2. Practical Identity: Who are you? 36
2.1. b Questions of personal identity 39
In this section, I differentiate four distinct, yet interrelated, questions
concerning personal identity. These inquire after the conditions for personhood; the criteria for individuation and for reidentification; and, the characteristics that identify an individual. I introduce and outline the claim that there has been a tendency in mainstream analytic philosophy to ignore questions of
characterisation and/or to treat descriptions of changes in characteristics as metaphorical claims about identity change.
Amélie Rorty outlines four questions that arise when philosophers reflect on personal identity: questions of “class differentiation”; “individual differentiation” (or “the problem of individuation”); “individual reidentification”; and “individual identification”.73 Rorty outlines these questions as follows. Class differentiation
70 Schüpbach, Gargiulo, and Welter, “Neurosurgery in Parkinson’s Disease: A Distressed
Mind in a Repaired Body?”, 1812.
71 Schüpbach, Gargiulo, and Welter, “Neurosurgery in Parkinson’s Disease: A Distressed
Mind in a Repaired Body?”, 1812.
72 Schüpbach, Gargiulo, and Welter, “Neurosurgery in Parkinson’s Disease: A Distressed
Mind in a Repaired Body?”, 1812.
73 Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Introduction,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amélie Oksenberg
Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1-2. Mackenzie identifies the same four types of questions concerning personal identity. Mackenzie labels these as: the conditions for personhood and class differentiation; individuation and reidentification; and, Characterisation. Catriona Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” in Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, ed. Catriona Mackenzie and Kim Atkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 1. Eric Olson identifies eight questions concerning personal identity, see Eric T. Olson, “Personal Identity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2010). I draw on Rorty and Mackenzie because they emphasis identifying questions of characterisation on their own terms and set out the four different types of questions in the context of an argument that these types of questions have been construed as metaphysical, and that questions of characterisation are conflated with questions of reidentification.
asks: ‘What distinguishes the class of persons from their nearest neighbors, from baboons, robots, human corpses, corporations?’; Individual differentiation asks: ‘What are the criteria for the numerical distinctness of persons who have the same general description?’; Individual reindentification asks: ‘What are the criteria for reidentifying the same individual in different contexts, under different
descriptions, or at different times?’; and, Individual identification asks: ‘What sorts of characteristics identify a person as essentially the person she is, such that if those characteristics were changed, she would be a significantly different person, though she might still be differentiated and reidentified as the same?’74
The first question asks about the conditions for personhood and class
differentiation: ‘What makes a being a person, as distinct from some other kind of entity?’75 For example, is it consciousness that distinguishes persons from
animals? John Locke defined a person as ‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places’.76 This type of question might be asked, and becomes salient, in a bioethical context in cases of advanced dementia. In such cases, we might say that the person has gone; this bears on questions of advance directives, for example.
The second and third questions are connected - they ask about “numerical identity” or sameness. Numerical identity is often contrasted with qualitative identity. Numerical identity is concerned with identity in the sense of being one and the same thing. Qualitative identity is concerned with identity in the sense of being perfectly similar – that all properties are in common. For example, two dogs of the same kind, for example, both Jack Russells could be described as
qualitatively identical. Qualitative resemblance implies that many properties are in common. Dogs of different kinds, for example, my Jack Russell dog and my neighbour’s kelpie resemble each other, but are not qualitatively identical. Numerical identity, in contrast, requires absolute sameness - it is the logical relation that can hold only between a thing and itself. These questions ask about when we say of two occurrences of the one thing, that they are one and the same thing.77 The question of individuation, when applied to persons, asks: ‘Which criteria are relevant in determining whether one individual should be counted as
74 Rorty, “Introduction,” 1-2.
75 Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” 1.
76 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
Book II, ch 27, Sec 9, 335.
77 Parfit distinguishes qualitative and numerical identity as follows: ‘There are two kinds of
sameness, or identity. … [T]wo white billiard balls are not numerically but may be qualitatively identical. If I paint one of these balls red, it will cease to be qualitatively identical with itself as it was. But the red ball that I later see and the white ball that I painted red are numerically identical. They are one and the same ball.’ Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 201.
the same or as a different person from another individual who is qualitatively identical or extremely similar?’78 The question of reidentification, when applied to persons, asks: ‘[O]n what basis should we reidentify a person as numerically the same despite qualitative differences over time, or under different descriptions?’79 A change in numerical identity would mean literally going out of existence and becoming another thing, or person, i.e. becoming someone else, something else, or dying. The fact that these questions are distinct is demonstrated for example through consideration of a person with advanced dementia. We may say they have ceased to be a person but this does not imply that the individual entity that has dementia has ceased to exist.
The fourth question focuses on a person’s characteristics, including, for example, the character traits, values, beliefs, bodily and mental capacities, as well as the social and family commitments, that make a person who they are, such that a change in those characteristics, might motivate the claim she is a different person, despite being numerically the same. This question asks:
Which characteristics (character traits, motivations, values, mental and bodily capacities and dispositions, emotional attachments, commitments, memories, and so on) make a person the particular person that she is?’ And when might
significant change to these characteristics warrant the judgment, whether by the person herself or by others, that she is a different or no longer the same person even if numerically she is the same?80
The focus on characteristics is more similar to Locke’s understanding of forensic identity.81 This form of identity involves a relation of attribution. Locke’s concern here, unlike in the concern about the category of personhood above, is to provide an account of how we can hold someone responsible for their actions, and also be rewarded or punished for those actions.
