Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2015
Derek Parfit claims that we are not human beings. Rather, each of us is the part of a human being that thinks in the strictest sense. This is said to solve a number of difficult metaphysical problems. I argue that the view has metaphysical problems of its own, and is inconsistent with any psychological-continuity account of personal identity over time, including Parfit's own.
1 ‘We are Not Human Beings’, Philosophy 87 (2012), 5–28 Google Scholar.
2 Unger, Peter, Identity, Consciousness, and Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 109Google Scholar.
3 My mental capacities don’t exist in electronic form within the machinery, though the information represented in my mental contents does. For a good definition of psychological continuity, see Shoemaker, Sydney, ‘Personal Identity: A Materialist's Account’, in Shoemaker, and Swinburne, Richard (eds), Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 89–91 Google Scholar. The transfer story is from page 108.
4 When Parfit says that the question of whether someone would be me has no answer, I take him to mean no straight, yes-or-no answer. Rather, the person would be neither definitely me nor definitely not me, much as the answer to the question of whether it’s raining may be that it’s neither definitely raining nor definitely not raining. If this is right, then the question has got an answer – a unique correct answer, in fact – and Parfit’s formulation is misleading. But I don’t know what else he could mean.
5 One cerebral hemisphere is clearly enough. No psychological-continuity theorist that I know of would deny that one could survive a hemispherectomy – a real though rare operation. And Parfit himself says that someone who was psychologically continuous with me by getting half my transplanted brain would be me if the other half were destroyed: see Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 254Google Scholar.
6 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 335Google Scholar.
7 ‘We are Not Human Beings’, 9–11
8 If an entire detached brain would be an organism (see van Inwagen, Peter, Material Beings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 169–181 Google Scholar, let only the cerebrum be transplanted. This applies also to the remnant-person problem described below.
9 Johnston, Mark, ‘“Human Beings” Revisited: My Body is Not an Animal’, in Zimmerman, Dean, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33–74 Google Scholar; Parfit, ‘We Are Not Human Beings’, 11–12; Olson, Eric, ‘The Remnant-Person Problem’, in Blatti, Stephan and Snowdon, Paul, eds., Essays on Animalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.
10 ‘We Are Not Human Beings’, 13f.; see also Olson, Eric, What Are We? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 215–219 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 ‘We Are Not Human Beings’, 14.
12 Campbell, Tim and McMahan, Jeff, ‘Animalism and the Varieties of Conjoined Twinning’, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (2010), 285–301 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
13 Animalists have their own responses to these problems. On the transplant objection, see Olson, , The Human Animal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42–69 Google Scholar; on the remnant-person problem, see Olson, ‘The Remnant-Person Problem’; on the thinking-parts problem, see van Inwagen, Material Beings, 81–97, Olson, What Are We?, 215–219; on the twinning problem, see van Inwagen, Material Beings, 188–212, Olson, ‘The Metaphysical Implications of Conjoined Twinning’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (2014), 24–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Olson, What Are We?, 87–90.
15 ‘We Are Not Human Beings’, 15. He does contrast our being brains with our being ‘embodied minds’ or ‘embodied persons’, saying that he prefers the last (15–17). But what these proposals amount to and how they differ is never explained.
16 I discuss some better alternatives in ‘The Person and the Corpse’, in Bradley, Ben et al. , eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80–96 Google Scholar.
17 Or at least the same intrinsic mental properties: my doppelganger in another galaxy may think about a city physically identical to Vienna, but he cannot think about Vienna.
18 Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
19 Reasons and Persons, 292.
20 For comments on ancestors of this paper I thank Radim Belohrad, Stephan Blatti, Galen Strawson, and Alex Moran. I am also grateful to Derek Parfit for discussions of these and related matters.
