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Ethics, Personal Identity, and Ideals of the Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Samuel Scheffler
Samuel Scheffler*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

It is not uncommon for contemporary moral philosophers to appeal, in support or in criticism of one moral theory or another, to supposed features of or facts about persons. Rawls, for example, maintains that ‘utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons,’ and that since ‘the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing,’ we should not expect utilitarianism to be the correct regulative scheme for human beings. Nozick, in a similar spirit, suggests that the deontological restrictions he calls ‘side constraints’ are desirable components of a moral conception because, without them, a moral scheme is unable to ‘sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that … [each individual] is a separate person,’ unable to take account of the fact that, with respect to each individual, ‘his is the only life he has.’ And Williams, to cite still another example, suggests that utilitarianism is a defective moral theory because ‘it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions.'

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 229 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

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Footnotes

*

This essay was presented as an Invited Paper at the Seventy-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Boston on December 29, 1980. Stephen Darwall was the commentator. His comments, and the reply I gave at that session, are printed immediately following this paper, and following that there appears a final response by Darwall, written since the APA meetings. Other versions of this paper were presented to colloquia at Stanford and Rice Universities, and to a faculty discussion group at Berkeley. I am grateful for the helpful comments I received on all of these various occasions. I am also indebted to Israel Scheffler for criticism and suggestions.

References

1 A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1971) 29: referred to hereafter as TJ.

2 TJ 29

3 Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974) 33

4 Utilitarianism For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973) 100

5 In Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy and Personal Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973) 137-69: referred to hereafter as LSMP

6 Bernard Williams rightly argues that it may be more difficult than this sort of account recognizes to reflect the ‘scalar’ nature of personal identity in moral thought. See his ‘Persons, Character and Morality,’ in Rorty, A. ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976) 197–216.Google Scholar

7 In his response to Parfit, Rawls appears to miss this point. For he seems to interpret Parfit as maintaining no more than that, on the Complex View, the 'sometimes short-term character of mental connections favor[s] the classical utilitarian theory,’ See ‘The Independence of Moral Theory,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 48 (1975) 19. This is what I had in mind when I said in ‘Moral Independence and the Original Position’ that I had ‘reservations about the adequacy of Rawls’ argument as a response to Parfit (Philosophical Studies, 35 [1979] 399).

8 For the purposes of my argument in this paper, the important point is the availability of this reply even on the assumption that Parfit's argument is entirely correct. It is worth noting, however, that Parfit's argument might itself be resisted. In particular, someone might deny that the unity of a life is less weighty or important on the Complex View than it is on the Simple View. From the fact that personal identity involves less on the Complex View than on the Simple View, it might be said, it does not follow that it is less important. What we learn when we switch from a Simple View to a Complex View is not that the unity of a life is less important than we thought, but rather that we had misidentified the nature of that which is important. To say this would be to reject Parfit's claim that ‘[w]hen some morally important fact is seen to be less deep, it can plausibly be claimed to be less important’ (LSMP, 148). This point is emphasized by Norman Daniels in ‘Moral Theory and the Plasticity of Persons,’ The Monist, 62 (1979) 265-87. There are some marked similarities between the views Daniels expresses in that paper and my own ideas.

9 LSMP, 158

10 LSMP, 159

11 Some might of course say that there is something wrong with any philosophical speculation which purports to show that our ordinary conception of ourselves and our situation is fundamentally deluded. They would therefore conclude either that the Complex View is false, or that its truth would not in the relevant sense undermine our conception of ourselves. Analogous responses to epistemological scepticism are familiar. I have profited from discussions with Thompson Clarke on this and related matters.

12 I distinguish between determinism and universal causation because I accept the view that there can be causation under indeterminism. Thus I reject the maxim 'every event has a cause’ as a characterization of the content of determinism. The case for causation under indeterminism is made by Anscombe, G.E.M. in Causality and Determination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1971),Google Scholar and by Dretske, Fred and Snyder, Aaron in ‘Causal Irregularity,’ Philosophy of Science, 39 (1972) 69–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I have also profited from lectures by David Lewis on this and related topics.

13 Thomas Nagel discusses parallels between the problem of personal identity and problems about free-will in ‘Subjective and Objective,’ which appears in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979) 196-213. I have benefited from and been considerably influenced by discussions with Nagel on this topic. I am also indebted to Milton Wachsberg for helpful discussion.

14 Of course, it remains open to someone to argue that some universal, morally neutral facts other than the ones I have examined do indeed suffice to select one moral conception as philosophically favored.

15 ‘Moral Scepticism and Ideals of the Person,’ The Monist, 62 (1979) 288-303: referred to hereafter as MSIP. The discussion in the next few pages follows that paper closely. For a somewhat similar view of morality, see Rawls’ Lectures, Dewey (Journal of Philosophy, 77 [1980] 515–72.Google Scholar)

16 TJ 584

17 TJ 18

18 TJ 18

19 TJ, 584

20 See, for example, Nagel, Thomas ‘Rawls on Justice,’ Philosophical Review, 82 (1973) 220–34;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Schwartz, Adina ‘Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods,’ Ethics, 83 (1973) 294–307;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Teitelman, Michael ‘The Limits of Individualism,’ Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1972) 545-56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 This discussion of Rawls has been heavily influenced by Scanlon's, T.M. ‘Rawls' Theory of Justice,’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 121 (1973) 1020-69,CrossRefGoogle Scholar though I doubt that Scanlon would accept my account of Rawls as it stands.

22 In MSIP I attempt to argue that the antecedent of this conditional is in fact true. But more needs to be said than I say there.

23 This point is elaborated in much greater detail in MSIP.