Reasons and conscious persons

Abstract

What justifies holding the person that we are today morally responsible for something we did a year ago? And why are we justified in showing prudential concern for the future welfare of the person we will be a year from now? Whatever our answer to these questions, it seems that we cannot systematically pursue them without in one way or another referring to persons and their identity over time. But while there is widespread agreement that considerations about personal identity must be front and center in any such inquiries, such agreement falls short when it comes to specifying the criteria for personal identity, that is, what this identity necessarily involves or consists in. Part of the difficulty is that an investigation into the nature of personal identity brings us to metaphysical questions about persons, their ontological status, identity conditions, and persistence over time. The challenge, then, is to pursue these additional questions without losing sight of the practical concerns that prompted them in the first place. Few contemporary philosophers have confronted this challenge with more analytic skill, depth, and ingenuity than Derek Parfit. In engaging with Parfit’s work on personal identity, primarily his Reason and Persons , my aim is to reassess his Reductionist View of personal identity in light of Buddhist Reductionism, a philosophical project grounded on the idea that persons reduce to a set of bodily, sensory, perceptual, dispositional, and conscious elements, which alone are real. Parfit is not only familiar with this Buddhist conception of personal identity, but thinks that the reductionist, no ownership position he defends, which takes persons both to exist and to reduce to their components, is true, and that, as he famously puts it, “Buddha would have agreed” (1984: 273). My goal here is threefold: first, to review Parfit’s Reductionism position and evaluate its main arguments; second, to assess the extent to which Buddhist Reductionism supports Parfit’s psychological