my rational anticipation, self-concern,
possibilities for compensation, and so on that I myself persist, but
this is an issue of numerical identity. Another way to put this point
is that one can't be a person, on the narrative view, unless one
gathers up the various experiences one has as a subject of experiences
into a coherent narrative, but then the identity of that subject of
experiences must be preserved across time for its experiences to be so
gathered up. If narrative identity presupposes numerical identity,
though, then we still need a plausible account of numerical identity
first, one that can ground an answer to the characterization question
the narrative view was built to address. But given the problems of
both the Psychological and Biological views, is there a way to do so?
A recent addition to the literature is promising.


### 2.4 The Anthropological View


Some have attempted to respond to the worry about bad or false
narratives by introducing a reality constraint to narrative views, one
that's buttressed by appeal to third-person storytelling (Lindemann
2001; Schechtman 2014, Ch. 3). But allowing third-person narratives
into the mix causes a sea change in our enterprise, for it greatly
broadens the range of identity-related practical concerns we will need
to explain. To see this important point, suppose that we start with a
purely subjective, first-person narrative account of my identity,
according to which I gather together various experiences in my life as
mine so that I can tell a sensible story unifying the actions for
which I'm morally responsible, the experiences I can rationally
anticipate having, the burdening experiences for which I can
justifiably be compensated with benefits, and the expected future
benefits or burdens I may prudentially care about. Notice that
telling this unifying story both requires a robust set of
psychological capacities and incorporates just those actions and
experiences I have had (or will have) while in possession of that
robust set of psychological capacities, i.e., the story is just about
my life as a *Lockean person*.


Now I may tell a one-sided or downright false story. To correct
the story, therefore, we may have to check it against third-person
narratives of my life. But third-person narratives are not going to
be restricted just to what happened to me while I was a Lockean
person. They will also include things I did or that happened to me
when I was an infant, or even a fetus ("You kicked so hard
during that last month of pregnancy," says my mother). And they
may well include what happens to me after falling into a PVS ("I
visited him every day and talked to him," says my mother).
These are social treatments that also seem grounded by attributions of
identity, such as *he was my son*, or *she's still my mom*.
But neither the Psychological Criterion nor the Biological Criterion
can account for them in a straightforward way.



The Psychological Criterion requires sophisticated psychological
capacities, sufficient to sustain continuities of memory, intentions,
beliefs, desires, and character. As neither infants/fetuses nor those
in PVS have such capacities, this criterion cannot ground these forms
of social treatment.


Now one might think the Biological Criterion could easily handle
such cases, but it can't. That's again because it's not in virtue of
her being the same human *animal* that we continue to treat
someone in a PVS or in the end stages of dementia, say, as identical
to her pre-PVS self. Rather, it's in virtue of her being the
same *human* animal that we do so. This is the core of what we
may call the *Anthropological View*, recently advanced and
defended by Marya Schechtman (Schechtman 2014). (Schechtman herself
calls this the "person-life view," but this label is
misleading for our purposes, as what she means by "person"
isn't Lockean; for instance, she assigns personhood even to fetuses
and those in a PVS. It is preferable, therefore, to stick with the
anthropological label for the sake of clarity and distinction from the
other views on the table.)


On the Anthropological View, we are human beings, with ways of life
organized around a particular paradigm: We are creatures who typically
develop in certain ways and are treated in certain ways not only with
respect to our inborn biological and psychological features but also
with respect to our socially shaped capacities (e.g., being empathic
and sociable requires nurturing). Among these capacities are the
"forensic" capacities Locke and many others have focused
on, having to do with responsibility and prudential concern. But we
are also born into families and societies whose members treat us in
various ways, giving us names, dressing us, singing to us, taking
walks with us, and so on. These concerns all track the very same
metaphysical unit that gradually *becomes* responsible and
concerned for its own future. We thus cannot say that the later
responsible unit is a different thing, or even a different kind of
thing, from the infant from which he or she developed.


Insofar as this is an account that draws from *paradigmatic*
cases of humanity to identify our identity conditions, it can allow
that, while there are non-paradigmatic cases of humans that may not be
a target of *all* our practical concerns, they are nevertheless
individuals like us and so are certainly appropriate targets
of *some* such concerns (like being named, dressed, and sung to).
This explains why humans with profound intellectual disabilities and
those in a PVS or with Alzheimer's dementia are still individuals like
us, units whose identity is also defined by the web of our practical
concerns (Schechtman 2014, Chs. 5-6)


Individuals like us, then, are human animals with a particular form
of life, one whose practices of pregnancy, birth, development, social
interaction, personhood, and death both shape and are shaped by the
particular attributes and capacities of the individuals living
it. These human animals are the locus of all of our
"person"-related practical concerns, and what makes any
such individual at one time the same as an individual at a later time
is just that they are living the very same human life.


If successful, this Anthropological View would reveal an extremely
tight relation between our practical concerns and personal
identity. Before we assess it, however, we must first examine its
polar opposite, a view abjuring any such relation between practical
concerns and personal identity.


### 2.5 The Identity Doesn't Matter View




Derek Parfit was among the first contemporary theorists to explore 
the relation between identity and ethics explicitly, first in his 
seminal early 1970s articles, "Personal Identity" and 
especially "Later Selves and Moral Principles," and then 
in his restatement and development of the view in Part III of his 
1984 book *Reasons and Persons* (from which the present 
exposition is taken). Parfit's is, in many respects, a Lockean 
account of personal identity, although there are significant 
departures. He is a "reductionist," according to which 
the facts about persons and personal identity consist in more 
particular facts about brains, bodies, and series of interrelated 
mental and physical events (Parfit 1984, 210-211). The denial of 
reductionism is called "nonreductionism," according to 
which the facts about persons and personal identity consist in some 
further fact, typically a fact about Cartesian egos or souls.




While Parfit's arguments against nonreductionism and in favor of 
reductionism are striking and important, for our purposes what 
matters is how he articulates and develops reductionism and how he 
argues for the surprising conclusion that the identity relation is in
fact not what matters in survival. To begin, he suggests at times 
that the most plausible reductionist criterion of personal identity 
is the Psychological Criterion. As we saw earlier, this criterion 
maintains that in order for *X* to be identical to *Y*,
*X* must be uniquely psychologically continuous
with *Y*. Psychological continuity is potentially a branching,
one-many relation, i.e., it could conceivably hold between me-now and
more than one person in the future. But identity is an equivalence
relation - it is reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive -
so it holds only one-one. Thus only by including a "no
branching" clause can this criterion of identity avoid a
crippling contradiction.




By way of explanation, consider the case Parfit uses in support of 
his claim that identity is not what matters: fission (*Ibid*.,
254-255). Suppose both of my brain hemispheres are functional 
duplicates of the other, and that each of my other two triplet 
brothers has suffered irreversible brain damage. A brilliant 
neurosurgeon can transplant one of my brain hemispheres into each 
brother, and so each survivor (we will stipulate) will be fully 
psychologically continuous with me upon waking up. What has happened 
to me? If we lack the "no branching" clause, we are 
forced to say that, because both brothers are psychologically 
continuous with me, they are *both* me. But then (given the 
transitivity of identity) both survivors would also have to be 
identical *to each other*, which seems obviously false 
(although see Belzer 2005 for doubts about this assertion). So to 
avoid violating this transitivity requirement, we simply have to 
stipulate in our criterion of personal identity that, if the 
relations in which identity consists may hold one-many, they must 
obtain *uniquely* for identity itself to obtain.




But then what *has* happened to me in fission? It seems I
cannot survive as both, as they are two people and I am only one. In
addition, there simply is no non-arbitrary reason why identity should
obtain between me and just
*one* of the survivors, given that I bear precisely the same
relation to each one. So the only remaining option is that I do not
survive fission (see Parfit 2001, 42; see also Brink 1997b,
140-141; and Johansson 2010). But is this like an ordinary case
in which I don't survive, i.e., like *death*? Clearly not: both
survivors will seem to remember my thoughts and experiences, they will
fulfill intentions I had in action, they will have the same
beliefs/desires/goals as me, and their characters will be exactly like
mine. Indeed, it will be just *as if* I had
survived. Everything that matters in ordinary survival (or nearly
everything), therefore, is preserved in fission, despite the fact that
the identity relation is not. What this must mean, then, is that the
identity relation just is not what matters (or is not what matters
very much) in survival; instead, what matters has to consist in
psychological continuity and/or connectedness (what Parfit calls
"Relation R"). As long as *that* relation holds
between me-now and some other person-stage - regardless of
whether or not it holds one-one - what happens to me is just as
good as ordinary survival. Call this the *Identity Doesn't
Matter* (IDM) view.




While there are plausible alternative reactions to fission that 
maintain the importance of the identity relation (see, e.g., Lewis 
1976, Sider 2001a) - and such views will be explored later 
- for now it is important to see what Parfit's version would 
mean, if anything, for our practical concerns. What, after all, do we
do if identity is not what matters in survival? Given that we have 
for the most part been assuming that identity is the relation 
grounding our patterns of concern, we are now faced with two options:
either we take those patterns of concern to be *unjustified* 
or we find new grounds for them. In *Reasons and Persons*, 
Parfit is officially agnostic on the proper approach (he claims that 
arguments for both stances are defensible, yet also can be defensibly
denied; see Parfit 1984, 311-312). Nevertheless, it surely seems most
plausible to retain the patterns of concern formerly grounded on 
identity and simply find a new justification for them. And it seems 
obvious that Relation R could provide such a justification. After 
all, if we formerly thought identity justified these patterns insofar
as it was what we thought mattered for survival, but it turns out 
that identity - Relation R plus uniqueness - is not what 
matters only because *uniqueness* is not what matters, then it
seems natural and plausible to cite the remaining 
aspect of identity (Relation R) as what grounds our patterns of 
concern in virtue of being what truly matters in survival (see, e.g.,
Jeske 1993). How, in other words, could 
*uniqueness* have provided all the relevant justifications?
Indeed, Parfit himself seems drawn to such a conclusion in the
discussion of rationality and morality that follows. He calls it
the *Moderate Claim* (Parfit 1984, 311). (This is in contrast to
the *Extreme Claim*, which is that the further fact of identity
is what grounds our practical concerns, so to the extent there is no
such further fact, our practical concerns are ungrounded.)




