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Are there dead persons?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Patrick Stokes
Patrick Stokes*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
*
Patrick Stokes [email protected]
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Abstract

Schechtman’s ‘Person Life View’ (PLV) offers an account of personal identity whereby persons are the unified loci of our practical and ethical judgment. PLV also recognises infants and permanent vegetative state patients as being persons. I argue that the way PLV handles these cases yields an unexpected result: the dead also remain persons, contrary to the widely-accepted ‘Termination Thesis.’ Even more surprisingly, this actually counts in PLV’s favor: in light of our social and ethical practices which treat the dead as moral patients, PLV gives a more plausible account of the status of the dead than its rival theories.

Keywords

Personal identitypersonhooddeathneo-LockeanismMarya Schechtman
Type
Original Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 49 , Issue 6 , September 2019 , pp. 755 - 775
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2018

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