Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 153-156

Counting Persons and Living With Alters:
Comments on Matthews

Stephen E. Braude

Keywords
dissociation; multiple personality, person, responsibility.

I am pleased to see an increasing amount of attention being paid to the topic of responsibility in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). But I question whether Matthews and others are taking matters in a helpful direction. I have a number of related concerns, some dealing with specifics of Matthews's present paper, and some with views presupposed here but argued for elsewhere.

First, Matthews may have framed the issues in a misleading and rather unhelpful way. As he sees it, the debate over responsibility and DID is, at its core, a debate between the multiple persons and single person theses. But as Matthews presents them, both theses appear to be nonstarters. It seems to me (as I argued in detail in Braude [1995]) that personhood is not one thing, and moreover that there is no context- or culture-independent conception of a person. In fact, in some cultures, the (to us) familiar one body/one person presumption is not the default presumption, even for normal cases. And even in cultures where one body/one person is the default presumption, context plays a central role in determining whether we treat DID patients as one person or many. Granted, it is appropriate to assign DID patients only one drivers' license or social security number, but different criteria of individuation are required for other contexts—say, promise keeping, gift giving, or deciding whether one should have sex with a spouse's alter. Like the question, "How many things are in this room?", the question "Is S a single person or multiple persons?" has no answer at all apart from a context in which the question is relevant and certain criteria of individuation seem more apt than others. But in that case, neither the multiple persons nor the single person thesis is true generally or in the abstract.

Matthews advocates the single person thesis. On his view, DID patients merely behave and appear as if they are more than one person. So no matter how dramatic the patient's dissociative state—for example, no matter how sharply and broadly characterized an alter might be, Matthews claims that "the patient is to be regarded morally and legally as a single person" (2003, p. 144). Moreover, he apparently believes that considerations about personal identity always do (or at least should) undergird our judgments about moral or criminal responsibility, even if in practice we can get away with relying on a mistaken [End Page 153] conception of personal identity, one that would be inadequate for a theory of identity, or which fails to provide sufficient conditions for identity. But these two positions strike me as implausible, for a related set of reasons.

To simplify matters, let's focus just on moral responsibility, and let's consider first Matthews's claim that we should always treat a DID patient as a single person morally. This seems difficult to reconcile with many urgent contexts in which people find they must treat alters as distinct subjects and moral or prudential agents. I do not see that Matthews has explained how the single person thesis undergirds a husband's realization that it is wrong to have sex with a child alter of his wife (but not some other alter), or who refuses to let certain alters drive the car, buy groceries, handle finances, or who sees the need to give alter-appropriate gifts at Christmas, or who knows not to discuss certain sensitive issues with particular alters, or who withholds certain foods from alters suffering from relevant food allergies. Of course, Matthews can claim that we simply need to treat alters as if they are persons, knowing all along that they are not. And perhaps he could agree that alters may count as kinds of distinct agents or subjects, while still refusing to call them persons. But what is striking about real-life interactions with alters is that those situations often compel...