So let us assume that Relation R grounds our patterns of concern. 
Consider, then, prudential rationality. While it is ordinarily 
thought to be imprudent to discount the interests of one's Much Later
Self (MLS) just because that self will not come into existence for a 
long time, Parfit suggests that reductionism provides a different, 
more plausible reason to do so. Since one of the relations in R 
(connectedness) obtains by degrees, it is very likely it will obtain 
to a much reduced degree between me-now and my MLS than it will 
between me-now and my tomorrow's self. But if R grounds my patterns 
of concern, and a reduced degree of connectedness is one part of R, 
then a reduced degree of connectedness justifies a reduced degree of 
concern. Thus, I may be justified in caring much less about my MLS 
than about my tomorrow's self. This conclusion justifies 
discounting my MLS's (expected) interests in favor of my present 
interests.




Of course, given that we still think great imprudence is wrong, how 
might we criticize it if we made these revisions to our practices? 
One way to do so would be to recognize that, since my MLS would 
really be more like a different person than me, he should be treated 
as such, i.e., how I treat him should now fall under the rubric of 
*morality*, and insofar as it is wrong to harm others without 
their consent, it would be wrong for me to harm him as well. Great 
imprudence like this, in other words, would be *immoral* 
(Parfit 1984, 318-320).




Parfit's theory has often been called "revisionary," in 
part because of moves like this one (see, e.g., Rovane 1998, 11; 
Martin 1998, 15). The thought is that both his theory of identity and
its implications for our prudential and moral practices and concerns 
require us to change our views both of ourselves and of what matters.
But this judgment may be mistaken. After all, Parfit seems to be 
trying to show that (a) what *in fact* matters to us in 
survival (revealed by the fission case) is Relation R, not identity, 
and (b) what these antecedent commitments about survival imply about 
prudence and morality is that the wrongness we currently attach to 
great imprudence should merely be *called* a wrongness of 
morality. But in neither case is there any call for revision of 
anything substantive in our views of ourselves or in our normative 
practices. Indeed, people simply *are* less concerned with 
their MLSs than with their tomorrow-selves, and it is not difficult 
to see why: if they cannot imagine *being* the self in 
question, it is extremely difficult either to imagine what that 
self's interests are or to take those interests into account equally 
with their more closely related stages in practical deliberation. But
what generally enables that act of projective imagination is the 
expectation of a significant degree of psychological connectedness, 
so the less there is expected to be of that relation, the less our 
concern for those distant stages is likely to be. This suggests, 
then, that Parfit's view is less revisionary than 
*revelatory*: he may be taken to be providing a clear-headed 
description of our practices and commitments, and in so doing 
revealing to us just what those practices and commitments actually 
involve and entail for other aspects of our lives (although see the 
discussion of the various articles by Mark Johnston later on for 
considerations to the contrary).


### 2.6 Assessing Theories of Personal Identity in Light of Fission


Fission is a challenge to any theory of personal identity that
purports to preserve a tight relation between identity and our
practical concerns. The Psychological Criterion will be a clear
casualty, for instance. As for the Biological Criterion, it seems
most plausible, in light of fission, to adopt an extreme version of
the IDM stance, maintaining (as does Olson 1997, as noted earlier)
that our numerical identity just doesn't ground our practical concerns
at all (which are instead a function of a "same person
relation" that need not adhere to the demands of a strict
numerical identity relation).


What, though, about the Anthropological View? Schechtman offers an
interesting take on fission: Such a procedure hasn't yet occurred, so
without filling in the social conditions and practices we can't state
in advance what the identity of the survivors would be. If fission
happened all the time, all of those future humans would likely be very
different sorts of creatures from us, as they would be living a
different form of life, and so the identity conditions for individuals
like *us* simply wouldn't apply to them. If it happened only
once or very rarely, the survivors would be sufficiently like us (as
we could still engage with them interpersonally, and our interactions
with them could still make sense from within our current form of life)
that they would be one of us, but they couldn't be identical to the
original person. This is because there would be such a huge range of
differences in how they would be treated - by the spouse, children,
friends, bank, and employer of the pre-fission person - that each
person's relation to the pre-fission person would now just be too
different to count as identity (Schechtman 2014, 159-166). The
Anthropological View thus seems as if it can deal with fission while
nevertheless preserving a tight relation between identity and
practical concerns.


It seems difficult to arbitrate between the IDM and the
Anthropological View, and one reason is that they seem to be taking
different methodological approaches to identifying the identity
conditions for different kinds of entities. Regarding the latter,
Parfit asks the first-person question, "What matters
to *me* in fission?" and this presupposes that we are
talking about the type of creatures (pre- and post-fission) that are
individuals like us in terms of our full-fledged forensic (Lockean
personhood) capacities. Schechtman, on the other hand, asks the
third-person question, about how such fission products would be
treated, which allows for their being creatures who are indeed
different from us. Furthermore, Schechtman is interested in
identifying (from the start) the unified locus of our practical
concerns and then subsequently figuring out *that thing's*
identity conditions, whereas Parfit is interested in what antecedent
theories of *personal* identity would imply for our practical
concerns in light of fission. This latter difference in methodology
will be discussed in a later section. The former difference in the
object of our practical concerns, however, may be irreconcilable.
Indeed, from *my* perspective in fission, once I'm a Lockean
person, it may seem that nothing internal to that perspective will be
lost (holding instead twice over). But I can also understand how
differently the survivors might well be treated in a number of
respects by others. It may thus be unclear which perspective we ought
to privilege here.


### 2.7 Nonreductionism




We have just examined the leading contemporary theories of 
personal identity (or what matters in personal identity), and we have
also explored how those views might relate to ethics. But we have 
thus far ignored what may be the most popular theory of identity 
*outside* philosophy (and a view that a minority of 
philosophers still accept as well). This is nonreductionism, according to 
which persons exist separately and independently from their brains 
and bodies, and so their lives are unified from birth to death in 
virtue of that separately existing entity, what we will call a 
Cartesian ego (but is most popularly thought of as a soul). And 
although there is logical space available for a nonreductionism 
according to which identity *isn't* what matters for survival 
and our practical concerns, the universal view is instead the 
opposite. Notice, then, that this view implies both a deep unity 
within individual lives and a deep *disunity* between lives. 
After all, if what unifies my life is a particular persisting 
ego-substance, and that substance is wholly present at every stage of
my life, then every temporal slice of my life is just as much a part 
of me as every other, so if prudential concern is grounded in 
identity, for example, I ought to be equally concerned for every part
of my life. Further, given that my particular ego-substance is 
distinct from every other person's particular ego-substance, my 
special prudential concern justifiably ends at the boundaries of my 
epidermis (or at the "boundaries" of my ego).




Now one important problem for this view is that it is very difficult 
to see why my patterns of concern should track this particular ego, 
and not instead the psychological features constituting Relation R. 
What is it about this substance that warrants my special 
prudential concern, for example? If it is in virtue of its function as the 
*carrier* of the various psychological connections, then we 
might well wonder why we shouldn't just care directly for those 
connections, rather than merely for the "house" they 
live in. But if we make that move, then we have already switched to 
reductionism, it seems, and because those direct psychological 
connections may hold one-many, identity cannot be what matters.




On the other hand, the nonreductionist might insist that I am 
justified in having special concern for my future ego simply insofar 
as it is the only thing that will be *me*, regardless of 
whether or not Relation R is preserved by or within it. On this 
account, then (what Parfit 1984, 228 calls the "Featureless 
Cartesian View"), who I am - my essential identity 
- is independent of any particular psychological properties. 
But if identity is entirely prized apart from psychology in this way,
and if the ego to be tracked is an immaterial substance (as it is, of
course, on the Cartesian version), we are left with two related 
puzzles. First, if the particular ego I now have (or am) can be 
perceived or identified neither directly, via some empirical means, 
nor indirectly, via a particular set of psychological properties it 
might be thought to evince, then we actually have no reason to 
believe that there is *just one* such ego unifying the various
stages of our lives. Instead, our bodies might get a new, 
qualitatively identical ego every year on our birthdays, or perhaps 
every day, or perhaps there is a river of them flowing through us 
from moment to moment. If this were to happen, then *I* would 
cease to exist, replaced by a qualitatively identical person who then
inherits my psychological properties. But no one would even notice! 
This would be rather odd, to say the least, and this is because of 
the connection we think should obtain between our metaphysical 
criterion of personal identity and our epistemological criterion of 
personal identity. In other words, we tend to think there is a close 
connection between the nature of personal identity and what enables 
us to *determine* when identity obtains. So if what makes 
*X* and *Y* identical is sameness of body, it will also
be our reidentification of that body which enables us to determine 
that *X* is *Y*. Similarly, if what makes *X* 
and *Y* identical is some kind of psychological continuity, 
then determining that *X* and *Y* are identical will be
a matter of determining whether psychological continuity obtains 
between them. Now in both the body and the psychology cases, we have 
the capacity to do the tracking in question. If the Featureless 
Cartesian View is correct, though, we do not. We cannot track 
immaterial egos floating free from any particular psychological 
properties, so on this view we would never be justified in claiming 
to have reidentified anyone, nor would we be justified in claiming 
special concern for some future stage of our bodies: in both cases, 
we could have no reason whatsoever for thinking that the persons in 
question were who we thought they were (Perry 1978, 6-18; Parfit 
1984, 228).




