Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

One of the primary objections to the biological approach revolves around what is known as the transplant intuition. That is, the allegedly widely shared intuition that if we had our cerebrum transplanted into a different body, we would be transferred to that body along with our cerebrum. Drawing upon our understanding of brain death, this paper argues that either (1) the transplant intuition should be rejected, and the biological approach has the advantage of being consistent with that rejection; or (2) the psychological approach, the biological approach’s main rival, cannot…

Derek Parfit takes the central principle of his discussions of personal identity to be “reductionism”: that our existence and persistence are not basic facts, but consist in something else. A number of striking claims, including the famous unimportance of identity, are supposed to follow from it. But they don’t follow. The main principle in Parfit’s arguments is something far more contentious that is never mentioned: a capacious ontology of material things. But the capacious ontology makes trouble for Parfit: it weakens his claim about the unimportance of identity and undermines…

Our natural attitude is to care about the fate of a future person in a special manner once we know that this person is none other than ourselves. In the present paper, we defend the rationality of that attitude against Parfit’s famous contrary claim that ‘identity does not matter’. We argue that it is intrinsically bad for a conscious subject to have negative experiences, and that one therefore has reasons of a special kind (de se subject-relative reasons) to avoid having such experiences in the future. Our argument makes crucial…

Parfit argues that if we come to believe his theory of personal identity, we should care differently about the future. Amongst others, we can redescribe death in ways that make it seem less bad. I consider three challenges to his reasoning. First, according to the Argument from Above, a fact, event, or state of affairs can be good or bad independently of the value or disvalue of its constituents. Death could thus be bad even if R-relatedness matters and some degree of it is gets preserved. Second, I argue that…

The psychological reductionist claims that what is important to our survival just consists in a series of causally related experiences. Our belief in a separately existing subject of experiences is held to be unjustified. In reply, it is contended that we need to distinguish between persons (continuing subjects of experience) and any related series of experiences (their lives). A number of objections to this conception of a person are considered and rejected.

On Parfit’s Psychological Criterion of personal identity, I persist as some future subject if we can trace a chain of overlapping mental state connections from me to that future subject. When two subjects are connected in this way, we can say that they are psychologically continuous. Parfit offers up three different versions of the Psychological Criterion in Reasons and Persons, and what he calls the Narrow, Wide, and Widest views are distinguished from one another by what is acceptable as the cause of continuity on each. However, there appear to…

The relationship between Parfit’s theory of Personal Identity and his research on Population Ethics is underexplored. In this paper I both examine this relationship and support the principle stating that it is moral to cause the greatest total wellbeing. Once introduced the basic concepts of Population Ethics and Parfit’s theory of Personal Identity, I report Parfit’s distinction between Different Number Choices, that affect both the number and the identity of future people, and Same Number Choices, that affect only future people’s identity. Parfit underlines how, in Different Number Choices, it…

In a recent paper, Olson (2019) returned to Parfit’s argument from the possibility of fission to the unimportance of identity to claim that it is inconsistent with Parfit’s ontological commitments. Picking up Olson’s claim, Noonan (2024) argues that one consequence of this is that Parfit’s argument necessarily fails to yield its conclusion. Here I show that Noonan’s ontological stance is similar to Parfit's in one significant sense, thus diminishing the scope of his claim. As a result, I hold that if we want to defend that personal identity is what…