The general idea of constitution-without-identity, as we have just seen, has the resources to meet the charge of incoherence. In this chapter, I want to show that the specific application of the idea of constitution to human persons likewise can meet this charge. The most serious challenge to the Constitution View today comes from those who hold that we are not merely constituted by animals, but that we are identical to animals. It is to such Animalists that I primarily want to respond. I shall begin with a series of objections that have been raised against a ‘coincidence’ view of person and body, and I shall show that, if these objections were taken to apply to the Constitution View, they would seriously mischaracterize the Constitution View as I have developed it. Next, I shall respond to three problems that are thought to attend the denial that I am identical to an animal: the “how many” problem; problem of linguistic incoherence; and the “fetus problem.” Finally, I want to respond to a putative counterexample to the application of the idea of constitution to persons and their bodies.

CONSTITUTION IS NOT MERE “COINCIDENCE”

Eric Olson combats a view according to which I am “associated with” a human animal with which I share the same matter and to which I am not identical. He calls this view “coincidence” and subjects it to a blistering attack. I want to begin with criticisms that Olson aims against “coincidence” to show that if applied to the Constitution View, these criticisms would miss their mark.

Throughout, I have been giving reasons to accept the Constitution View of human persons. In this final chapter, I want to assemble those reasons, expand on some of them, and add others. The aim of this chapter is to emphasize the strengths of the Constitution View and to argue for its superiority to the rival views of persons and bodies.

YES, MATERIALISM

One of the virtues of the Constitution View that I have touted is that it is a form of materialism: The Constitution View shows what is special about human persons without supposing that they are anything but material beings. But does it, really?

Mind/body dualists sometimes weigh in with the charge that the Constitution View is not really a materialist view, but rather leads to immaterialism. They argue as follows:

1. (1)If I am a material object, then there is some material object to which I am identical.

2. (2)If I am identical to any material object, then I am identical to my body or some part of it.

3. (3)It is possible that I exist when neither my body nor any of its parts exist.

4. Therefore,

5. (4)I am not identical to my body or any part of it.

6. Therefore,

7. (5)I am not identical to any material object (by (4) and (2)).

8. Therefore,

9. (6)I am an immaterial object.

Of course, we should resist drawing this conclusion, for premise (2) should be rejected outright.

According to the Constitution View, human persons are constituted by bodies. Constitution, as we have seen, is not identity. But if a person is constituted by a body to which she is not identical, what distinguishes a person from the body that constitutes her? My answer, which I shall explain in this chapter, is that a person has a capacity for a first-person perspective essentially; her constituting body has it contingently. The person/body case is thus analogous to the statue/piece-of-marble case. The statue has the property of being related to an artworld essentially; the constituting piece of marble has that property contingently. Having a capacity for a first–person perspective plays the same role in the human person case that being related to an artworld in such-and-such a way plays in the statue case.

A first–person perspective makes possible an inner life. On the Constitution View, something with a capacity for an inner life is a fundamentally different kind of thing from anything that has no capacity for an inner life. (Thus, I am ontologically closer to a self-conscious Martian than I am to a racehorse or to an early-term fetus.) The body of a human person is (identical to) an animal. An animal, human or not, can exist without any capacity for an inner life; a person cannot. This view is not Cartesian: An inner life does not require an immaterial soul, nor is it independent of the world around us.

“But what, then, am I?” Descartes famously asked in the Meditations. Descartes then set the philosophical stage for the next few hundred years with his equally famous answer: “A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses and which also imagines and senses.” But what kind of thing is a thing that thinks? Descartes's own answer — that a thinking thing is an immaterial mind — has lost ground over the centuries. Today neoCartesian materialists typically take the thinking thing to be the brain and then go on to try to determine how particular neural states can be the mental states involved in thinking (e.g., beliefs, desires, and intentions). But the thinker — the thing that thinks, that has an inner life — is neither an immaterial mind nor a material brain: it is the person. My brain is the organ by which I think; but I, a person embedded in a material world, am the thinker. So, where traditional Cartesians see a mind/body problem and neo- Cartesians see a mental-state/brain-state problem, I see a person/body problem: What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and her body? This is the problem that I shall investigate here.

According to the solution that I shall offer, a human person is constituted by a human body. But a human person is not identical to the body that constitutes her.

In ordinary discourse, we speak of people as having bodies without making much fuss about just what this ‘having’ relation is. What does it mean to say that I have a body? The Constitution View offers an answer: For a person to have a body is for the person to be constituted by a body (in the sense of‘constitution’; explicated in Chapter 2). A person is not a separate thing from the constituting body, any more than a statue is a separate thing from the constituting block of marble. Nor is a person identical to the constituting body. The nonidentity of person and body, on the Constitution View, is guaranteed by the fact that any body could exist without a first-person perspective, but no person could exist without a capacity for first-person perspective (in the sense of ‘first-person perspective’ explicated in Chapter 3). Now I shall try to spell out in detail just how human persons are related to their bodies.