Now the defender of the view might maintain that, given the
correctness of the metaphysical criterion, we should simply abandon
our desire for epistemic access to identity. And it is indeed the case
that this version of nonreductionism could be true: There is simply no
way to show that I am not, after all, an essentially immaterial
substance unattached to any particular psychological properties. But
if this true, and there becomes no way to make justified judgments of
identity, then the second problem is that the theory is
just *irrelevant* for all practical purposes. We in fact make
judgments of identity and reidentification based on physical and
psychological properties - we lack the capacity to do anything
else - so even if the Featureless Cartesian View were true, it
would be useless in addressing any of our practical concerns. If,
then, we want to articulate a *useful* relation between
personal identity and ethics, we may have to abandon nonreductionism,
or at least nonreductionism of the "separately existing
entities" sort (technically, Schechtman's Anthropological View
is a non-reductionist view, as it does insist that the facts about
identity consist in facts beyond just facts about brains and bodies,
but these aren't non-trackable facts like those of the Featureless
Cartesian; they are instead facts about social treatment and
engagement).


### 2.8 Four-Dimensionalism




Let us turn briefly now to a very general position, a possible 
version of reductionism according to which identity nevertheless 
still matters. This view is typically defended by advocates of 
*four-dimensionalism*, according to which objects have both 
spatial and temporal parts (see, e.g., Lewis 1971, 1976; 
Noonan 1989; Sider 2001a). This view allows one to say that, in the 
fission case, both post-fission people existed all along, completely 
coinciding spatially pre-fission (so that each shared that temporal 
stretch of his life with the other). In other words, they might be 
like two distinct roads that coincide for a while before separating 
off in different directions. Thus, if both post-fission person-stages
are stages of the same person as the pre-fission stages (but there 
are indeed two distinct persons all along), then one can maintain the
thesis that the identity relation is what matters, for now identity 
is also preserved through fission (whereas in Parfit's version while 
what matters is preserved through fission, identity is not).




Of course, this does not mean identity is really what matters. 
Perhaps instead the identity relation merely always 
*accompanies*, but is not constitutive of, what matters. 
Indeed, this point may be pressed on the four-dimensionalist. Why, 
after all, would it be *identity* that matters in my relation 
to some future person-stage? Suppose we regularly lived to be 1000 
years old. On the four-dimensionalist account, I now would be unified
with - I would be part of the same spacetime worm as - my
900-year-old self. But it is extraordinarily difficult, if not 
psychologically impossible, for me to project myself into his shoes, 
for I expect him to be radically different, psychologically, from me.
There would be between us, then, virtually *nothing* of what 
actually matters in ordinary survival, despite the obtaining of 
identity. Of course, one might maintain instead that it is some 
strong degree of psychological connectedness that provides the unity 
relation between various temporal stages, but then it seems explicit 
that the relation preserving what matters is just connectedness, not 
identity per se. There is much more to say about this view, of 
course (see, e.g., Belzer 2005), and we will return to it later.


## 3. Prudential and Moral Units




Strictly speaking, a metaphysical criterion of identity has no direct
implications whatsoever for normative matters, simply because what is
the case implies nothing about what ought to be the case. What people
who seek a relation between identity and ethics typically do, then, 
is appeal to considerations of identity to fill in some key blank 
regarding what the  *ethically significant metaphysical units*
are. In other words, certain conclusions about identity are taken to 
inform us as to just what unifies the targets of prudential and moral
theorizing. Consider prudence, for example. In deliberating about 
what is in my best interest, what is needed is some conception of the
scope of the "my" in question, i.e., what *unit* 
my deliberations are to cover. Similarly, with respect to moral 
responsibility, we need to know whether the agent subject to 
praise or blame for some action is part of the same unit as the agent
who performed that action.




But notice that a specification of possible metaphysical unities alone
will not be sufficient, for what we need in addition is a
specification of which such unities are *significant for
ethics*. To see why this is an issue, consider just reductionism.
Reductionism is actually quite a general metaphysical view, holding at
its most basic that the facts about identity simply consist in more
particular facts about brains, bodies, and so forth. But even if one
accepts reductionism, and so abandons appeal to some further fact
about separately existing entities to explain personal identity, and
even if one also believes that identity is not what matters in
survival, one still has much work to do before being able to apply the
theory to ethics. This is because there are (at least) *four*
possible metaphysical units that could be targeted for normative
theorizing. First, we might target *living human beings*, human
organisms picked out by the Biological Criterion (and to some extent
the Anthropological View) and unified over time via biological
continuity. These entities would endure from some early-stage fetuses
until organismic death. Second, we might target Lockean
*persons*, entities picked out by the Psychological Criterion
and unified over time by psychological continuity (overlapping chains
of strong psychological connectedness). These entities would endure
from late infancy (or the time at which the various psychological
connections could be established) to brain death or perhaps
dementia. Third, we might target *selves*, entities unified by
strong psychological connectedness. Such units would have significant
duration, but they would not be likely to endure for as long as
persons - insofar as memories typically fade, beliefs and
desires are lost or revised over time, and so forth - and they
certainly wouldn't endure as long as the life of the human being of
which they were a part. Fourth, we might target *atoms*, or
momentary experiencers, "units" defined and delimited by
the duration of an experience. It could be, after all, that if the
deep fact of identity is missing, there just are no other relations of
significance we could legitimately substitute for it, so all that
remains would be merely the basic atomic moments of people's
lives. (For discussion of the last three possible units, see D.
Shoemaker 1999, 401; for a similar distinction, see Brink 1997b,
110-115, where he labels these last three possible units
"persons," "person-segments," and
"person-slices.")




So it is not enough that we articulate the various possible 
metaphysical units. We must also figure out a way to identify 
which one we ought to target for ethics (or whether just one will do 
the trick for all relevant forms of ethical theorizing). So in its 
purely metaphysical guise, reductionism must settle merely for 
presenting these four alternatives, remaining officially neutral on 
which one the ethicists should adopt. This two-step process - 
identifying the possible metaphysical units, then narrowing down the 
list to the ethically *significant* metaphysical units -
is often overlooked by those wishing to adopt metaphysical 
conclusions in their normative theorizing, but both steps are 
important (a notable exception to those who overlook this point is 
Brink; see his 1990, 1997a, and 1997b).




Once we make the switch from talk of identity to talk of unity 
relations as being ethically significant, however, things can also 
get quite complicated. For there seems no reason in principle why two
of the contending intrapersonal unity relations - psychological
continuity and connectedness - could not also hold 
*interpersonally*. That is, not only could psychological 
continuity, say, hold one-many, between me-now and more than one 
person in the future, but it could also hold between me-now and other
spatially distinct, simultaneously-existing persons (Brink 1997a, 
141-143, 1997b, 125-128). And the same could be true as well of 
psychological connectedness. At least 
some of the psychological relations making up connectedness and 
continuity can obviously obtain interpersonally, e.g., sameness of 
beliefs/desires/goals, and resemblance of character. But it also 
seems perfectly possible that memories and intentions may be shared 
between persons, produced by some common cause (*Ibid*.). 
Recognizing these connections widens the boundaries of what counts as
a targeted unit (and in so doing it may also blur the boundaries 
between prudence and morality), but the ensuing messiness may not be 
worth it. After all, if the proper ethical unit is a self, say, 
unified by psychological connectedness, which obtains by degrees, 
that means that my unity with many others - and with future 
stages of myself - will be only partial, obtaining to various 
people in varying degrees. But if these are the units targeted by 
ethics, how do we mark their boundaries such that the moral concepts 
and principles coherently apply (McMahan 2002, 62)? In addition, who 
exactly would the practical agents in question be, where people are 
more or less unified with each other (Brink 1997b, 113-114)? And 
there may also be worries about how to apply moral concepts admitting
of no scalar dimensions - like promises - to moral units 
- like selves - that do (Williams 1976, 202-204). These 
questions (and more) pose genuine challenges for accounts allowing 
for interpersonal unities.


Perhaps in order to avoid these and other problems, Marya
Schechtman proposes her Anthropological View as driven by the question
of what units are the proper object of *all of* our
person-related practical concerns. As already noted, she thinks the
only way to unite all of them is by focusing on the human animal, one
that lives our form of life. This allows her to say that the fetus is
the same thing as the infant, which is the same as the teenager, the
adult, and the demented grandparent, one individual treated as the
same locus of a host of practical concerns over the course of that
life. This view effectively blocks the possibilities, raised above,
of some concerns cutting across individual lives, but this may prevent
the Anthropological View from being able to explain some features of
commonsense morality that the interpersonal unities view can.


## 4. Identity and Normative Ethics




We have already seen some ways in which considerations of personal 
identity might be relevant to self-regarding arenas like 
anticipation and prudential concern. We turn now to examine specific ways 
in which personal identity may have implications for the 
other-regarding practical concerns discussed in various arenas of 
moral philosophy. One of the most widely discussed in the 
literature thus far has been ethical theory. Most of those working in
the field to this point have been appealing to considerations of 
identity to boost the plausibility of consequentialism, and, more 
specifically, utilitarianism. There are various ways in which such an
attempt proceeds.




First, one might identify a serious objection to utilitarianism, say,
and then show how considerations of personal identity (or at least of
what *matters* in identity) dissolve the objection. This is 
the approach Parfit takes in *Reasons and Persons*. The 
objection he is concerned to refute is Rawls' famous 
"separateness of persons" charge, the contention that 
utilitarianism fails to take seriously the distinction between 
persons, because it controversially jettisons interpersonal 
distributive principles in exactly the way we uncontroversially 
jettison them intrapersonally (Rawls 1971, 22-27). That is, in 
extending the principle of rational choice to society-wide 
decision-making (via use of the imagined impartial spectator), 
utilitarianism treats the interests of all members of society as if 
they were the interests of one person, and so conflates different 
persons into one. What Parfit suggests is that, if the objection 
depends on a hard-and-fast metaphysical distinction between persons 
(i.e., on the non-identity of different persons), and if this 
distinction depends on the further fact of identity - a 
nonexistent fact if reductionism is true - then the distinction
is nothing to take seriously in the first place. Utilitarians, in 
other words, may be reductionists, justifiably ignoring the 
"distinctness" between persons - and the 
distributive principles such a distinction might support - 
because the non-identity of persons is just a less deep fact (Parfit 
1984, 329-345; see also Broome 1991 for a reductionist-based argument
in support of utilitarianism's account of goodness).