Rorty states that whilst these questions concerning personal identity are distinguishable, a solution to one will influence, though probably not dictate, a solution to the others. Rorty further remarks that there has been a tendency in mainstream analytic philosophy to think that questions concerning our
characteristics can be settled through reference to criteria for individual
reidentification. This amounts to taking the claims about changes in characteristics as qualitative changes, changes that are to be understood as metaphorical. That is, the person is numerically the same, but they say they are now a different person following a traumatic incident, for example. This is not a contradictory statement, rather people are understood as expressing a change in their qualitative identity. Parfit demonstrates this understanding, when he writes:
78 Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” 1. 79 Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” 1. 80 Mackenzie, “Practical Identity and Narrative Agency,” 1.
81 For Locke’s discussion of forensic identity see Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Sec 26, 346-7.
We might say, of someone, ‘After his accident, he is no longer the same person’. This is a claim about both kinds of identity. We claim that he, the same person, is
not now the same person. This is not a contradiction. We merely mean that this person’s character has changed. This numerically identical person is now qualitatively different.
When we are concerned about our future, it is our numerical identity that we are concerned about. I may believe that, after my marriage, I shall not be the same person. But this does not make marriage death. However much I change, I shall still be alive if there will be some person living who will be me.82
Rorty argues however that questions about change in individual identification or characteristics cannot be reduced to the conditions for reidentification, because it is the person’s perspective or self-understanding of the change that matters in this domain: that is, whether the individual in question identifies with herself or her preferences as those of a continuous self. As Rorty writes:
Defining the conditions for individual identification does not reduce to specifying conditions for reidentification because the characteristics that distinguish or reidentify persons (e.g., fingerprints, DNA codes, or memories) may not be thought by the individual herself or by her society to determine her real identity. For instance, it might be possible that an individual be considered reidentifiable by the memory criterion, but not be considered identifiable as the same person because all that she considered essential had changed: her principles and preference rankings were different, her tastes, plans, hopes, and fears. She remembered her old principles of choice well enough and so, by the memory criterion, might consider herself the same old person; but by grace or reeducation she could be counted on to choose and act in a new way.83
Rorty notes that answers to the question about criteria for individual reidentification by the philosophers she is criticising analyse the conditions of temporal reidentification, trying to define conditions for distinguishing successive stages of a continuing person from stages of a successor or descendent person. I will have more to say about reidentification and reidentification theorists below in section 2.2.a.
Schechtman also distinguishes between different, yet related, questions concerning personal identity, and like Rorty, she argues that conceptually significant questions about changes in characteristics cannot be reduced to, or exhausted by, specifying the criteria for individual reidentification.84 In The Constitution of Selves, Schechtman contrasts questions of reidentification and questions of characterisation. Questions of reidentification ask ‘what it means to say that a person a t2 is the same person as a person at t1’.85 This inquiry is concerned with the logical relation which every object bears to itself and to
82 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 201-02. 83 Rorty, “Introduction,” 2.
84 Both Schechtman and Rorty challenge the framing of debates about personal identity in
terms of a choice between physiological and biological continuity approaches. They both argue that these approaches fail to distinguish between different questions about personal identity, that this undermines the debates, and leads to endless or ceaseless fighting without the possibility of a resolution.
nothing else. Questions of characterisation ask ‘what it means to say that a
particular characteristic is that of a given person’.86 This inquiry is concerned with the logical relation of attribution. The question of characterisation asks which actions, experiences, beliefs, values, desires, character traits, and so on are to be attributed to a given person. Importantly, argues Schechtman, questions of characterisation speak to our practical concerns with identity - concerns related to our survival, moral responsibility, self-interested concern, and compensation. Schechtman calls these practical concerns the “four concerns” or “four features” of our existence. Schechtman, like Rorty, argues that questions of characterisation cannot be reduced to questions of reidentification - they are not variants of the same question, because something conceptually significant about personhood is left out of these reductive moves. Schechtman argues that these questions - reidentification and characterisation, belong to different domains with different foci. Answers to questions of characterisation, including the four features
identified above, come in degrees, whereas questions of reidentification require an all or nothing answer. Characterisation questions, then, allow for changes that do not indicate a change in what a person is, but rather a change in the properties that the person has, including properties relevant to determining responsibility for actions. These questions are related though - that is, ‘[T]he question of whether action A is attributable to person P is obviously intimately connected to the question of whether P is the same person as the person who performed A’.87 Schechtman proposes a solution to the relation between questions of
characterisation and reidentification, which I discuss in the following section. Moreover, Schechtman uses the distinction between these two understandings to develop her narrative self-constitution account as an answer to the
characterisation question, which I outline and defend in the following chapter. The characterisation question, argues Schechtman, concerns the kind of identity that is at issue in an identity crisis. Schechtman writes:
In an identity crisis, a person is unsure about what those defining features are, and so is unsure of his identity. The characterization question seeks a means of resolving this kind of uncertainty and determining which characteristics constitute a person’s identity.88
However, despite their everyday practical significance, Schechtman notes that questions related to characterisation have not generally been considered by analytic philosophers in discussions of personal identity.
By clearly distinguishing questions of characterisation from questions of reidentification, Schechtman draws our attention to the “Who” of personal identity. Schechtman notes that characterisation questions can be asked from
86 Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 73. 87 Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 77. 88 Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 74.
either a first- or third-person perspective. Schechtman draws on examples from literature, including Nora’s revelation at the end of A Doll’s House when she realises that the person she has presented to the world is a ‘sham’, a product of the
expectations of society and not of her own making and direction.89 Schechtman also draws on examples from everyday life, for example, the wife who finds out she has lived with a killer and asks: Who are you? Or in less sensational
circumstances, the woman who is ruthless at work, but a loving wife and mother at home, and asks: Who is she, or who is she really? The loving wife or the ruthless opponent?90