DEREK
PARFIT''S ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY ANNUAL LECTURE
WE ARE NOT
HUMAN BEINGS
An Introduction
by Ted Honderich
Derek Parfit, born of medical
doctors teaching in missionary hospitals in China, was educated at Eton and in
Oxford, where he studied modern history. After a year at Columbia and Harvard,
where he turned to philosophy, he became a fellow of All Souls College in
Oxford, and is now an Emeritus Fellow. He is also a regular visiting professor
at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers. To his commitment to philosophy
he adds one to photography.
If you saw somebody distinctive in
the Broad in Oxford a year ago and somebody similar yesterday, what would make
them the same person? What is the criterion of personal identity, of being a
particular person? There once was the idea, and still is, that they would have
to be one and the same self, subject, or maybe soul -- an internal and unphysical entity, one that has experience
rather than somehow consists in it. There is also the second idea, argued for
by Bernard Williams among others, that the two would have to be one body --
there would have to be physical
continuity.
There is the third idea whose origin
is assigned to Locke in the 17th Century. It is that the person today is the
person of a year ago if today's person remembers, as their own, actions that
were performed by the person a year ago, and also the person today may be
acting on an intention to visit Oxford formed by the person a year ago, and
also have some identical beliefs and the like. In sum, there is psychological continuity. Parfit is best
known for his formidable development, partly in terms of further ideas of
uniqueness, cause, and brain, of what is called this Lockean idea. That was in
his uniquely methodical and regulating book Reasons
and Persons.
To these three responses to the
problem of personal identity has more recently been added what has been known
as the idea of animalism, that two
persons are the same person if they are the same animal or human animal -- if
there is what is also called biological
continuity. Parfit takes and speaks of this as the view that personal
identity is a matter of same human being,
and so in the title of his lecture denies that we as individual persons are
individuated as human beings.
It is his main concern in his
lecture to refute this view but also, so to speak, to learn from it. Proceeding
by imagined cases or thought experiments like those that have been the main
content of the philosophy of personal identity, he first considers objections
by animalists to the Lockean idea, and then considers problems for animalism or
biological continuity and also for the Lockean view and how the views do or do
not solve them.
Partly prompted by animalism, he
moves thereafter to the Embodied Part
View of personal identity and then on to the principal contention of the lecture, that the truth about personal
identity is the Embodied Person View.
It is mainly a development of his original Lockeanism -- a development to the
effect that each person is an embodied conscious, thinking, and controlling
part of a body, animal or organism. It is no more a physicalism about personal
identity than he originally had in mind. As remarked elsewhere, he continues to
find physicalism implausible but rejects Cartesian dualism, and has not thought
about the mind-body problem, regarding it as too difficult.
What follows in the lecture is
consideration of objections to the Embodied Part and the Embodied Persons View,
much of this consideration by way of the proposition that the pronouns 'I' and
'you' are in a way ambiguous. Finally the possibility is considered of whether
the lecturer has undermined his own original case by his development of it. He
also considers a strengthening of what was an upshot of his original view --
that personal identity cannot be what matters, or anyway what matters as much
to us as before we come to understand it rightly.
All of the lecture is a typically
indefatigable train of argument. It is a sequence of particular proofs, or
particular propositions akin to proofs, that add up to something about as approximate to proof of a whole
theory as the unique difficulty of philosophy allows. It is a lecture like
others in this volume that are more in need of encouragement in advance for
readers than summary. It is also a lecture ending in generosity to animalist
opponents, including Paul Snowdon, Eric Olson and others.
Inclined as I myself am to a developed
kind of Lockean and indeed Parfitian view of personal identity, I ask but one
question. In philosophy and elsewhere, there is endless concern with subjectivity in connection with
consciousness. Is it the same fact as personal identity conceived in a way like
the one defended in the lecture?