The success of arguments for this conclusion actually depends on the specific 
*version* of reductionism being advanced. After all, there are
several possible ethically significant metaphysical units compatible
with reductionism, and it turns out that the larger the unit, the less
successful the argument will be. As the authors on this topic do, we
will focus just on the three possible *psychological* units:
persons, selves, and atoms. If one believes that the only relevant
units are atoms (momentary experiencers) - given that in the
absence of the further fact of identity one believes there
just *are* no other unifying relations of any significance
(i.e., Parfit's Extreme Claim) - then it is easy to see the
complete analogy between individual lives and sets of lives: neither
are unified by any significant metaphysical relations, so we could
think of them both as just big collections of experiences, in which
case there would seem to be no reason to apply distributive principles
within either (or, alternatively, no reason not to apply such
principles to both - how much *weight* they ought to bear
in that case would remain open, however). But notice that if one
adopts either of the other two psychology-based versions of
reductionism, according to which either selves or persons are the
basic moral units, the argument may not be as successful. If, for
instance, it is psychological continuity that matters instead of the
further fact of identity - and matters just as much as identity
was thought to (i.e., Parfit's Moderate Claim) - then persons are
the ethically significant metaphysical units, but then there remains a
metaphysical distinction *between* persons, for psychological
continuity, in the absence of interpersonal connectedness, fails to
unify sets of lives in the way it does individual lives (see Jeske
1993, Brink 1997a). And the same goes for strong psychological
connectedness, which would unify *selves* in a way rendering
them metaphysically distinct from sets of lives.




It looks, then, as if the only way to bolster support for 
utilitarianism (with a version of *this* argument, anyway) is 
to adopt the extreme view, that the ethically significant metaphysical 
units are momentarily-existing person-atoms. But this is implausible,
for it is very difficult even to make sense of a momentary 
*agent*. Agents, after all, have interests and projects they 
seek to advance that necessarily project them into the future. In 
order to be what one is at any moment, then, one must identify with 
one's future. "When the person is viewed as an agent, no clear 
content can be given to the idea of a merely present self" 
(Korsgaard 1989, 114; see also Williams 1976, 204-207, and Brink 
1997b, 112-113). But if one moves away from atoms as the basic moral 
units for these sorts of practical reasons, the separation between 
selves/persons and sets of lives becomes more distinct.



*Unless*, that is, one allows that the relations that matter 
in identity can hold interpersonally, in which case a number of 
interesting possibilities arise. For instance, Brink argues that the 
possibility of interpersonal continuity supports a kind of 
consequentialism via rational egoism. If one is a rational egoist, 
one will aim to promote one's own good. What counts as *one's 
own*, though - what counts as contained within the 
*prudentially* significant metaphysical unit - given 
reductionism, is defined by psychological continuity (Brink argues 
against the coherence or practical feasibility of both atoms and 
selves as the basic units). But if continuity also holds 
interpersonally, then the rational egoist must, if truly rational, 
promote the good of all those with whom he is continuous, which, 
given the thought that each of us bears only six degrees of 
separation from every other person, generates an important kind of 
impartial, *universalist* consequentialism: "the egoist 
can recognize derivative but non-instrumental reason to be concerned 
about others" (Brink 1997b, 127). Of course, if the utter 
impartiality of a universalist consequentialism is implausible for 
the way it overlooks the importance to us of the special concern we 
have for friends and loved ones, perhaps one can introduce the idea 
of *degrees* of continuity, in which case the concern the 
egoist must have for others "is proportional to the amount of 
psychological continuity that exists between the agent and 
others" (*Ibid*., 128; see also McMahan 2002, 59-66).




Of course, while connectedness clearly comes in degrees, it is less 
clear that *continuity* does. For one thing, if continuity 
consists in strong connectedness, and what makes for such strength is
the obtaining of an amount of direct psychological connections above 
some specified threshold (as it does for Parfit 1984, 206), then 
continuity is not a matter of degree: either strong connectedness 
obtains at each link in the chain or it does not (Belzer 2005). But 
even if we allow that some links in the chain may be weaker than 
others, if what matters is the existence of the *chain*, it is
difficult to see why its strength in certain patches is relevant. In 
other words, even if we allow that continuity comes in degrees, it is
not entirely clear why our patterns of concern ought to track the 
*amount* and not simply the *fact* of continuity. 
Indeed, if what matters is supposed to be the degree of continuity, 
it might seem to make more sense simply to focus on the more 
obviously scalar relation in which continuity consists, viz., 
*connectedness*, as delivering the units of significance in 
the form of selves.




While focus on selves could perhaps yield a very complicated form of 
consequentialism (involving the introduction into deliberation of the
good of all affected parties - including future selves - 
weighted according to the degrees of connectedness obtaining between 
them and the deliberator), another, perhaps more promising, approach 
would be to appeal to reductionist selves to buttress a different 
ethical theory altogether, namely contractualism. One longstanding 
objection to the theory is that it has no way of motivating the 
amoralist to adhere to the demands of morality. But we can assume 
that the amoralist is at least prudentially rational. If so, then one
very plausible way to model ordinary prudential deliberation is as 
consisting of a desire that one's actions be justifiable to all 
affected future stages of oneself (see, e.g., McClennen 1990, 217). 
But if the relation that matters in identity is connectedness, it 
should ground such prudential concern in a way that restricts 
required justification only to those stages with whom one expects to 
be connected. Then if connectedness holds interpersonally, the 
rational amoralist must also extend that desire for justifiability to
all those with whom he is psychologically connected, and this will 
take him a long ways towards having the moral motivation at the heart
of contractualism (D. Shoemaker 2000; 
for the basic view of contractualism presupposed here, see Scanlon 
1982 and 1998).




The views documented thus far all appeal to psychology-based versions
of the ethically significant metaphysical units. What, though, of
biology-based versions? One thought motivating nonconsequentialism
over consequentialism has to do with compensation:
nonconsequentialists think it would be unfair to compensate one basic
moral unit for a burden undergone by another such unit, something
which consequentialism allegedly permits (Jeske 1993). Here the
non-identity of different basic moral units is significant. But what
are the moral units relevant to issues of compensation? These are most
often thought to be psychological units, typically reductionist
persons. But why not think these basic units are instead *human
beings*, individual animal organisms unified by biological
continuity? One reason to do so stems from consideration of cases in
which a child has been made worse off by some burden undergone when
she was a fetus, e.g., her mother drank (giving her fetal alcohol
syndrome) or her mother's physician was negligent. Here she is owed
compensation, we might think, for what happened to *her* before
birth. (And analogous cases might be constructed with respect to
humans who become non-persons, perhaps by going into a PVS.) Such
cases might then suggest that, if compensation presupposes personal
identity (or what matters in identity), then the criterion of identity
relevant to compensation is biological, in which case ethical theories
targeting only psychological units are incomplete (D. Shoemaker 2007,
338).




As we can see, then, one may deploy reductionism about personal
identity in very different ways to achieve very different results for
ethical theory, depending on the basic metaphysical units one
targets. Of course, there may simply be no single relation appropriate
for grounding *all* our patterns of concern, i.e., some
patterns of concern may be grounded in biological continuity, some may
be grounded in psychological continuity or connectedness, and some may
target simple momentary experiences. If this is the case, then it may
be difficult to see what general uniform conclusions, if any, can be
drawn for ethical theory (see Shoemaker 2007; this is what Schechtman
2014 (80-88) calls the Problem of Multiplicity).


## 5. Identity and Moral Responsibility




As noted earlier, Locke thought the personal identity relation was, 
in effect, an *accountability* relation: what makes *Y*
at *t*2 the same person as *X* at 
*t*1 is just what makes *Y* accountable
- morally responsible - for *X*'s actions. Now this
general account of moral responsibility won't do without immmediate
supplementation. After all, various excuses (e.g., brainwashing,
involuntary intoxication) may serve to get one off the accountability
hook even if one is identical to the original agent. So let us
suppose, then, that Locke thought one is accountable, *in the
absence of excuse*, for all and only those actions performed by
someone with whom one is identical. Is this true?




There is widespread agreement that identity is at least a necessary
condition for accountability. The way this idea is most often
expressed is that one can be responsible only for one's own
actions. Sometimes this is put more expansively: I can be responsible
for my own actions, and I cannot be responsible for anyone else's
actions (Sider 2001, 4, 143, 203-204; Schechtman 1996, 14; Olson
1997, 59). But these ways of putting the matter are just supposed to
be a gloss on the philosophical slogan that moral responsibility
presupposes personal identity (Butler 1736, 99-105; Reid 1785,
107-118; DeGrazia 2005, 88-89; Glannon 1998; Parfit 1984,
323-326; Parfit 1986, 837-843).




Now one might think that there are obvious counterexamples to the
slogan: parents are sometimes held responsible for the actions of
their children, and accomplices are held responsible for the crimes
committed by others. An easy reply, however, is that in each case the
person being held responsible is actually responsible only for
*what he or she did*. For example, the parent is being held 
responsible, not for what his child did, but for his (in)action in 
*letting* the child do what she did, say, or for his poor 
parenting. And the accomplice is being held responsible, not for what 
the criminal did, but for what the accomplice did in aiding the 
criminal. So in both cases there is some properly specified action 
for which it seems only the person identical to the actor may be held
responsible.




Nevertheless, there are serious problems with the slogan. To see why,
note that we are looking for an answer to the following question:
what makes a past action *my own* for purposes of responsibility?
The answer given by most theorists, following Locke, is that an action
is my own just in case I am identical to the person who performed
it. So what account of personal identity provides the right criterion
of what makes an action one's own? Locke's memory criterion fails, for
some actions can be one's own even if one no longer remembers
performing them, due to drunkenness, repression, trauma, or the like
(Schechtman 2005, 12; see also Bradford and Smith 1979). In addition,
memory isn't sufficient for ownership of actions. Were someone else's
memory trace of doing something immoral copied into my brain (so that
I "remembered" that person's action), it would be silly to
think that it was mine for purposes of accountability, or that I was
somehow thereby identical to the performer of that action (Schechtman
2005, 12).




