Study Group: Was Parfit Right About Personal Identity? (Headington)

Personal Identity and Ethics – Focusing on the Philosophy of Derek Parfit.

In this study group session we will be discussing Personal Identity and its relationship with Ethics, with a particular focus on the Philosophy of Derek Parfit. The session will be divided into two parts, focusing first on Personal Identity and then on the implications for Ethics. Each session will have an introduction that outlines Parfit’s thinking and key thought experiments ( Derek Parfit - Wikipedia).

There are two things we would like you to read/view before the session.
The first is a paper from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here > Personal Identity and Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
And here is a short video where Derek Parfit explores personal identity through a couple of his key thought experiments > Derek Parfit on Personal Identity (1996) .

Concepts of Personal Identify are in many ways key to views on Ethics. For example: How could we hold someone morally responsible for a past action if we could not identify that person as being the same person who committed the action. And yet we change physically and mentally all the time, and after a period of time may not even remember what we have done or be mentally capable now of committing similar actions, after mental illness for example.

Conversely, when we are considering actions that are to the benefit of our future selves, we are relying on an interpretation of Personal Identity that enables us to view our future selves as the same person as you are now despite all the changes that may occur.

Traditional views on Personal Identity can be very crudely categorised for the sake of this introduction, as below:
· Relying on Bodily Continuity
· Relying on continuity of a mental substance (eg Descartes)
· Relying on Consciousness and Memory (eg Locke’s position)
· Psychological continuity
· Identity through incorporation into personal narrative
· There is no such thing as sustained personal identity.

Parfit’s highly developed views can be said to lie in, or have developed from, the Psychological continuity category and were presented in his key work Reasons and Persons published in 1984.

In our session we will use some of Parfit’s key thought experiments to explore Personal Identity, including cases where persons might be multiplied or even split, as well as touching on older thought experiments such as the Brave Officer paradox (which was a critique of Locke’s position).

Quoting from the Stanford article: "Derek Parfit was among the first contemporary theorists to explore the relation between identity and ethics explicitly, first in his seminal early 1970s articles, “Personal Identity” and especially “Later Selves and Moral Principles,” and then in his restatement and development of the view in Part III of his 1984 book Reasons and Persons ... Parfit's is, in many respects, a Lockean account of personal identity, although there are significant departures. He is a “reductionist,” according to which the facts about persons and personal identity consist in more particular facts about brains, bodies, and series of interrelated mental and physical events (Parfit 1984, 210–211).

For the second part of the session concerning the relationship with Ethics, a key reference point will be section 2.5 (The Identity Doesn’t Matter View) and the sections below that in the Stanford paper.
We will return to key thought experiments discussed in part 1 and consider what implications they have for our Ethical positions through examples of ethical questions.

Derek Parfit in many ways, was a remarkable philosopher and person and an important contributor to the Effective Altruism movement. He wrote of his liberating realisation that “identity is not what matters ” that:
“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others”.
We look forward to seeing you at the session.

Anyone can attend this session. No experience in philosophy or knowledge of the subject is required in advance. Just come along and enjoy. Our events use the the 4Cs of community philosophy:

• Caring for others, making space for their contributions
• Collaborating to get a better mutual understanding rather than scoring points
• Critically assessing what we say, clarifying what is meant and asking what reasons support assertions
• Creatively coming up with alternative perspectives, rather than dogmatically sticking to our initial positions

We welcome everyone of a wide range of ages, social and educational backgrounds etc. Don't worry if you don't have a qualification in philosophy - almost no-one does.