Chapter six, especially §6

unified mental life, and one functional “I”. It would thus be possible for someone, in the functional sense, to do things which, in the other sense, they would have no possibility of remembering. Users would certainly have to be aware of the differences. And this would mean that, in effect, they were employing two parallel conceptions of personal continuity over time. This, once more, would collapse into the view that we had a society where personal survival is determined by I* relatedness, but that importance is placed on something other than personal survival, which is based on functionality.

The dilemma is this. If we don’t allow the beings in this thought experiment to have r relations, then they become so alien that they cannot be considered as persons at all, and thus it ceases to become a counter-example to my conception of persons. But if we do allow them these relations, the idea that they could take a purely functional view of personal identity just becomes implausible. What happens is that if we try to imagine what it would be like to be in such a society, we find that we already presuppose the conception of persons I have argued for. In order to be able to think of identity in functional terms, one already requires the characteristics of persons I have described. At best, they have two different views of personal survival, which still means my account is applicable to that society. 13 The characterisation of the Eskimo view of personal identity being functional must then be false, and the idea that the functional self can exist without the r related self is unconvincing. The Eskimo view of the self is therefore a variant which operates within the limits laid down by the I* relation. Certainly, the group may be more important for them and may be crucial in making a person what they are. But if we are to suppose that this entails a breakdown of the sense of a person being a thinking being with a sense of its own future and past, we are surely mistaken. In short, when we really consider what the functional self would entail, it only becomes plausible in beings rather different to persons.

13 As, I have argued, w e too have two views; one based on the third person conception of identity, the other on the first person conception of survival.

(ii) The Manifold Self.

Harré’s other example comes from Japan, in Japanese, the way one refers to oneself and others always depends upon who one is with. It is impossible to speak to anyone without the use of vocabulary indicating the social distance between you and them. This is part of a culture where much depends upon its social place. In morality, for example, what is important in one area of life may not matter in another;

The shame that diffuses that part of the psyche which has to do with others in the world of work cannot diffuse into the system within which a Japanese manages his home life. 14

The self, therefore, is not immutable and absolute but is something which is defined relationally. Again, we would therefore expect that personal continuity depends upon the maintaining of these relations, not on psychological unity, except in the derivative sense in which psychological disunity could interfere with these relations.

What we seem to have here is a case where different sections of society place value only on those parts of the lives of persons which are relevant to those sections. This is really only a more extreme form of what occurs in any society where a person has a variety of roles. In any one day, a person can be, for example, a parent, a partner, a boss, an employee, a team member and so on. The fact that the person acts and is treated differently in each of these cases doesn't threaten the fundamental unity which underlies those diverse roles. It could be argued that without an awareness of the different roles we play, we would be unable to fulfil them properly.

There is, however, another view not dissimilar to the Japanese one, which believes there is an increasing fracturing of the self, which some see as part of the postmodern condition. The postmodernist claim is that we are witnessing a fracturing of our traditional views of the subject as a unified entity. As part of a

broader fracturing of thought and society, we will come to see persons, not as single uniform entities, but as beings without any essential unity whatsoever. Each person will have a variety of personae, and each of these can be seen as much as individual entities as the whole human being. We will consequently have to revise our views concerning the fundamental unity of the individual. This can be seen as a version of the view that for the Japanese it is incorrect to think of a single individual with various social facets but rather a collection of different persons which occupy different stages of the human being’s life. I call this conception “The Manifold Self” as it denies the psychological unity entailed by my own view and instead postulates the existence of a variety of selves within the single organism.

There are two points I would like to make about such a conception. Firstly, such a radical fracturing of the individual appears extremely unlikely. It would seem to make the unity we currently enjoy a kind of social construct. Certainly, the way in which society is organised could make us divide up our lives into more discrete compartments, but the unity which we experience is surely not something that can be swept away so easily. Even if we did make greater distinctions between our various public and private faces, these would themselves be unified by the thread of the I* relation. It is inconceivable that, for example, the bank manager would not be able to plan what they would do that evening after work or remember what they had done before, for example.

But secondly, even if the postmodernists are right, this doesn’t threaten my view. However fractured the individual human being is, in order for there to be any unity among the various characters, or whatever they are to be called, they must be I* related. What I suppose we are being asked to accept is the possibility of a number of I* related ‘threads’ running along the life of the human being, with each one taking it in turns to sit out while one continues its development. Within the single human life, each person-at-a-time would only be r related to certain other persons-at-a-time. This is certainly compatible with my

view, even if it does sound more like a wild thought experiment than an actual possibility.

So it seems that either way, the postmodernist view of the manifold self is no threat. Either there is a more fundamental unity which links together the distinct personae of the human being or the various personae themselves have their own internal unity, which can be fully explained by the I* relation. The fracturing of the self has to have limits if the result is to be persons at all.

(ii) The Human Self.

Finally, I would like to offer an example from our own society. When someone’s relative suffers terrible brain damage, so that they are almost certainly not I* related to their former self, one does not always consider that person to have died. Whatever happens, we are still the children of our parents, the siblings of our siblings. We can view this sentimentally or as the cold result of our genetic programming. But whatever the cause, it happens, and these relations do help define who we are. Even stronger than this, it could be claimed that this shows there is something immutable about our identity. We cannot entirely cease to be what we once were, no matter what changes occur. Such a view would support the animalist view of identity, as it seems that it is the human being in this case which is always considered to be the same person. It could be claimed that if we reduce personal identity merely to psychological unity, something which we value about ourselves has been left out. And all through this thesis I have been arguing that what we value about ourselves has to be included in the final analysis.

Of course, this is most apparent when we consider how we view others. When we think about ourselves going senile, for example, we tend to take the view that ‘it won’t be me there’ quite easily. That’s not such an easy position to take up with someone else. Many people say of senile people that the person they once knew is already dead. But if deeds speak louder than words, then we do not view the ending of a loved one’s unified mental life as the end of that

person, merely the end of that person as we knew them. We still feel for them when they suffer and grieve for them when they die.

What is also apparent is that we cannot neatly distinguish the way we view ourselves and the way we are viewed. Our culture at least partly defines what we consider ourselves to be. It seems impossible for anyone to hold a vastly different notion of what it means for other people to be individual persons to the one they hold for themselves.

Cases like this demonstrate the difficulties of theory meeting practice. I believe that if we review the arguments, we will find psychological reductionism to be superior to animalism. All we can learn from cases of amnesia and terrible brain damage is that certain intuitive responses cannot be overruled by philosophical reflection. Hume found that, however bothered he was when he thought about the existence of real bodies in his philosophical mode, playing billiards his doubts soon melted away. Equally, it seems to me that however much we are convinced by psychological reductionism, our being accustomed to thinking of persons as individual human beings makes a complete transfer of theory into practice almost impossible. Parfit also candidly admits the same thing:

I can believe this view at the intellectual or reflective level. I am convinced by the arguments in favour of this view. But I think it likely that, at some other level, I shall always have doubts. [...] Something similar is true when I look through a window at the top of a sky scraper. I know I am in no danger. But, looking down from this dizzying height, I am afraid. 15 As human persons, it seems our humanity is important to us. This may be hard to defend rationally. Indeed, it could be characterised as an example of a pernicious speciesismie. Alternatively, our attachments to human beings regardless of what has happened to their minds may be sentimental, explained

15 Parfit p279

16 As defined by Singer [1979], chapter 3. Speceisism is to deny equality to beings solely on the