What of the Biological Criterion? On an application of that view, some
past action is mine for purposes of accountability just in case I am
biologically continuous with its agent. But this again seems neither
necessary nor sufficient for ownership. Were my cerebrum transplanted
into another's biological organism, such that that person were now
fully psychologically continuous with me, it seems that ownership of
my actions would have been transferred as well, such that my cerebrum
inheritor now is eligible for accountability for my actions, despite
his not being biologically continuous with me. Furthermore, were
immoral Johann to enter a fugue state, yielding a biological successor
(call him Sebastian) who was nevertheless completely psychologically
discontinuous with Johann, it would be hard to believe Sebastian could
continue to be the owner of Johann's actions, despite their biological
continuity (D. Shoemaker 2011).




The natural move, then, is to apply the Psychological Criterion to the
criterion of ownership relevant to responsibility (see, e.g., Glannon
1998, 231, 237-243). This criterion requires a wider variety and a
greater number of psychological connections than does the memory
criterion, and so it can sidestep the worries attaching to Locke's
account, while also emphasizing that psychological, not biological,
relations are what matter for responsibility. According to this view,
then, some past action is my own (for purposes of accountability) just
in case the person who performed the action is uniquely
psychologically continuous with me (where this consists in overlapping
chains of strong psychological connectedness).




Nevertheless, this view also has some problems. For one thing, it's
unclear that psychological continuity alone is sufficient for
ownership. Suppose Johann's fugue state (turning into the
psychologically very different Sebastian) developed gradually, as the
result of a brain tumor. We still would likely deny that Sebastian is
the owner of Johann's actions, despite their now psychological
continuity. And it also seems possible that psychological continuity
isn't necessary for ownership either. Suppose someone were to undergo
a brain trauma causing psychological discontinuity. Depending on how
the case were filled in, it may be that certain actions performed
prior to the discontinuity would still be judged hers in the relevant
sense. As long as they flowed from a central aspect of the agent's
character that remained in place, we might say, they are properly
attributable to her regardless of the other psychological
discontinuities that have taken place.




It is in part because of these sorts of worries that Schechtman 
suggests abandoning the search for identity in the reidentification 
sense in favor of identity in the characterization sense. What we're 
looking for, after all, is an account of what makes some past action 
my own. But looking for an answer to this question via something like
the Psychological Criterion is too indirect: it has us attributing 
the action to some past person first and then trying to determine 
whether or not the person to be assessed as responsible is one and 
the same as that past agent. But if the action cannot be attributed 
to the allegedly responsible person *directly*, the relation 
between the two person-slices just isn't strong enough to warrant 
responses like punishment and blame (Schechtman 1996, 90-91; 2005, 
13).




Nevertheless, all of these theories, including narrative identity, fall prey to the 
fission case. Suppose *X* were to 
rob a bank and then undergo fission, dividing into *Y* and 
*Z*, both of whom were psychologically continuous with 
*X*. Both *Y* and *Z* would seem to remember 
*X*'s theft, they would still be buzzing over the thrill of 
the getaway chase, they would each have inherited an intention to 
spend the money on wine, women, and song, they would each persist in 
*X*'s beliefs about the justification for the crime, and so 
forth. We would likely think the crime to be properly attributable to
both of them, and so hold them both (at least partially) responsible 
for it. Yet *neither* could be numerically identical to 
*X*, and if identity is a necessary condition of 
responsibility, neither could be morally responsible for his crime. 
But this seems the wrong answer.




There are two plausible replies, both familiar by now. On the one 
hand, we can go four-dimensionalist (as does Sider 2001a), and hold that 
*Y* and *Z* are indeed two people who were, 
essentially, present all along, overlapping in all their spatial 
parts during the temporal stage of the life when they were both known
as "*X*." This allows us to preserve the slogan
that one person cannot be responsible for the actions of another 
- in other words, it is indeed numerical *identity* that
is necessary for responsibility - while also preserving the 
thought that it is the robust psychological relation that obtains 
between the various parties that grounds our belief that *X* 
has not gotten away with his crime just by undergoing fission.




Nevertheless, this option has some uncomfortable implications. For 
one thing, we think "I" *uniquely* refers, but 
"I" in *X*'s mouth would, in this case, actually 
be referring to *two* people, *Y* and *Z*. Or 
perhaps that is not quite right; perhaps instead "I" in 
*X*'s mouth refers to only *one* person, either 
*Y* *or* *Z*. But in that case, no one, not even
"the" speaker, could possibly know to which one it 
referred. And there are other worries. For instance, whether or not 
the pre-fission *X* consists in two overlapping persons 
depends entirely on what happens in the future, i.e., on whether or 
not *X* goes through with the fission. So if *X* is 
driving from the bank to the fission doctor and then gets cold feet, 
there will be no fission and thus no *Y* or *Z*. But 
then whether or not *Y* or *Z* exist *at the time of
*X*'s cold feet* depends on whether or not *X* even
gets cold feet, which seems, at the very least, quite odd. Whether or
not "I" now consist in one or two people should not, we 
want to say, depend on what happens to "me" in the 
future.




Now these are just standard puzzles for four-dimensionalism about 
persons (see Olson 1997b, van Inwagen 2002, and the entry on 
 personal identity).
 But there are also puzzles for four-dimensionalism specific to its 
treatment of the responsibility case. For instance, if responsibility
depends on identity, and identity is a transitive relation, then if 
*Y* is responsible for the actions of *X* (insofar as 
*Y* is unified with *X* as part of the same 
person-worm), and *Z* is responsible for the actions of 
*X* (insofar as *Z* is unified with *X* as part 
of the same person-worm), then wouldn't *Y* also be 
responsible for the actions of *Z* (and vice versa)? Of 
course, unity relations are not identity relations, but it is unclear
just why they do not have to be transitive in the way the identity 
relation is supposed to be (in Sider 2001a, 203, he simply insists 
that they do not have to be, without saying why). Furthermore, the 
four-dimensionalist solution is meant to preserve the commonsense 
slogan, but it does so in virtue of a solution that seems about as
far from commonsense as can be. Indeed, the slogan is about the
responsibility of *persons*, but four-dimensionalism offers 
only a solution regarding the responsibility of 
*person-stages* (*Ibid*.; see also Parfit 1976).




A second reply is reductionist, and it simply denies the slogan. 
In other words, identity is *not* necessary for moral 
responsibility. Instead (the reductionist could say), what matters is
psychological continuity (or connectedness), regardless of whether it
obtains uniquely. This allows the reductionist to handle the fission 
case in the following way: while neither *Y* nor *Z* is
identical with *X*, both are fully psychologically continuous 
with him, and insofar as ownership of actions consists in 
psychological continuity with the original agent, and because 
ownership is the necessary condition for responsibility, both 
*Y* and *Z* may be morally responsible for *X*'s
crimes.




Of course, we already saw some worries attached to a psychological
continuity account of ownership that were unrelated to its being an
account of numerical identity (e.g., the gradual fugue of Johann to
Sebastian, and the psychological discontinuity case). Perhaps, though,
we could draw from the insights regarding the characterization sense
of identity in responding to these particular problems, and then
construct an account of ownership relevant to responsibility that is
utterly divorced from considerations of numerical identity (and
insofar as narrative identity depends on numerical identity, it would
not be an eligible contender here). Indeed, this might be one way to
construe what those working on responsibility
and *identification* are doing (e.g., Frankfurt 1988, 1999;
Taylor 1983; Watson 1975; Smith 2000; D. Shoemaker 2015). Once the
account of ownership were complete, one could then
*call* the view an identity account if one wanted (perhaps
being about practical identity), but this would just be a
terminological overlay, and it would be clear at that point that the
essential component of responsibility was not really identity but
rather ownership.


(One might wonder what the Anthropological View would say about
moral responsibility and personhood. As the theory stands, it does not
engage directly with this discussion, as it is just about determining
the types of entities who are the appropriate targets of
accountability assessments, and so does not purport to deliver whether
any individual assessment is appropriate relative to identity.)


## 6. Identity and Applied Ethics




Perhaps the most exciting and variegated explorations of the relation
between identity and ethics are taking place in the arena 
of applied ethics, specifically in medical ethics and bioethics. 
These typically involve attempts to chart the relation between some 
clear-cut person and either an earlier or later entity "at the 
margins of life." We will here discuss the two main arenas of 
such research before briefly noting the sorts of debates about 
identity and applied ethics taking place in other arenas.


### 6.1 Embryonic Research and Abortion




There are several ways in which personal identity is taken to be 
relevant to the debates over these topics. Consider first embryos and
recent disputes over the morality of stem cell research. The
most commonly cited argument against such research is that, in its 
most promising form, it will involve destruction of two- to 
five-day-old embryos (in order to harvest their inner cell mass, 
which is what is used for the development of stem cells). But because
human beings come into existence at the "moment" of 
conception, embryos are human beings, and insofar as it is prima 
facie immoral to kill human beings, it is prima facie immoral to kill
embryos (see, e.g., Peters 2001, 129).




References to identity in this debate come from objectors to this
argument, who apply the argument from fission to a real life version
of it, namely, twinning. An embryo might split any time generally
before the two-week point in fetal development, and those two embryos
could develop into fully formed infant twins. The question for the
advocate of the above argument to consider is, in such a case, what
happens to the original *human being*, the embryo we will call
Adam? There are only three possibilities: (a) either Adam survives as
both twins, (b) Adam survives only as one or the other of the twins,
or (c) Adam does not survive. Option (a) cannot be right, given that
the twins will live distinct, individual lives, and so will clearly be
two human beings, not one. Option (b) cannot be right, for what
non-arbitrary reason could there be for one of the twins to be Adam
and not the other? They will both be qualitatively identical to Adam,
after all. The only remaining option, then, is (c), in which Adam does
not survive. But this has two bad implications for the above
advocate. First, if it is a tragedy when a human being dies, then
twinning involves a tragedy, and Adam's death, it seems, ought to be
mourned. This seems absurd (McMahan 1995 and 2002, 26; although see
Oderberg 1997 for an embrace of this implication). Second, if the
metaphysical analysis is right, then Adam's death brings about the
existence of two new human beings (call them Barney and Claire). But
this means that (1) it is not the case that
*all* human beings come into existence at conception (some 
come into existence at twinning), and (2) death can somehow occur 
with no earthly remains, which is at best odd and at worst false 
(Kuhse and Singer 2002, 190).




