Misunderstandings Understood

Simon Beck offers a series of insightful challenges to an earlier paper in which I argue for a self-understanding, or narrative, view of personal identity (Schechtman 2005). His objections have shown me that my earlier paper conflates two issues that, although connected, are not connected in the straightforward way I implied. One is the claim that narrative views, unlike psychological theories, capture what is compelling in Locke’s account of personal identity. What draws us to Locke’s approach is the intuition that personal continuation is at bottom a phenomenological fact. I suggest that psychological continuity theorists’ development of the notion of ‘sameness of consciousness’ in terms of the contents of consciousness loses this phenomenological connection. The other claim is that the narrative approach can avoid an objection that would seem to apply to any view that does capture the intuitive appeal of Locke’s account, that it has difficulty making sense of the attribution of non-conscious psychological states.

In my earlier paper, I suggested that the capacity to account for non-conscious states was an advantage that the narrative view has over psychological theories. This is misleading. Psychological theories in many ways have an easier time attributing non-conscious states than the narrative view does, but they do so at the cost of giving up the appeal of Locke’s phenomenological account. The advantage of the narrative view is thus that it can explain the attribution of non-conscious psychological states while capturing the Lockean insight that personal identity should be defined in phenomenological terms. Because the bulk of Beck’s discussion concerns my reading of the psychological approach, I concentrate primarily on my objections to that view in what follows.

One of the central arguments Beck makes against my analysis is that it aims to solve a problem that does not exist. Psychological theorists are not trying to capture the Lockean perspective, he says, so the fact that they fail to do so is not a genuine demerit. Locke is arguing against substantialist views of personal identity, whereas psychological continuity theories have the quite different goal of arguing against anti-reductionist views. This is a bit too quick, however. Psychological theorists must defend not only against anti-reductionists, but also against biological accounts of identity (which have enjoyed a strong resurgence in recent ‘animalist’ accounts; see, e.g., Olson 1997) Locke argues for a psychological approach by asking us to reflect on hypothetical cases like that of the prince whose consciousness enters the body of a cobbler. In this case, he says, we will judge that the person goes where the consciousness goes. Anticipating such a switch, the prince would anticipate having future experience in the cobbler’s body rather than in the one he now inhabits. It is the pains and pleasures of the cobbler’s body rather than the princely one that he will feel after the transfer takes place. It is this phenomenological connection to future experience that makes for personal identity on Locke’s view.

Locke also asks us to reflect on questions about the justice of punishment and reward. I disagree with Beck’s assessment that Locke’s insistence that ‘person’ is a forensic term amounts only to the assertion that “it has special significance in a legal context” (Beck 2013, 40). Locke focuses as much on self-interested concern as on responsibility, and sees the two as inherently linked. To be an agent one must be capable of a law, and this requires that one be able to experience pleasure or pain, care which one experiences, and understand that the quality of present experience is contingent upon past actions.

Psychological theorists use Lockean thought experiments to argue for a psychological approach and to this extent are obligated to include those features of Locke’s account that follow from it. My claim is that they fail to do this. Overlapping chains of strong psychological connectedness do not in themselves guarantee a phenomenological connection between persons at two different times, only a certain kind of likeness or continuity in the contents of consciousness...