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Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 169-174



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Blaming Agents and Excusing Persons:
The Case of DID

Steve Matthews


Keywords
dissociation, identity, person, agency, responsibility


Jeanette Kennett and I (2002) were originally prompted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke to address the question of responsibility in cases of dissociative identify disorder (DID). Behnke and Sinnot-Armstrong (2000) argued that, other things being equal, sufferers of DID cannot be exculpated for crimes committed while in an alter state because "[t]his total person [the alter and the host ] . . . can be held responsible for what one part of her did, just as anyone can be held responsible for what one temporal part of them did . . . " (p. 305). They argued that if an offending alter meets legal standards of sanity and is identical with the host, then the conditions for responsibility are fulfilled. We responded by assimilating cases of DID to other cases of mental disorder in which such alter states would be regarded as delusional and beyond the control of the patient, and so the DID patient does not meet the requisite standards of sanity. But what of the question of personal identity in these cases? I argued in this volume that the test Behnke and Sinnott-Armstrong put forward was flawed. I would like now to clarify and develop my position on these questions and in so doing respond to some comments and criticisms from the commentators.

Personal identity requires a concept of personhood and a concept of numerical identity. I agree with Braude that our concept of personhood is elastic. But the concept of the numerical identity of self over time is necessarily not elastic because the concept of numerical identity is not: everything is identical with itself and no other thing. If we refer to different stages or aspects of the same person as properties, then we can put the thesis of personal identity schematically by saying that no property of such a person could belong to any other person. The struggle philosophers and others have had with the question of personal identity over time can then be traced to this problem: how can an object conceptualizedas a person—with vague boundaries and indeterminately owned properties—also have properties that, as the concept of identity demands—are determinately owned? The problem has forced many, especially since David Hume (1739/1978), to simply give up on the notion of personal identity. But to do this has radical implications for our practices. On the other hand, there is a way of justifying philosophically the (tight) conception of personal identity that our practices require, while also accommodating the loose concept of personhood. [End Page 169]

Our concept of a person is indeed elastic because of a variety of aspects they present: (1) the autonomous agent, (2) the remembering or narrative self, (3) the relational self, and (4) the embodied self (more below on each of these). When these aspects of personhood continue to be instantiated in an individual over time, the successive stages of this individual are her or his appropriate surviving stages. To secure the all-or-nothing feature of identity, we may think of such survival as a threshold notion: when those aspects of personhood are sufficiently depleted we withdraw assent to survival. Stating technically how to arrive at this point is not my intention here. 1 However, reflection on the fact that we re-identify selves in borderline contexts up to a certain point, but no further, shows we deploy such a threshold notion. In, for example, cases of brain damage, dementia, schizophrenia, and DID itself, we are loathe to give up on personal identity, especially for those close to us, and in fact there is almost always a presumption in favor of it until those aspects of personhood I mentioned are well depleted. (That we sometimes wonder whether we have lost a person to such conditions reflects on an epistemological handicap, not a metaphysical position we take.) And of course, the concept of personal identity is so deeply embedded in our moral and legal institutions it may...

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