There are several possible replies, though. First, it is not clear 
that the options in twinning are exhausted by the three possibilities
articulated above. A fourth possible option, it seems, is that of the
four-dimensionalist, who can maintain that the embryo is a human 
being from the moment of conception by saying that the pre-twinning 
temporal parts of *both* Barney and Claire simply overlapped, 
i.e., what we called Adam was really a shared stage in the lives of 
both Barney and Claire. McMahan, for one, simply dismisses this 
possibility as absurd (McMahan 2002, 26), but it is not clear why, 
especially given that it is a straightforward application of a 
powerful metaphysical theory that has quite a bit of independent 
support (despite having its own set of problems, discussed earlier). 
Second, the implications involved may not be as bad as indicated. For
one thing, "death by twinning," while still a kind of 
death, may not be of a kind warranting the same sort of mourning 
typically expected to accompany regular "bodily" death. 
Furthermore, this kind of ceasing to exist, if it is a different kind
of event than that of regular death, perhaps should not be expected 
to have the same kind of conditions - like the leaving of 
earthly remains - as regular death either. Consider how we 
think of the similar "deaths" of splitting amoebas 
(*Ibid*., 27).




Turn now to just one way in which personal identity enters into the 
broader debate over abortion. Perhaps the most famous anti-abortion 
argument in the philosophical literature comes from Don Marquis, who 
argues that, because it is prima facie wrong to kill any entity with 
a future like ours, and because a fetus has a future like ours, it is
prima facie wrong to kill a fetus (Marquis 1989). Peter McInerney and
others, however, have denied that fetuses have futures like ours by 
appealing to considerations of identity. To have a future like ours, 
for instance, presupposes that one is identical to some person who 
will experience said future. But a fetus is not a person, it seems, 
and so it cannot be identical to any future person. Indeed, none of 
the relations deemed relevant to the identity of *persons* are 
present between a fetus and anything else, simply because a fetus 
lacks a psychology with memories, beliefs, desires, intentions, and a
general character capable of establishing any sort of plausible 
connection to a future experiencer, so that any experiences that 
experiencer undergoes cannot be the *fetus's* future 
experiences (McInerney 1990, Brill 2003). (The same point might be 
true as well for infants, but instead of taking that to be a 
*reductio* of the objection, one might also quite plausibly take
it simply to be a point in favor of rejecting Marquis's criterion of 
the wrongness of killing: given that infants also lack a future like 
ours, Marquis's account is substantially incomplete, for it fails to 
explain why killing infants is wrong, when it obviously is.)




This objection assumes a purely psychological criterion of identity, 
however, one in which, further, "person" is what's known
as a substance concept, a term designating a kind to which an 
individual always and essentially belongs throughout its existence. 
But as we saw earlier, "person" might be merely a  *phase* sortal, designating a kind to which the individual belongs
- if it does at all - for only part of its existence. 
This could mean, then, that I, *now* a person, could still be 
identical *qua* individual, to some organism - a fetus, 
say - that was not a person. Thus if some past fetus is 
identical to me - if we are one and the same animal, or 
organism - then he did indeed have a future like ours (Marquis 
1998).




Clearly, though, if it is identity alone that renders a future
experiencer's experiences *mine*, then the view runs into
difficulty when, once more, we consider the possibility of fission.
If I undergo fission, then, given the standard arguments, I will not
survive (setting four-dimensionalist considerations aside).
Nevertheless, surely we want to say that I still *have* a
valuable future - indeed, it is overwhelmingly plausible to say
I will have  *two* valuable futures. This only makes sense,
though, if we prize apart the having of a valuable future from the
obtaining of the (numerical) identity relation (for resistance to this
point, see Heathwood 2011). If we do so, though, we are insisting that
the relations that matter in the having of a valuable future are
definitely *psychological*, in which case, even if I am
identical with some past fetus (*qua* organism or animal), that
is irrelevant: what *matters* in the having of a valuable
future does not obtain between us, so while a fetus has a future, it
really does not have a future *like ours*.




A third kind of stance taken regarding identity and abortion is that 
there just *is* no relation of significance between them. Earl
Conee argues in this way, insisting that the four main attempts to 
bolster some view about abortion with metaphysical conclusions fail, 
and thus that the metaphysics simply makes no moral difference, a 
conclusion "indicative of a general epistemic irrelevance of 
metaphysics to the moral issue" (Conee 1999, 619). But just 
because the various arguments fail (and Conee seems right about 
that), it does not yet follow that metaphysics generally makes no 
moral difference to questions about fetuses and embryos; indeed, we 
have just discussed two cases in which it clearly does. As Timothy 
Chappell puts it, Conee "does nothing to show that the 
*right* metaphysical doctrines - combined of course with
the right moral doctrines - could not give us genuine reason to
turn one way rather than the other in debates about abortion, or 
other similar debates about the extent of the moral community" 
(Chappell 2000, 279). And so it is to one of those "similar 
debates," this time regarding the other end of life, that we 
now turn.


### 6.2 Advanced Directives




The philosophical puzzle regarding advance directives is 
fundamentally a puzzle about personal identity. Suppose that a woman 
is in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease, and she recognizes 
that there will come a point where she is in a demented state and 
will thus be incompetent to make autonomous or informed decisions 
about her treatment. Because she values her creativity and autonomy, 
she does not want that future demented self to be kept alive - 
its life will not be worth living - so she signs an advance 
directive stipulating that no life-saving measures are to be used on 
that future demented self (FDS). However, by the time her FDS gets 
pneumonia, she is quite content in her state and, when asked, says 
she wants to live (e.g., McMahan 2002, 497).




There is obviously a conflict here, but of what sort? If FDS is 
identical to the early-stage Alzheimer's self (EAS), then the 
conflict is between temporally distinct interests of the same person.
But if that is the case, then we typically discount past interests in
favor of present ones. If, when I was a ravenously carnivorous 
20-year-old, I swore to myself that I would never pass up an 
opportunity to eat a juicy steak, yet I now find myself a vegetarian 
who gets queasy at the sight of medium-rare flesh on the table, it is
obviously my present interests that will - and ought, we think 
- win the day.




On the other hand, if FDS is *not* identical to EAS - 
if, instead, she is a different person, or is at least a different 
self - then it may not be so obvious what the conflict is after
all, for FDS has made her preferences clear, and if she is 
importantly distinct from the signer of the advance directive, then 
there seems little reason why the interests of EAS are relevant at 
all to FDS's life. But then again, FDS is not competent, and EAS, if 
not identical to her, is at least akin to her closest relative, one 
might think, in which case her earlier wishes perhaps ought to hold 
sway after all (see Luttrell and Sommerville 1996). (But EAS and FDS 
will be very psychologically different, we are supposing, so why 
think they are closely related at all? Indeed, wouldn't FDS be more 
closely "related" to her fellow end-stage Alzheimer's 
patients? So why think EAS has any more right to make life-or-death 
decisions about her than any of these others?)




And here is yet another way of looking at the matter. Suppose we 
agree with Parfit and others that identity just is not what matters 
for, among other things, defining and delimiting the scope of 
egoistic concern; suppose instead it is Relation R. FDS, because of 
her loss of memory and the like, will bear a very limited degree of 
that relation to EAS. EAS will thus be strongly R-related with most 
of the previous stages of her life (the chains of connectedness, let 
us stipulate, are very strong), but very weakly R-related with FDS, 
even though, it seems clear, FDS remains a stage of her life. But the
part of her life most deeply prudentially unified - the far 
larger, more dominant part of her life - is the part of which 
EAS was still a strongly R-related part. Thus it might be that the 
wishes of EAS to preserve a coherently meaningful and valuable life 
ought to control here, given that the longer FDS lives, the worse she
might retrospectively render EAS's life. That is, what is good for 
the deepest, longest prudential unity will be closest to what is best
for the life as a whole, so FDS's good ought to be sacrificed for the
sake of the good of the whole, as articulated by EAS in her advanced 
directive (see McMahan 2002, 502 for an argument like this).




Of course, once we abandon identity as what matters - 
especially if we do so in favor of a relation(s) that does not 
guarantee life-long unity (e.g., connectedness) - then it is 
not so clear anymore why what is best for the life-as-a-whole 
"unit" should matter at all. But if considerations of 
life-long welfare are set aside, then it is hard to see how EAS's 
advance directive could still have any moral authority over FDS's 
expressed interests. EAS's "life" would be over, for all 
intents and purposes, so it seems that no matter what happens to FDS,
it cannot retroactively affect the value of EAS's already-completed 
"life." This is the kind of move urged by some theorists 
regardless of considerations of identity. What we should abandon, 
they suggest, is the intuition that EAS's preferences are 
authoritative over FDS's at all (Dresser 1986, Jaworska 1999). Many 
demented patients are still capable of a kind of autonomy - 
involving the capacity to *value* - and so their wishes 
ought to be respected, goes this line, over the decisions of their 
earlier selves (Jaworska 1999, 109). Of course, this kind of view 
won't apply to *end-stage* dementia patients, but they may be 
patients incapable of expressing (or having?) genuine preferences in 
the first place.




As should be evident from just this very brief discussion, the issues
here are quite complex, but they are definitely issues for which
considerations of personal identity are often taken to be directly
relevant. (See also Buchanan 1988 for helpful discussion of some of
these issues.)


