Simon Beck

These Bizarre Fictions: Thought-experiments, our Psychology and our Selves

Abstract Philosophers have traditionally used thought-experiments in their endeavours to find a satisfactory account of the self and personal identity. Yet there are considerations from empirical psychology as well as related ones from philosophy itself that appear to completely undermine the method of thought-experiment. This paper focuses on both sets of considerations and attempts a defence of the method.

Going Narrative: Schechtman and the Russians

Abstract Marya Schechtman’s The Constitution of Selves presented an impressive attempt to persuade those working on personal identity to give up mainstream positions and take on a narrative view instead. More recently, she has presented new arguments with a closely related aim. She attempts to convince us to give up the view of identity as a matter of psychological continuity, using Derek Parfit’s story of the “Nineteenth Century Russian” as a central example in making the case against Parfit’s own view, and offers a form of narrative theory as a way out of the problem. In this paper I consider this new case, and argue that we should not be persuaded towards the narrative.

Points of Concern

Raymond Martin’s Self-Concern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)1 sets out to put the debate around personal identity on to a new footing. He acknowledges the ground-breaking work of Derek Parfit which shifted the general focus from questions of strict identity to the question of what it is that really should matter in survival, but he thinks the focus should shift further than just this. His book sets out to endorse ‘a shift in the philosophical debate from the normative question of whether this or that should matter in survival to the largely descriptive question of what ... actually does or might be brought to matter’ (x). The roots of his objection to the new orthodoxy represented by Parfit are methodological. Since Locke began the debate on what makes someone the same person over time, almost all philosophers who have got involved have made use of thought-experiments to establish their view and to challenge those of their rivals. Parfit is no exception. Indeed, his major contribution – the move from a focus on identity to a focus on egoistic survival values – was based entirely on one of these ‘puzzle cases’. In the thought-experiment he called ‘My Division’, Parfit imagined himself being split into two distinct people (Parfit 1984: 254). In such a case, the logic of identity rules that neither of these two resulting people could be Parfit, and yet (Parfit argued) their relationships to the original person contain all that matters in survival. His conclusion was that identity could not be what matters in survival, and that we should rather concern ourselves with what does matter. Martin agrees that survival values and not identity should be our central focus, but disagrees with Parfit’s way of establishing this. He is not out to follow Kathleen Wilkes in rejecting all thought-experiments of this kind (Wilkes 1988: chapter 1), but he does think that this method cannot establish what we should value – in the sense of what is rationally required, as Parfit wants it to – but only what actually matters to particular individuals. And besides,

Back to the self and the future

The thought-experiment presented by Bernard Williams in ‘The self and the future’ continues to draw the attention of writers in the debate about personal identity. While few of them agree on what implications it has for the debate, almost all agree that those implications are significant ones. Some have even claimed that it has consequences not only for personal identity, but also concerning the viability of thought-experiment as a method. This paper surveys what these consequences might be at both levels—as a substantive contribution to the debate on identity, and as to what it shows about the usefulness of thought-experiments. It argues ultimately that thought-experiments like Williamss do provide a useful philosophical tool as long as we temper our expectations of them, and that it offers some support to a view of personal identity but one which is at odds with Williamss own view.

Causal Co-personality: In defence of the psychological continuity theory

Abstract The view that an account of personal identity can be provided in terms of psychological continuity has come under fire from an interesting new angle in recent years. Critics from a variety of rival positions have argued that it cannot adequately explain what makes psychological states co-personal (i.e. the states of a single person). The suggestion is that there will inevitably be examples of states that it ascribes wrongly using only the causal connections available to it. In this paper, I describe three distinct attacks on the psychological continuity theory along these lines. While I acknowledge that a number of interesting issues arise, I argue that the theory can withstand all three attacks.

A Sporting Dilemma and Its Jurisprudence

Our purpose in this article is to draw attention to a connection that obtains between two dilemmas from two separate spheres: sports and the law. It is our contention that umpires in the game of cricket may face a dilemma that is similar to a dilemma confronted by legal decision makers and that comparing the nature of the dilemmas, and the arguments advanced to solve them, will serve to advance our understanding of both the law and games. In asserting the existence of an illuminating intersection between a game and the law, we follow arguably the two preeminent legal philosophers of the last hundred years, H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin (12: pp. 34, 40, 59, 142–144; 5: pp. 101–104). Yet the proposition that that we can examine the dilemmas arising in one of these spheres to achieve a fuller understanding of what is at stake in the dilemmas encountered in the other does not command universal assent. According to Judith Shklar,

Let's exist again (like we did last summer)

ABSTRACT This paper is a defence of a psychological view of personal identity against the attack Peter Unger launches against it in his Identity, Consciousness and Value. Unger attempts to undermine the traditional support which a psychological criterion of identity has drawn from thought-experiments, and to show that such a criterion has totally unacceptable implications—in particular, that it allows that persons can go out of and come back into existence. I respond to both aspects of this criticism, arguing that the relevant thought- experiments (and the support they appear to offer) survive Ungers attack intact, and that he does not establish his case against intermittent existence.

Morals, Metaphysics and The Method of Cases

Abstract In this paper I discuss a set of problems concerning the method of cases as it is used in applied ethics and in the metaphysical debate about personal identity. These problems stem from research in social psychology concerning our access to the data with which the method operates. I argue that the issues facing ethics are more worrying than those facing metaphysics.

Martha Nussbaum and the Foundations of Ethics : identity, morality and thought-experiments

Abstract Martha Nussbaum has argued in support of the view (supposedly that of Aristotle) that we can, through thought-experiments involving personal identity, find an objective foundation for moral thought without having to appeal to any authority independent of morality. I compare the thought-experiment from Plato’s Philebus that she presents as an example to other thought-experiments involving identity in the literature and argue that this reveals a tension between the sources of authority which Nussbaum invokes for her thought-experiment. I also argue that each of her sources of authority presents further difficulties for her project. Finally, I argue that it is not clear that her thought-experiment is one that actually involves identity in any crucial way. As a result, the case she offers does not offer any satisfactory support for her view on the relation between identity, morality and thought-experiments, but we do gain some insights into what that relation really is along the way.