Persons as proper parts of organisms

Theoria

Volumn 71, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 29-37

  Hershenov, David B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 64949142886     PISSN: 00405825     EISSN: 17552567     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-2567.2005.tb01003.x     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. McMahan, Jeff. Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 88-94
2. Persson, Ingmar. "Our Identity and Separability of Persons and Organisms." Dialogue. Vol 38. (1999) pp.521-533. Persson puts forth this thesis in a more tentative manner than McMahan. He recognizes that there are considerable linguistic intuitions that support the organism as the reference of the first person pronoun. Such usage supports the rival theory, The Biological Approach to Personal Identity (BAPI), which maintains that we are essentially living beings, not thinking entities. While I believe that there are some good reasons for believing that the reference of the first person pronoun is the organism, I would not put as much metaphysical weight on our linguistic practices as Persson does. (529-29.) People don't speak consistently about death and irreversibly noncognitive states
3. Persson. "Our Identity and Separability of Persons and Organisms." Op. cit. p. 522
4. The distinction between the part/whole and the occupant/niche relationship is clarified in Barry Smith and Achille Varzi's "The Niche." Nous. 33:2 (1999) pp. 198-222
5. Olson, Eric. The Human Animal: Identity Without Psychology. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). pp. 131-135
6. Van Inwagen, Peter. Material Beings. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) pp. 167-181
7. McMahan Ethics of Killing. Op cit. p. 90
8. McMahan and Persson might have to "go eliminativist" about statues and lumps, flags and cloth, hills and lumps of dirt etc. since there is no reason to preserve one of each of these pairs of spatially coincident entities and not the other, and the two members of each pair cannot be identified with each other. Such reasoning can be found in Trenton Merricks's Persons and Objects (Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 31-55
9. McMahan. The Ethics of Killing. Op. cit. p. 92
10. Person. Our Identity and Separability of Persons and Organisms." Op. cit. p. 531. note #1
11. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.) p. 211
12. For the problems with constitution and coincidence, see Eric Olson's "Material Coincidence and the Indiscernibility Problem." The Philosophical Quarterly 51. no. 204 (2001)
13. and "Composition and Coincidence." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 77. no. 4 (1996). Olson and van Inwagen think that their Biological Approach to Personal Identity (BAPI) avoids the problem of spatially coincident thinking beings by treating "person" as a phase sortal. The organism is the person, though she has the property of personhood contingently, just as she may have the property of being a student, Christian, European etc. However, it isn't clear to me that the BAPI can avoid its own version of the Problem of Too Many Thinkers
14. I have seen a description of aborted conjoined (cephalothoracopagus) twins that shared one cerebrum but had two brainstems (and two cerebelli, two lungs and other duplicated organs.) Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology 18, 2001, pp. 289-290. Given that van Inwagen and Olson's BAPI individuate organisms in terms of brainstems, the just described conjoined twins would be two organisms sharing a cerebrum. If one is skeptical of this description, it seems metaphysically possible to modify the actual case so it is without a doubt two distinct organisms sharing a cerebrum rather than one oddly shaped organism whose life processes are controlled in an over-determined manner by two brainstems. If such twins engaged in minimal thought before they died or if it were metaphysically possible for such twins to live long enough to think, and if organisms are considered the subject of thought, then there could be two thinkers sharing the same cerebrum and thus apparently thinking the same thoughts. The very puzzles of too many thinkers that supposedly embarrass the Psychlogoical Approach to Personal Identity (PAPI) would reappear for the BPAI even though the conjoined twins were not spatially coincident organisms. The reason these problems reappear for the non-spatially coincident pair of organisms is that they would be sharing one cerebrum which is the organ that realizes conscious life. Any pain one twin felt, the other would be using the same cerebrum to feel. Now let's assume that advocates of the BAPI can explain how two organisms using the same cerebrum can each think and refer just to itself. The dilemma for the BAPI appears then to be that however it is capable of avoiding the problems that arise from positing two thinkers with one cerebrum will be available to the advocate of the PAPI who posits the spatially coincident organism and person sharing the same cerebrum. This type of conjoined twins, two organisms with a shared cerebrum, may actually cause the BAPI more trouble than the equally peculiar case of the dicephalus, conjoined twins consisting of allegedly a single organism with two cerebrums. McMahan and Persson put forth the dicephalus as an example of two persons that are part of a single organism to subvert the claims of organism/person identity advocated by van Inwagen and Olson
15. To see how the BAPI might respond to the McMahan/Persson dicephalus, see my "Countering the Appeal of the Psychological Approach to Personal Identity." Philosophy 79 2004 pp. 445-472