### 6.3 Other Issues in Applied Ethics




There are at least four other areas of applied ethics that seem to 
bear a relation to personal identity, and we will lay out the issues 
of each very briefly. First, there is a problem of justifying 
therapeutic treatment for patients with Dissociative Identity 
Disorder (DID, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). The 
worry here comes from the attractive thought that each of the 
distinct personalities of someone with DID is in fact a different *person* (Wilkes 1988; Dennett 1976). If so, then a therapy that 
aims at  *eliminating* one or more of the alter personalities in
favor of one of them would be, prima facie, immoral. (Morton Prince, 
one of the first psychologists to work with a DID patient, wrote that
his aim was indeed to kill off what he thought of as the 
"non-real" personalities of his patient, Christine 
Beauchamp. See Prince 1905.) But this verdict is quite 
counterintuitive: surely the therapist is *helping* the patient 
with DID when his work produces only one healthy personality, not 
doing anything immoral. The issue, then, is about the moral 
ramifications of cutting off personal identity in an unusual sort of 
way. In addition, there are intriguing issues regarding identity and 
both legal and moral responsibility in patients with DID. What if one
alter commits a crime, say? Is the patient with DID responsible or is
only the offending alter responsible? If the latter, how is a fair 
punishment to be effected? (For further discussion of these issues, 
see Wilkes 1981, 1988; Hacking 1991, 1995; Lizza 1993; Braude 1995, 
1996; Radden 1996; Sinnott-Armstrong and Behnke 2000; Kennett and 
Matthews 2002; and DeGrazia 2005).




A second problem has to do with genetic interference. Suppose someone
carried the gene for Huntington's disease (HD) and wanted a child. 
There would be a 50/50 chance her child would inherit the HD gene. If
there were genetic intervention available to eliminate the 
possibility of her child carrying the gene, should she undergo it? It
seems obvious she should, at least until we draw on some metaphysical
considerations about identity. Suppose the genetic intervention 
involved waiting until after fertilization and then altering the 
genome of the fetus. What would be the identity of the 
post-intervention child? Further, if its identity would be different 
from the child that *would have* been brought into existence, 
would the genetic interference be immoral in virtue of 
*preventing* that other child's existence? Relevant to the 
debate here is Saul Kripke's thesis about origins, that one person 
could not have been someone else (Kripke 1980), and this is a thesis 
with which advocates of the Biological Criterion of personal identity
would likely agree: what makes me the particular individual I am is 
my biological structure and its origins, and any other combination of
my parents' sperm and egg would have produced a different individual.
The question here, though, is whether or not some *other* 
changes, after the combination of sperm and egg, would be sufficient 
to produce a different individual. And if so, does this bear on the 
morality of doing so? (For further discussion of these issues, see 
Elliot 1993, Persson 1995, Belshaw 2000, Glannon 2001, and DeGrazia 2005:
244-268.)




A third problem is in certain respects closely related. It is the 
*non-identity problem*, first discussed in detail in Parfit 
1984, 351-379. Suppose a fourteen-year-old girl decides to have a 
child. Given her youth, the girl gives her child a bad start in life.
If she had waited several years to have a child, that child would 
have been better off than the one she had. Our intuition is 
that what the girl has done is wrong. But why? The obvious answer 
would seem to be that the girl's decision was bad *for her 
child*. But this cannot be right, for that child would not even 
have existed were it not for her decision. It is also clear that she 
doesn't harm the child that would have existed had she waited, given 
that something that does not exist cannot be harmed. It thus turns 
out to be very difficult to articulate just what was wrong with the 
girl's decision, but as Parfit notes, we do not abandon our belief in
the wrongness of what the girl did. Instead, "we cannot defend 
this belief in the natural way ... suggested" (Parfit 
1984, 359). But finding an alternative defense does not look very 
promising. And applying the non-identity problem on a grander scale 
yields a serious puzzle in population ethics. Suppose governments 
around the world continue to ignore the threat of global warming, so 
that the lives of people living between 2200 and 2500 are barely 
worth living. Contrast this case with the scenario in which the 
governments cooperate to enact regulatory measures that slow down the
warming trend and render it a non-threat, but in so doing make the 
lives of people living between 2010 and 2200 of a lower quality than 
they would otherwise have been. Clearly, it seems the second scenario
is better, that we ought to bring this scenario about. But on what 
basis? Far-reaching governmental policies often play a critical role 
in determining the ways and timing in which people get together, so 
the identities of the members of the populations in each scenario 
would likely be quite different. If we also assume that we do not 
harm anyone by bringing him or her into existence, then who is harmed
in the former scenario? Who is made worse off? Given that those 
people would not have existed had we done something about global 
warming, they have not been harmed by our inaction. So what moral 
reason can be given in defense of our pursuit of the second scenario?
(Parfit 1984, 371-377) These are very difficult issues indeed. (For 
further discussion, see DeGrazia 2005, 268-279.)




Finally, many have argued that considerations of personal identity can
shed light on the nature of death, which itself plays a key role in
moral argumentation (Green and Wikler 1980; Zaner 1988; Puccetti 1988;
McMahan 2002; DeGrazia 2005). One popular line of thought, based on
the Psychological Criterion, has been that when an individual is at
the point when she is no longer able to sustain any psychological
continuity, her identity has ceased, and so she should be considered
dead. This idea has led many philosophers to advocate for a criterion
of death known as the "higher brain standard," according
to which death occurs at the point of irreversible loss of the
capacity for consciousness (e.g., Green and Wikler 1980). This
psychological criterion of death implies that those in a permanent
vegetative state are dead, despite their continuing brainstem
activities. This philosophically popular view has never, however, been
adopted anywhere. Those favoring the Biological Criterion advocate a
view much more in line with actual medical practice. If we are
essentially human organisms, according to these advocates, then our
death occurs at the point when that organism dies. There is still
wrangling over when precisely that occurs, however. Some favor a
"death of the whole brain standard," whereas
others, *dissenters* as DeGrazia labels them, adhere to a
"circulatory-respiratory standard," according to which
"human death is the permanent cessation of
circulatory-respiratory function" (DeGrazia 2005, 149). It is
less clear, however, what role personal identity actually plays in
this debate. After all, the cessation of my identity may have nothing
to do with anything like organismic (or brain) death. On any view of
personal identity other than four-dimensionalism, recall, I cease to
exist if I undergo fission. There will be no one in existence who is
me, but this fact is irrelevant to our thinking about death. It may be
the case, then, that seeking the factors involved in cutting off
someone's personal, or human, identity will yield no insights into the
nature of death itself. (For further discussion, see DeGrazia 2003, and
McMahan 1995 and 2002.)


## 7. Methodological Alternatives




Recall that both Reid and Butler objected to Locke's account of 
personal identity, in part, because they thought it had absurdly 
revisionary implications for our practices of moral responsibility. 
So rather than give up those practices, they said, we would be better
off giving up Locke's theory. On this view, our normative commitments
provide an important check on our theories of personal identity. Nevertheless, the 
consideration about moral responsibility is only one of many 
objections both critics run against Locke. They also launch purely 
metaphysical objections as well, the thought being that Locke's view 
fails both on its own terms and in light of its absurd normative 
implications. So actually, while our normative commitments provide 
*an important* consideration that the theory of personal 
identity should account for, it remains open that such commitments 
could be overridden or revised, depending perhaps on the independent 
plausibility of the theory in question.




For some authors, however, the role of our normative commitments in 
this debate is much stronger: they may actually authoritatively 
constrain, shape, or even be immune or irrelevant to one's theory of 
personal identity. This is a general methodological dispute about the
proper direction of argumentation in the arena of personal identity 
and ethics. The assumption of many working in this arena has been 
evident in the discussion thus far: we work out or identify the 
correct theory of personal identity and then apply it where needed to
the world of ethics. What we will briefly explore in this section, 
though, are four importantly different approaches (these are not 
exhaustive of the alternatives, however).




First, there is the Kantian view, advanced by Christine Korsgaard, 
that conceiving ourselves as practical agents simply 
*requires* us to view our lives as unified, despite the 
weakness or strength of various psychological connections that may or
may not obtain between our various temporal stages. My conception of 
myself as a unified agent is not based on any metaphysical theory; it
is instead based (a) on the basic need I have to eliminate 
conflict among my various motivational desires in order to act 
(producing my unified agency at any given time, i.e., synchronic 
unity), (b) on my deliberative standpoint, within which I view 
*myself* - a single deliberator/decider - as being
over and above my various desires, weighing them and deciding between
them, and (c) on my need to pursue any ends or carry out a 
rational plan of life (presupposing my unified agency across time, 
i.e., diachronic unity). In any case, I must conceive myself as a 
unified agent both at a time and across time because I have only one 
body with which to act. This unity, therefore, has no need of any 
metaphysical support; instead, it is simply a practical requirement 
of being an agent, a doer of deeds and a thinker of thoughts 
(Korsgaard 1989).




Second, there is the communitarian view, advanced by philosophers 
like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, that all proper 
conceptions of the self are dependent on social matrices. In order to
understand the self, we must view it both in its relation to the good
and in its relation to other selves, for two reasons. First, we have 
an indispensable ability both to have certain moral intuitions and to
articulate the grounds of those intuitions, and this ability 
presupposes the existence of what Taylor calls evaluative frameworks,
frameworks also presupposed by our concept of personhood. So crucial 
to understanding who I am is understanding where I stand in moral 
space: my identity is bound up in, and at least partially constituted
by, my strong attachments to a community that provides the evaluative
framework within which I am able to articulate what is good and 
valuable. Thus, to ask about a person abstracted from his 
self-interpretations is to ask "a fundamentally misguided 
question" (Taylor 1989, 34).




The second general reason selves can be understood only by reference 
to community and morality comes from a consideration of human 
actions. As MacIntyre notes, human actions are *intelligible* 
only if viewed in a particular setting. We can understand a piece of 
human behavior only when we have situated the agent's intentions 
within the two contexts of their role in the agent's history and 
their role within the history of their particular setting(s). In 
doing so, we are writing a narrative history. Intelligible actions 
are actions for which the agent is *accountable*, actions 
which have a place in an ongoing narrative (MacIntyre 1984, 206-208).
Thus arises the notion of narrative unity. My life, my 
*entire* life, from physical birth to physical death, can be 
understood only as a narrative, as an ongoing story. Now the unity of
a narrative requires unity of character, and unity of character 
presupposes strict, numerical personal identity. To be the subject of
a narrative is to be accountable for past actions that have composed 
that narrative life. To understand your actions now, therefore, I 
have to understand them as actions situated in a life story, 
*your* life story, as actions interrelated with *your* 
prior actions. As a result, "all attempts to elucidate the 
notion of personal identity independently of and in isolation from 
the notions of narrative, intelligibility and accountability are 
bound to fail. As all such attempts have" (*ibid*., 
218).




