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Chapter XIII: Persons, Personal Identity, and Metaphysical Luck
- University of Ottawa Press
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I In this chapter i want to come to some conclusions about persons— ourselves and beings like us, if there are any that are in this respect like us. A good deal has already been said in earlier chapters about persons, and some views argued for in discussing essence and substance will now be set out more fully and defended. Let us, initially at least, begin afresh, and bring the earlier discussion and results into the investigation as it proceeds. the term “person” has a number of uses or applications, both philosophical and extraphilosophical. i should say explicitly right at the beginning that i use the term to signify the being we refer to when we use the word “i.” “Persons,” in this sense, is, in effect, the plural of “i.”1 Other concepts of persons that may have a role in theories of various sorts—legal, juridical, moral, etc.—but do not coincide with the idea that a person is an “i” (whether or not, at a particular time and in particular circumstances, capable of conceiving of or referring to itself as an “i”) will not be what the present chapter is about. A person is a substance that is conscious or has experiences. Persons are also characterized as selves. they are typically regarded as beings that are, at least at some stages of their existence, capable of deliberate action. every reader of this book is a person, as is its author. We are all human beings. So at least some human beings are persons. C H A P t e R X i i i Persons, Personal Identity, and Metaphysical Luck 204 ReALitY: Fundamental topics in Metaphysics it seems to me that many philosophers have overmystified persons, and what it is to be one, from both ends of the philosophical spectrum. that is, many idealist, dualist, and hermeneutical and phenomenological philosophers have had mistaken and unjustifiably elevated notions of persons as inappropriately simple entities, or as things that are not part of the natural world; and often allegedly tough-minded empiricist and materialist philosophers have had a similar conception, usually as prelude to trying to make trouble for the idea. As i see it, person is a peculiar kind of classification we give to cases, all of which in our actual experience are cases of living terrestrial organisms, but by virtue of which we pick out something we take to be distinctive of those and other possible beings that would not in fact need to be terrestrial or even, perhaps, living. Person does not identify a species or set of species; in that respect it resembles quadruped or, better, multiped, which can apply to both giraffes and caterpillars. Something is a person by virtue of certain kinds of processes or states occurring in the thing, or typically occurring in things of that sort. these processes do not imply genetic affinity, though, of course, there may be such an affinity. Being a person is conceived as a very central trait of the things to which it applies. Some hold it to be essential to those things, in the strongest metaphysical sense. Whether that is correct or not i shall sidestep for now. i want to emphasize what so many philosophers neglect: the specieslike character and the naturalism of being a person. Persons can have sublime thoughts. they can also be photographed and hit by cars. A great many persons, at least in many modern societies, have birth certificates, which make it possible to infer how long the person has existed, at any rate what the duration of the person’s existence is since their birth. i take it, moreover, that something is a human person if and only if it is a human being; and that this pattern holds for every natural species with members that are characteristically persons. thus for every such species F, something will be an F person if and only if it is an F. the biconditional here may only be a material one, but it does express something true. the upshot of this will be, part of it at least, that the concept of a person should be expected to pose some of the conceptual and possible cases challenges that species natural kind concepts do, and should not be assumed to pose any other challenges than those concepts do; not unless special additional argument is given. Maybe person is an underdetermined concept: that is, one for the application of which there are sufficient but...