Theoretical persons and practical agents

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 318-332

  Shoemaker, David W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53349175833     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1996.tb00045.x     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Philosophy & Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 101-32. In what follows, I will simply mark the referenced page number from this article, preceded by the abbreviation "PIUA," in parentheses in the text.
2. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 210. In what follows, I will simply mark the referenced page number from this book, preceded by the abbreviation "R & P," in parentheses in the text.
3. Exactly what that right kind of cause involves is left open. In a note to the 1985 edition of Reasons and Persons, Parfit withdraws his support for the Wide Psychological Criterion of personal identity (in which the right kind of cause would be any reliable cause; see p. 208), because such support would be inconsistent with his "view that we should not try to decide between different criteria" (p. x).
4. The word "I," then, we would use only to refer to this present self.
5. I will say much more about the attitude of indifference in the third section of this paper.
6. See Parfit's Nineteenth Century Russian case (p. 327) for an example of a past self being the appropriate object of moral concern.
7. That there is a problem here involving who exactly is doing the lowering has not escaped my attention. This problem with the case, along with others, is discussed thoroughly in Eli Hirsch, "Divided Minds," The Philosophical Review, 100, no. 1 (January 1991): 3-30. I tend to think that one of the "streams" might somehow be given the responsibility, before division, of lowering the eyebrow, but solving this problem is not crucial for my purposes here. Rather, I bring up the case to illustrate Parfit's general view of the unity of consciousness. I will then focus on Korsgaard's more general reactions to Parfit's overall picture.
8. Others as well have noted the tendency of personal identity theorists to ignore this internal, practical point of view. See, for example, Thomas Nagel, "Subjective and Objective,"
9. and Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 20-22, and Chapter Five.
10. I am grateful to Derek Parfit for this point.
11. This point is also made by Bernard Williams in "Persons, Character and Morality," in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 206-207.
12. I should make it clear that Korsgaard's use of the phrase "present self" is different from Parfit's. Korsgaard seems to think a "merely present self" would have to be something like an agent that would exist only momentarily but that could nonetheless coherently deliberate and choose reasons for action. For Parfit, on the other hand, a present self is that person-stage currently unified by strong psychological connectedness, an entity never described as strictly momentary, and an entity quite capable of projecting itself into the future. As a result, Parfit would have no problem agreeing with Korsgaard that, given her usage, the idea of a merely present self could not be given any clear content.
13. As Korsgaard notes, "[W]hen they can communicate, two different people can integrate their functions, and, for purposes of a given activity, become a single agent" (p. 119).
14. Others have raised similar objections to Parfit as well. See, for example, Bernard Williams' "Persons, Character and Morality."
15. Journal of Philosophy 68 (October 21, 1971): 683-90.
16. It is important to point out here that the decision to talk in terms of a past self is not what produces the reduced degrees of connectedness or the attitude of nonidentification. Rather, such an expression reflects the preexisting reduction of connectedness and attitude of nonidentification/ indifference.
17. Derek Parfit, "On 'The Importance of Self-Identity,'" p. 689.
18. Nevertheless, I admit there remains a problem in the determination of the point at which such intervention might be justified with regard to Korsgaardian agents. Further, should such intervention be aimed at somehow urging such authorial disconnectedness or merely preventing harmful behavior? These are difficult issues that I leave open here.