Locke on Personal Identity

Locke's Project: Verifying the Idea of Personal Identity

- Verification = Tracing ideas back to origin in sense experience

- "This being premised to find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider what Person stands for."

- E.g. When we use the word 'person', what sense impression stands behind this word? What in experience are we referring to?

- What makes me the same person that I was at other points in time? With what right do I say that it was 'me'?

Against a Physical Account of Identity

- The Ship of Theseus thought experiment =?

- We have a ship that is identified as Theseus' ship:

????a) If we repaire a couple of wooden planks on this ship, is it still Theseus' ship?

????b) If it gets into a huge storem and we replace 51% of the planks on the ship, is the ship that results still to be called Theseus' ship?

????c) If over time we keep replacing planks one at a time and over the period of a decade end up replacing every single plank, is the ship that results still to be called Theseus' ship?

Locke's Initial Definitions

- What is "identity"?

????- No two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time, and no individual can be in two different places at the same time.

????- "It's not therefore Unity of Substance that comprehends all sorts of Identity, or will determine it in every Case: But to conceive, and judge of it aright, we must consider what Idea and Word it is applied to stands for."

- What is "a person"?

????a) "Person stands for a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places."

????b) "...Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery."

Locke's Psychological Solution

- Diachronic identity of persons (what makes me 'me' over the course of time) consists in sameness of consciousness

- William James = a 'stream of thought'

Thought Experiments

- The Prince and the Cobbler (i.e. the prince wakes up in the body of the cobbler)

- The two Socrates: "If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousneess, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Sorates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such Twins have been seen."

- Dayman and Nightman: "Two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same Body, the one constantly by Day, the other by Night" (see also the drunk!)

- "Rational Parrot": persons can exist in animal bodies too.

Some Conceptual Distinctions

- Remember for Locke: "Person stands for a thinking intelligent Being".

- Person?≠ Human being (or 'rational animal")

????"The Identity of the same Man consists... in nothing but a participation of the same continued Life, by constantly fleeting Particles of Matter, in succession vitally united to the same organised Body."

- Person?≠ Soul (or 'thinking substance")

????"Self is not determined by Identity or Diversity of Substance... but only by identity of consciousness."

Problems with Locke's Accounts

1. Metaphysical or epistemological account of identity?

????I.e. is Locke claming that this is why we are the same person through time or that this is how we know that we are the same person through time?

2. What is "consciousness" for Locke?

????"Lockeseems to see consciousness as (1) a mental state inseparable from an act of perception by means of which we are aware of ourselves as perceiving, and (2) the ongoing self we are aware of in these conscious states." (Weinberg)

3. The "Brave Officer" (Thomas Reid)

????An old general has a first-person memory of performing an act of bravery in battle as a junior officer, while the junior officer had a first-person memory of stealing apples as a boy --- and yet the general no longer remembers the boyhoold incident. By Locke's account, it seems, the general is the same person as the junior officer, who is the same person as the boy, but the general is not the same person as the boy.