"All Is Revolution in Us": Personal Identity in Shaftesbury and Hume

Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000, pp. 3-40 "All Is Revolution in Us": Personal Identity in Shaftesbury and Hume KENNETH P. WINKLER 1. Introduction Even philosophers who believe there is a single "problem of personal identity" conceive of that problem in different ways. They differ not only in their ways of stating the problem, but in the parts of philosophy to which they assign it, and in the resources they feel entitled to call upon in their attempts to deal with it. My topic in this paper is an eighteenth-century uncertainty about the place within philosophy of the problem of personal identity. Is it a problem in metaphysics, or a problem in ethics? Here I try to show that the boundary between ethics and metaphysics was—for a line of philosophers beginning with Locke, continuing with Shaftesbury, and ending (at least in the present paper) with Hume—a shifting and sometimes disputed one. I hope what I have to say will help to clarify a longstanding problem in the interpretation of Hume: his motive for repudiating, in the Appendix to the Treatise, the account of judgments of personal identity and simplicity he had provided in Book I. Whether the topic of personal identity is ethical or metaphysical is a question raised by Locke's well-known observation that person is a "Forensick" or legal term, "appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery" (Essay II xxvii 26).1 The Essay's treatment of identity, Book II, ch. xxvii, was added to the book in its second edition. Locke had asked his friend William Molyneux whether there were logical or metaphysical topics he had neglected in the first Kenneth P. Winkler is at the Department of Philosophy, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA. e-mail: kwinkler@wellesley.edu 4 Kenneth R Winkler edition. Molyneux named the principle of individuation, and Locke drafted II xxvii in response. To locate the general topic of identity under the heading of logic or metaphysics is, it would seem, to locate personal identity there as well; this suggests that once we have our account of personal identity in hand, we should be able to determine whether a later person y is the same as some earlier person χ without considering any science—ethics, for example—not thought to depend on logic or metaphysics. But if person is a forensic or legal term, perhaps the judgment that y is λ: can be overthrown by the injustice—the moral inappropriateness—of attributing x's acts to y. If the attribution is inappropriate simply because χ and y are, according to some purely metaphysical criterion , distinct, the priority of metaphysics over ethics will not, of course, have been compromised. But perhaps Locke has something more dramatic in mind when he speaks of the forensic character ot person. Perhaps he means to allow that a judgment of personal identity can exhibit a specifically moral shortcoming —a shortcoming to which we have access only by virtue of moral considerations . In that case, judgments of identity will be attendant upon moral considerations. They will not be prior to (and therefore independent of) ethics and practice, as traditional ways of dividing the subfields of philosophy suggest they should be.3 The boundary between ethics and metaphysics, or Locke's view of the boundary, has something to do, I think, with how seriously we should take some of the interpretive questions raised by Essay II xxvii. Locke tells us that in dealing with questions about identity, we should take notice "what the Word /is applied to" (II xxvii 20). Suppose for the moment that materialism is true, and that thinking things are nothing but systems of matter, fitly disposed to serve as vehicles for the superadded attribute of thought. What is the relationship , metaphysically considered, between my self—the person I am— and the living system of matter (the animal or "man") in which my consciousness is (as we would now say) realized? One answer is that the system of matter or animal is a substance and that I am a mixed mode. Another answer is that we are both substances...