WHAT A HUMAN PERSON IS

On the Constitution View, what makes a human person a person is the capacity to have a first-person perspective. What makes a human person a human is being constituted by a human organism.

A first-person perspective is a defining characteristic of all persons, human or not. From a first-person point of view, one can think about oneself as oneself and think about one's thoughts as one's own.

There are two central questions about what it is to be a person. One is synchronic: In virtue of what is something a person at a given time? The other is diachronic: In virtue of what is there a single person at two different times? To put the diachronic question another way: Assuming that a person S is considered at time t and a person S′ is considered at time t′ in virtue of what is person S identical to person S′? So far, I have sheared off the question of what it is for x to be a person from the related, and much discussed, question of what it is for x and y to be the same person considered at two times. My answer to the synchronic question was that to be a person is to have a first-person perspective, where I gave an account of what a first-person perspective is; and to be a human person (nonderivatively) is to be a person constituted by a human organism.

Turn now to the diachronic question, the question of personal identity over time: In virtue of what is a person P1, at t1 the same person as person P2, at t2? All the candidate answers that I know to the question about identity of persons over time (including my own answer) are either clearly false or not very illuminating. I want now to canvas various answers, and show where they fall down, and then offer my own answer – in the not-very-illuminating category.

The approach to the material world in terms of constitution without identity has been subjected to a barrage of criticism. Some objections have been leveled at the very idea of constitution-without-identity; others have challenged the specific application of the idea of constitution- without-identity to the problem of persons and their bodies. In this chapter, I want to defend the idea of constitution-without-identity. In the next chapter, I want to defend the Constitution View of human persons and their bodies.

Some of the objections just refuse to take the general idea of constitution-without-identity seriously. For example, David Lewis speaks for many when he remarks, “It reeks of double-counting to say that here we have a dishpan, and we also have a dishpan-shaped bit of plastic that is just where the dishpan is. …” But this is just a bit of polemics. There is no double-counting; we count by sortals, and ‘piece of plastic’; is a different sortal from ‘dishpan.’ The “reek of double-counting” comes from Lewis's tendentious use of ‘dishpan-shaped’ to describe the piece of plastic. The less tendentious way to express what constitutionwithout- identity implies is to say: Here we have a dishpan constituted by an S-shaped piece of plastic, where ‘S-shaped’ is a more neutral expression denoting the actual shape of the piece of plastic. To see that Lewis's remark gets its bite from being amusing, consider a less amusing (and by now tired) example of a piece of sculpture constituted by a hunk of gold.

According to the Constitution View, what is ontologically most important about human persons is that they are persons. According to the Animalist View, by contrast, what is ontologically most important about human persons is that they are animals. In this chapter, I want to show the difference that being a person makes.

It is the first-person perspective, in virtue of which we are persons, that gives rise to what matters to and about us. First, we matter to ourselves in a way that, logically, animals that lack first-person perspectives cannot matter to themselves. Nonhuman animals can attempt to survive and reproduce, but only beings with first-person perspectives can have conceptions of their own futures. Only persons can have fears and hopes about the future, and only persons can attempt to shape their futures according to their own ideas of the kinds of beings that they want to be. In short, animals that do not constitute persons cannot be important to themselves in the same way that persons are important to themselves. This is so because the first-person perspective allows us to think about, and conceive of, ourselves in a unique way.

So the significance, to persons, of being persons is simply incalculable. And it is difficult to see how to dismiss this apparent significance as merely parochial. I suspect that such dismissal requires a degree of selfdeception. We may gaze at the sky and think how vast is the universe and how inconsequential are humans, but that does not (and should not!) stop us from worrying about how we are going to take care of our aging parents.

The relation between a person and his or her body, I shall argue, is simply an instance of a very general relation: constitution. Constitution is a fundamental relation that is ubiquitous. It is the relation that obtains between an octagonal piece of metal and a Stop sign, between strands of DNA molecules and genes, between pieces of paper and dollar bills, between stones and monument; between lumps of clay and statues — the list is endless. So, apart from the light that it sheds on human persons, the idea of constitution holds philosophical interest in its own right. In this chapter, I shall give a very general and technical account of this important idea.

There are additional reasons to be explicit about the idea of constitution. First, as I have argued elsewhere, I think that constitution cannot be understood as identity. But if constitution is not identity, what exactly is it? In this chapter, I am going to try to say. Constitution has been caricatured by those who cannot imagine a relation of unity that is intermediate between identity and separate existence. The idea of such an intermediate position strikes many philosophers as incoherent. Nothing but a detailed exposition of the idea of constitution will absolve it of the charge of incoherence or obscurity. Second, I start with assumptionsthat are different from those of other writers on constitution. Philosophers typically treat constitution as a matter of relations between things and their parts.