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Selfless Persons: Goodness in an Impersonal World?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2015

Lynne Rudder Baker
Lynne Rudder Baker*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Mark Johnston takes reality to be wholly objective or impersonal, and aims to show that the inevitability of death does not obliterate goodness in such a naturalistic world. Crucial to his argument is the claim that there are no persisting selves. After critically discussing Johnston's arguments, I set out a view of persons that shares Johnston's view that there are no selves, but disagrees about the prospects of goodness in a wholly impersonal world. On my view, a wholly objective world is ontologically incomplete: Persons have irreducible first-person properties. My aim is to show that we can (and should) reject selves, but that we can (and should) retain persons and their essential first-person properties as ontologically significant.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 76: Mind, Self and Person , May 2015 , pp. 143 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015 

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References

1 Johnston, Mark, Surviving Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5.

2 Johnston, Surviving Death, 49.

3 Also, I do not follow neo-Lockeans, who take persons not to be substances, but rather to be ‘cross-time bundles’ (Johnston's term), ‘which do not have all their essences present at each moment the exist’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 53–54).

4 Johnston, Surviving Death, 13.

5 Selves, according to Johnston, are to provide independent justification for seeking premium treatment. Johnston takes Kant's claim that we are radically evil to be the manifestly true claim ‘that there is something at the root of human nature that disposes each one of us to favor himself or herself over the others’. This is why his thinking of ‘Johnston as me, as the one at the center of this arena, makes him appear privileged, even if he is actually just one human being among the others’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 158) In contrast to Johnston, I think of the asymmetry between myself and others to be a matter of the first-person perspective, not a matter of thinking of myself as the center of an arena. And I think of exemplifying the robust first-person perspective as having ontological import, not moral import.

6 Johnston, Surviving Death, 168.

7 Johnston, Surviving Death, 175. This question seems to me to be rooted in Johnston's discussions with Parfit. I myself never pick out a person in the future and ask if it will be me. Never.

8 Johnston, Surviving Death, 169

9 Johnston, Surviving Death, 231. Johnston's aim in denying that there are persistent selves is to show that self-concern is irrational. Here is an argument:

  1. 1.

    1. What really matters is to be me, not to be this human being.

  2. 2.

    2. To be me is to be at center of this arena of presence, self.

  3. 3.

    3. I – this self – am defined only relative to this arena of presence.

  4. 4.

    4. This center of presence is an intentional item, a virtual item at which perspectival modes of presentations appear to converge – and not a feature of the world.

  5. ∴5.

    ∴5. This self is not a feature of the world.

  6. ∴6.

    ∴6. It's irrational to care about this self.

10 Johnston, Surviving Death, 238.

11 Johnston also calls the first-personal reasons ‘de se’ reasons. Johnston characterizes de se thought as ‘thought about oneself as oneself’, thought that one typically expresses in the first person. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 189)

12 I should mention that Johnston distinguishes between two forms of ‘I’ thought: one merely indexical to register information about the person who tokens it, and the other truly subjective, ‘mediated by thinking of oneself as some person or other qua at the center of an immediately given arena of consciousness’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 193) On his view, however, the second form of ‘I’ thought is illusory. I make no such distinction between merely indexical ‘I’ thoughts and truly de se ‘I’ thoughts. A child, who uses ‘I’ in a merely indexical way (if there are such), simply hasn't completely mastered the use of the first-person pronoun.

13 Johnston, Surviving Death, 189.

14 Johnston, Surviving Death, 9. Even my special attachment to friends and family, because they are my friends and family derives ‘from an objective point of view, anyway owed to family members, friends and others’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 191).

15 Johnston, Surviving Death, 236.

16 Ibid., 48.

17 Ibid., 235.

18 Nevertheless, self-concern may be bequeathed to us by natural selection. If survival and reproduction are built-in goals, then when I can conceive of the difference between my survival and others' survival, I seem to have a reason to seek premium treatment for myself.

19 Johnston, Surviving Death, 178.

20 Ibid., 48.

21 Ibid., 48, 179.

22 Ibid., 235.

23 Ibid., 238.

24 Self-regard, Johnston argues, is not rational. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 49) Johnston has Kantian overtones throughout: The impersonality of nonderivative reason, goodness as a good will.

25 Johnston, Surviving Death, 296.

26 Ibid., 241.

27 Johnston, Surviving Death, 274.

28 Ibid., 272.

29 The term ‘Protean’ pertains to the shape-changing god Proteus. A Protean entity is extremely variable, like an actor play who has multiple roles in a play.