Both the Kantian and communitarian objections target the  *disunifying* implications of a metaphysical approach like 
reductionism, insisting instead that we are indeed unified as either 
practical agents or selves in moral space for purely normative 
reasons. Any theory of identity we construct, then, must be 
constrained by these normative considerations, which are thus 
obviously prior. Nevertheless, we may have some reason to doubt these
claims. Consider first narrative unity. For one thing, it is not 
clear that intelligible actions are those for which the agent is 
accountable. Actions of children and the insane can be perfectly 
intelligible - even intelligible within some kind of narrative 
structure - without being those for which the agents are 
accountable.




More troublesome, though, is the status of the narrative unity claim.
Is it descriptive or prescriptive? If descriptive, asserting that 
selves simply conceive themselves as unified over their lives within 
a narrative structure, then it seems false. As Galen Strawson points 
out, some people (and he claims to be one) are 
"Episodics," those who have "little or no sense 
that the self that one is was there in the (further) past and will be
there in the future," and thus "are likely to have no 
particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms" 
(Strawson 2004, 430). In addition, this observation bodes ill for the
Kantian, insofar as it asserts the possibility of practical agency 
for those who *do not* view themselves as diachronically 
unified, i.e., unified practical agency may indeed not be a practical
necessity. On the other hand, if the narrative unity thesis is 
supposed to be *prescriptive*, urging that people 
*ought* to view themselves as unified over time within a
narrative structure, then it poses no threat to descriptive,
disuniting theories of identity like reductionism, for it would have
to allow that life-long unity may simply not occur. Indeed, if the
account is prescriptive, then it actually makes more sense to consider
persons to be disunified, if what they ought to strive for is greater
unity. If unity were a given, such striving would be
unnecessary. (For somewhat similar considerations, see Williams
2007.)




But even if we grant the need for the kind of unity desired by both 
the Kantians and the communitarians, this does not yet imply that we 
must grant the *life-long* unity on which they both insist. It
may be instead that only certain *parts* of one's life are 
unified in the way they describe, and these could in fact be 
stretches defined also by the obtaining of strong psychological 
connectedness, say (such that one's life would be better conceived as
a collection of short stories than as a novel). In other words, it 
could be that reductionist theories of personal identity dovetail 
with these normative considerations already, so that rather than 
constituting a constraint on that theory (and disuniting theories 
like it), such considerations actually  *buttress* it.




The third methodological alternative insists that, because our 
commonsense intuitions are at loggerheads over the thought 
experiments motivating the various metaphysical theories of personal 
identity (e.g., brain transplants, teletransportation, and the like),
the only plausible solution to this underlying conflict is going to 
be revisionary, requiring us to abandon one of the conflicting sets 
of intuitions. But on the basis of what? Carol Rovane suggests that 
we start instead by deploying something on which everyone could 
agree, namely, a conception of personhood that's allegedly built into
the foundations of every ethical position (including anti-theoretical
ones). Once we determine the key condition of personhood - the 
condition Rovane calls "the ability to engage in  *agency-regarding relations*" (Rovane 1998, 5) - we 
can then go on to construct a metaphysical theory of personal 
identity on top of this ethical concept. For Rovane, this will yield 
the rather surprising possibility of both group persons, composed of 
many human bodies (insofar as the group can meet the conditions of 
ethical personhood, functioning as an individual agent), and multiple
persons, simultaneously existing within only one human body (insofar 
as each "personality" can meet the condition of ethical 
personhood, functioning as an individual agent, as well) 
(*Ibid*., chapters 4-5).




Others have been sufficiently moved as well by the recognition of 
conflicting intuitions in the puzzle cases to seek an entirely 
different approach to the issue of personal identity (see, e.g., 
Wilkes 1988, Schechtman 1996). But it is not yet clear why such a 
radical revision in methodology is called for. After all, the fact 
that our intuitions conflict in the puzzle cases does not necessarily
mean that there is some deep-seated, ineliminable incoherence in the 
concepts we're applying to them. Instead, it may simply mean that 
there are conditions restricting the deployment of our concepts to 
anything other than paradigm cases, or it might mean that we are 
actually unsure *what* our intuitions are about the puzzle 
cases (for the former objection, see Gendler 2002a, 231; for the 
latter, see Degaynesford 2001, 171). (Further, even if we do agree on
the need for a distinctly ethical conception of personhood and 
personal identity, it is not clear why the one Rovane has chosen is 
supposed to be *uniquely* suited to our purposes. After all, 
there will be plenty of other possible conceptions that are at least 
as plausible as having the agency-regarding ability, including 
conceptions emphasizing the ability to experience complex emotions, 
to control certain aspects of their world, or to feel pleasure and 
pain [see Gendler 2002a, 236]. Why privilege agency-regarding 
capacities over these?)




A fourth alternative to the methodology assumed thus far is presented
in a series of powerful papers by Mark Johnston, in which he defends 
a view called "minimalism," according to which the 
metaphysical facts of personal identity are *irrelevant* to the 
justification of our person-related practices and practical concerns,
that the facts to which we think we are committed actually play only 
a minimal role in those practices and concerns (Johnston 1987, 1989, 
1992, and 1997; Wolf 1986 and Unger 1990 have argued in a somewhat 
similar vein as well). Indeed, our practices here have a 
justification independent of metaphysics - a coherentist 
justification - so no metaphysical theory of personal identity 
will imply any real revisions to them at all. Johnston illustrates 
this point by talking about one of our practical concerns in 
particular: self-concern. My self-concern is part of a wider pattern 
of *self-referential* concern, a special non-derivative concern 
I have for a certain limited network of people, all of whom bear certain 
sorts of special relations to me: I care about *my* friends, 
*my* family, and *my* self. I care about them for their own
sakes and I would need a very good reason not to do so (which is so 
far not forthcoming) (Johnston 1997, 158-159). Thus, in "the 
particular case of personal identity, minimalism implies that any 
metaphysical view of persons which we might have is either 
epiphenomenal or a redundant basis for our practice of making 
judgements about personal identity and organizing our practical 
concerns around this relation" (Johnston 1997, 150).




This is an important point. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether it
could be extended to apply to *all* of our practical concerns,
resting as it does solely on an analysis of self-concern. Indeed,
there may well be other person-related practices and concerns that
aren't part of that network of self-referential concerns, including,
perhaps, moral responsibility, compensation, third-person
reidentification, and general survival. For these other practices and
concerns, then, the metaphysics of identity may still be quite
relevant. Indeed, trying to see what, if anything, serves to unify
the locus of *all* of these practical concerns is what motivates
Schechtman's (2014) Anthropological View of our "literal
identity." Insofar as our many concerns are, she thinks,
organized around one type of thing (what she calls a
"person-life"), we can derive from their close
consideration the actual identity conditions of individuals like us.
Here, though, the issue is less about identity *grounding* our
practical concerns than its being *revealed* by them.


## 8. Conclusion




As should by now be obvious, the relation between personal identity
and ethics is complex and by no means established, and this is true
for several reasons. First, it is still unclear what the correct
theory of personal identity is, or even what the right *sense* of
"identity" (reidentification or characterization) is
that's to be deployed. Second, there is a question about the priority
relation between identity and ethics. In other words, should we
establish the true theory of identity before applying it to ethics,
should we constrain or construct our theory of identity in light of
our ethical concerns, or should we try to build up theories of both
identity and our ethical concerns in light of one another (via a sort
of reflective equilibrium)? Third, it is unclear what the precise type
of relation is that we should expect between identity and ethics,
i.e., should it be a justificatory relation or an explanatory
relation? If the former, how exactly do we bridge the is/ought gap
between descriptive metaphysics and normativity? If the latter, what
precisely is to be explained, and how would appeals to identity help?
Fourth, are we right to think of there being *the* - a
single - relation between identity and ethics at all? (See
D. Shoemaker 2007 and 2016; Schechtman 2014, Ch. 3)




This last point deserves much more discussion than it has previously
received. It has generally been assumed that if there is a relation
between identity and our practical concerns, it is some sort of
univocal relation, running from a single (correct) theory of personal
identity to *all* of our person-related practical concerns
(whether it's a grounding relation, an explanatory relation, a
revealed relation, or something else). But why should we think this is
the case? Instead, why not think that some practical concerns are
grounded by one relation and other concerns are grounded by
another?




Here is just one way in which this might be true. My concern about
anticipation of survival seems to depend on a belief about some future
person bearing a certain sort of psychological relation to me.
Alternatively, what grounds compensation might be a biological
relation. The possibility of compensation, after all, may not be
restricted to benefits and burdens distributed solely to psychological
creatures: As mentioned earlier, I may deserve compensation as an
adult for what happened to me *as a fetus*, and this may be
rendered coherent only with respect to my being a biological human
organism. Finally, consider moral responsibility. It seems
platitudinous that I can be responsible only for my own actions, but
this suggests that what's at issue is the  *ownership* relation
of moral agents to their actions, i.e., the issue of what makes some
past action properly attributable to me, a robust Lockean person (see Jaworski and Shoemaker 2018). But
this relation may best be grounded by something like a narrative
conception of personal identity, one that answers to the
characterization question, not the reidentification question.




These sketches suggest the possibility, then, of a  *plurality*
of relations between identity and ethics. If so, perhaps the way to
proceed is to focus on one specific person-related practical concern
at a time and work out its precise relation to identity (if any)
before moving on to others. While this approach may not diminish the
complexity of the relation(s) between identity and ethics, perhaps it
will at least provide the kind of settled views in some limited areas
which we have thus far been missing.