-
7 Persistence and Responsibility
- The MIT Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Let me begin with the seemingly simple fact that I persist through time. If, while preparing dinner sometime next week, I accidentally cut off the end of my finger, I will survive. And not just in the ordinary sense that this biological organism will continue functioning; even in the philosopher’s sense, I’ll survive. That is, the person who gets rushed to the hospital will be the same person who is sitting here typing these words, with all ten fingers intact. And it’s not that I’m special; you persist through time too. That persons persist through time is not in question. What is in question is what persistence through time amounts to. Do persons persist, on the one hand, by enduring through time?1 Or do persons persist by perduring through time?2 This is a genuine metaphysical dispute. As with many important metaphysical questions, however, the consequences of this dispute reach beyond metaphysics. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between the debate over persistence and another philosophical thesis that is not in question, namely, that persons are at least sometimes morally responsible for their actions.3 Some philosophers have thought that persons cannot properly be held morally responsible for their actions unless they endure through time.4 On this view, if persons perdure, then no person is morally responsible for anything. If true, this would be a telling objection against the view that persons perdure. Unfortunately, the remarks made in the literature against the compatibility of perdurance and moral responsibility, though suggestive, are often quite brief. In order to remedy this, I aim to expand on these suggestive remarks in order to see what arguments can be found for the incompatibility claim. Not that these arguments will turn out to be more convincing than the suggestive remarks, though. Indeed, though there are five such arguments I will be considering, we will see that the proponent of 7 Persistence and Responsibility Neal A. Tognazzini 150 N. A. Tognazzini perdurance can successfully rebut them all. The upshot will be that we have yet to see a good reason to think that perdurance is incompatible with morally responsible agency. Theories of Persistence First, let me say a bit more about theories of persistence. There are actually a number of different theories one might have about persistence through time. The two most common are endurance and perdurance, but at least one other theory deserves to be mentioned here: stage theory.5 I will not be discussing stage theory directly in what follows, but it will help to include it in this section so that we can better understand the philosophical terrain.6 Following Ted Sider, let the term ‘continuants’ refer to those things that we ordinarily talk about, quantify over, and (I’ll add) attribute responsibility to in everyday contexts (Sider 2001, 191). This way of using the term will help us better understand the different theories of persistence. Each theory has a view about which objects are continuants, and each theory has an explanation about how those continuants persist through time. Both endurance and stage theory maintain that continuants are threedimensional things, that is, things that are only extended in the three spatial dimensions.7 According to perdurance, on the other hand, continuants are four-dimensional things extended in three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Endurantists and stage theorists maintain, in other words, that continuants have spatial parts but no temporal parts, whereas perdurantists maintain that continuants have both spatial and temporal parts. Though the concepts involved here are notoriously difficult to pin down, we can get the intuitive idea of a temporal part as follows. Just as I have a part that I ordinarily call ‘my head’, which occupies the region of space from somewhere on my neck on up, perdurance says that I also have a part that we might call ‘my last-year-self’ that occupies the region of time from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2010. What I am, on this view, is the four-dimensional object composed of all of my many temporal parts. Now that we have each theory’s understanding of continuants out of the way, let me turn to each theory’s account of how continuants persist through time.8 Up to this point, I haven’t mentioned any differences between endurance and stage theory, but there’s a big difference. According to endurance, continuants persist through time by being wholly present...