30 Johnston, Surviving Death, 284.

31 Ibid., 285.

32 Ibid., 284.

33 Ibid., 278.

34 Ibid., 275.

35 Ibid., 327.

36 Johnston, Surviving Death, 296.

37 Ibid., 14.

38 Ibid., 284, 295, 296.

39 Ibid., 49.

40 Ibid., 318.

41 Johnston, Surviving Death, 350. To identify with someone is to be disposed to ‘take [certain] anticipated future interests as default starting points in our practical reasoning’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 295) Earlier, Johnston explained ‘identification with’ as ‘caring for [the good of people] in a non-derivative way’. ( Johnston, ‘Human Concerns Without Superlative Selves’, in Reading Parfit, Dancy, Jonathan, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers (1997), 149–179.Google Scholar Quotation is on 157.)

42 Johnston, Surviving Death, 319.

43 Ibid., 336.

44 Ibid., 335.

45 Ibid., 331.

46 Ibid., 350.

47 Ibid., 350.

48 Ibid., 49.

49 Ibid., 350.

50 Ibid., 351.

51 Johnston, Surviving Death, 49.

52 Ibid., 361.

53 Ibid., 275, 335.

54 Ibid., 350.

55 Ibid., 13, 351.

56 Ibid., 350.

57 Johnston distinguishes self-identity from personal identity. ‘Self-identity, the identity that guarantees the coninuation of one's immediately available arena of presence over time, is more basic in its importance than personal identity, the identity over time of the public person who happens now to be at the center of one's arena of presence.’ Johnston picks out his (hylomorphic) self as ‘the self that I am is constituted by a potential succession of persons united by the following cross-time unity condition – that they be successively at the center of this arena of presence’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 204) This self is ‘presently constituted by Johnston. Johnston presently has the property of being me’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 206) There's prima facie evidence that we trace selves, he says, ‘by bringing to bear a salient subjective unity conditions, rather than tracking persons by offloading onto the most salient substance in the vicinity’. We're haunted by thoughts of an afterlife in which we come to be things different from human beings, or we come back as another person. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 212).

58 It is only because Johnston equates being me with being at the center of this arena of presence and action that he can say that ‘the idea that there is nothing real to being you, when properly grasped, is even more terrifying than death’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 164) ‘Perhaps the key to deathlessness is the realization that YOU, in the relevant sense, could not possibly be real – are anyway, not real enough to justify a temporally extended pattern of self-concern, which manifests itself in your everyday egocentrism and in your special fear of your own(most) death.’ (Johnston, Surviving Death, 179).

59 Johnston, Surviving Death, 50.

60 Johnston, Surviving Death, 9.

61 Ibid., 350.

62 Ibid., 295.

63 Trenton Merricks, ‘There are no Criteria of Identity Over Time’, Noûs 32 (1998), 106–124.

64 Johnston, Surviving Death, 268.

65 I am relying here on the important work of Hector-Neri Castañeda ( Castañeda, ‘Indicators and Quasi-Indicators’, American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967), 85–100 Google Scholar; Castañeda, ‘He: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness’, Ratio 8 (1966), 130–157.Google Scholar

66 And even when Johnston makes no obvious first-person reference, what he says presupposes first-person perspectives. For example: Johnston says that a good will ‘is a disposition to absorb the legitimate interests of any present or future individual personality into one's present practical outlook, so that those interests count as much as one's own’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 332) No one can count the interests of others as much as her own unless she can conceive of herself as herself in the first person. A world with such first-person perspectives is not the wholly objective and impersonal world of naturalism.

67 I also agree with Johnston that we do not use any sufficient conditions for personal identity over time to reidentify people. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 59; Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘Three-Dimensionalism Rescued: A Brief Reply to Michael Della Rocca’, Journal of Philosophy 110 (2013), 167 CrossRefGoogle Scholar)).

68 I use the word ‘constitution’ somewhat differently from Johnston; see, for example, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life. ( Baker, Lynne Rudder, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 And a first-person perspective has nothing to do with justifying ‘a certain temporally extended pattern of special self-concern’. (Johnston, Surviving Death, 176).

70 This expression is John Searle's characterization of subjective phenomena. ( Searle, John R., ‘Consciousness’, Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000), 561 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed).

71 Johnston, Surviving Death, 221.

72 The property of being a person is the property of exemplifying a first-person perspective essentially. The property of being me is the property of being this exemplifier of a first-person perspective essentially. There is no informative noncircular definition of ‘x and y have the same first-person perspective’ inasmuch as any such definition must characterize persons in nonpersonal terms. Since I believe that we are not reducible to nonpersonal or subpersonal items, of course I can not give a definition of what makes us persons in nonpersonal terms. Persons are fundamentally different kinds of beings from anything else in the natural world. If this metaphysical claim is correct, then what I say about human persons does not – cannot – be a noncircular informative definition. (I think that this meets van Inwagen's objection.)

73 But I strenuously disagree with Johnston that there are no subjects of experience, that there are only modes of presentation and mental acts of accessing them. If x is accessed, then there is a y who accesses x. The human brain makes accessing possible, but it is not the accessor. The accessor is a subject of experience (a human person) Where there are acts, there are agents. But there are no arenas.