PERSONAL IDENTITY, MINIMALISM, AND MADHYAMAKA Roy W. Perrett Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University I The diachronic problem of personal identity is the problem of specifying what it is that makes a person the same person over time. Contemporary Western philosophical theories of diachronic personal identity have tended to be constructed in terms of a quest for theunityrelationfor persons.1 To specify the unity relation for persons is to specify the relation between person-stages occurring at different times in virtue of which they are all stages of one and the same person. We may think of personstagesas temporal slices of persons, or, alternatively, as temporal slices of the biographies of persons. Either way, there are quite a number of theories on offer as to what the unity relation for persons consists in. These theories can all be classified, however, as being instances of two general types. The first, and currently most popular, type of theory of personal identity holds that the unity relation between personstages can be specified in terms of a relation that does not itself presuppose identity. This is what Parfit calls ‘‘Reductionism’’: Reductionism: Personal identity just consists in the holding of certain facts that can be described without making reference to personal identity.2 The alternative type of theory is Non-Reductionism, which denies this claim. Non-Reductionists hold that the unity relation for persons is just identity; that is, what makes a set of person-stages occurring at different times all stages of the same person is simply that they all are stages of the same person. Personal identity is simple and unanalyzable: there is no nontrivial and noncircular analysis of the identity conditions for persons, nothing that personal identity ‘‘consists in.’’ Currently this is verymuchthelesspopulartypeoftheoryofpersonalidentity,butitneverthelesshas able contemporary defenders.3 Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons not only defends a Reductionist theory of persons and their identity over time (specifically, a variety of psychological continuity theory) but also seeks to derive normative implications from it. In one sense thisisnotsurprising:Parfit’stheoryrevivesandextendsvariousLockeanthemes,and Locke had already insisted that personal identity was a ‘‘forensic’’ notion ‘‘appropriatingactionsandtheirmerits.’’Hence,thereisanaturaltemptationtosupposethata theory of personal identity ought to capture the link between identity and what Marya Schechtman calls ‘‘the four features’’: survival, moral responsibility, selfinterestedconcern,andcompensation.4 Parfit’smetaphysicalandmoralrevisionism, however, goes much further than this. First, he argues that personal identity (and Philosophy East & West Volume 52, Number 3 July 2002 373–385 373 >2002 by University of Hawai‘i Press hence survival) is a matter of degree because the psychological relation that constitutes identity (Relation R) itself admits of degrees. Moreover the same relation that imperfectly unifies the self over time also connects us with other people. Second, he infers from the imaginary branching cases that ‘‘what matters’’ in survival is not identity, but the holding of the right sort of psychological relation with some future person who may not be identical with you. The central normative implication of all this, so far as Parfit is concerned, is a drift toward impartiality and impersonality, a lessening of the gap between persons since my relation to others is not so significantly different from my relation to my own past and future. Parfit claims that if Reductionism is true, then theSelf-interestTheory(according to which, as rational agents, we each ought to be supremely concerned about our own futures) is false. However, there remain two other possibilities about what it is rational for an agent to seek: TheExtremeClaim:If Reductionism is true, then we have no reason to be specially concerned about our own futures. TheModerateClaim:IfReductionismistrue,thentheholdingofRelationRgivesussome reason to be specially concerned about our futures.5 In ReasonsandPersons Parfit held both of these claims to be rationally defensible, although he personally favored the Moderate Claim.6 More recently he seems to have moved a little bit closer to the Extreme Claim, at least insofar as he is now skeptical about the possibility of justifying our customary practices of desert-based punishment and compensation if Reductionism is true.7 There have been various...