Abstract
In this paper several meanings of ‘personal identity’ are distinguished. It is argued that the ontological questions of unity and persistence should not be analysed using the notion of a person but using the notion of a human organism. The notions of personhood and personality are used to describe the evaluative and normative aspects of being a person. Based on these conceptual distinctions the classical philosophical problem of personal identity is dissolved into four sets of problems. Then it is argued that the ethical problems of intervening in the psyche of human beings should be discussed using the notions of personhood and personality, not unity or persistence. Finally, those ethical problems of interventions in the psyche of human beings directly related to personhood or personality are distinguished from more general ethical problems raised by these interventions.
Zusammenfassung
In diesem Beitrag werden verschiedene Bedeutungen der Rede von, personaler Identität’ unterschieden. Es wird die These verteidigt, dass die ontologischen Probleme der Einheit und der Persistenz nicht unter Verwendung des Begriffs der Person zu behandeln sind, sondern mithilfe des Begriffs des menschlichen Organismus. Die Begriffe Personalität und Persönlichkeit werden verwendet, um die evaluativen und normativen Aspekte des personalen Lebens zu erfassen. Basierend auf diesen begrifflichen Unterscheidungen wird das klassische philosophische Problem der personalen Identität aufgelöst in vier Gruppen von Problemen. Anschließend wird dafür argumentiert, dass die ethischen Probleme von Interventionen in die menschliche Psyche unter Verwendung der Begriffe Personalität und Persönlichkeit zu diskutieren sind, nicht mittels der Begriffe Einheit oder Persistenz. Schließlich werden diejenigen ethischen Probleme von Interventionen in die menschliche Psyche, die direkt mit Personalität und Persönlichkeit verbunden sind, unterschieden von allgemeineren ethischen Fragestellungen, die mit diesen Interventionen ebenfalls verbunden sind.
Résumé
Le présent article différencie plusieurs significations du discours sur ≪l’identité personnelle≫. La thèse défendue consiste en ce que les problèmes ontologiques de l’unité et de la persistance ne doivent pas être traités en utilisant la notion de personne, mais au contraire à l’aide de la notion d’organisme humain. Les termes de ≪Personalität≫ et de ≪Persönlichkeit≫ sont utilisés pour saisir les aspects évaluatifs et normatifs de la vie personnelle. Sur la base de ces distinctions sémantiques, le problème philosophique classique de l’identité personnelle est fractionné en quatre catégories de problèmes. À la suite de quoi l’argumentation se prononce en faveur du fait que les problèmes éthiques des interventions sur le psychisme humain doivent être discutés en recourant aux notions de Personalität et de Persönlichkeit et non aux notions d’unité ou de persistance. Enfin, les problèmes éthiques des interventions sur le psychisme humain qui sont directement liés à la Personalität et à la Persönlichkeit, sont différenciés des questions éthiques plus générales également liées à ces interventions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In the philosophy of mind the unity-of-consciousness is discussed as a topic of its own. But in the literature dealing with ‘personal identity’ this problem comes to the surface if we give up the rule “one human being—one person” (for example if we discuss group persons or multiple personality disorder).
If we are interested in other person than human beings we can widen the scope asking for criteria of persistence for organisms, which are taken to be persons, or for artefacts, which are taken to be persons. In the philosophy of religious it might be even useful to give up the idea that the entity, qualified as a person, has to exist as a space–time being at all.
One short side-remark: Reading Locke this way firstly contradicts those who hold that Locke has defended the thesis of sortal-relativity of identity, since I claim that he indeed holds the thesis that the persistence-relation is sortal-dependent or, if every sortal delivers its own criteria of persistence, sortal-relative. It is the persistence-relation which is sortal-dependent (or sortal-relative), not the identity-relation. Secondly, my reading contradicts those who deny that Locke wanted to answer the persistence-of-person-problem at all and who claim that he was interested in those questions only which I have named the conditions-of-personhood-problem and the structure-of-personality-problem. Indeed I think that Locke mixed the four problems which I try to distinguish in this paper. So traces of all can be found in his arguments. Therefore we simply cannot claim his theory to be an answer only to one of the four problems I try to distinguish here.
In the following first-person-perspective or first-personal-facts always mean first-person-singular.
This problem is analogous to the question of human pain and martian pain; or more generally, of the possibility that our mental vocabulary cannot be used univocally for sentient beings capable of first-person-thoughts and for those sentient beings which cannot.
Although it is no little irony that this account normally is framed in a functionalistic framework wherein the first-person-stance is taken from the outside, so that the basic insight of Locke’s definition is lost at once. A lot is said about the first-person-perspective or the reference of “I” and so on, but the whole approach is not given from within the first-person-perspective, is not given from the standpoint of a human being which tries to lead its life within a social context as a person.
Of course there is a third kind of ethical problems relevant in discussions of intervening in the psyche which are of an even more general kind (e.g. questions of human experimentation or allocation problems). These questions, without doubt among the hard questions concerning interventions in psychic capacities, fall out of the scope of this paper since they are not specific for interventions in the psyche.
If we take multiple personality disorder for example and if we understand this condition in such a way that different persons share one human body we can ask whether eliminating the disorder by therapy is not tantamount to killing persons. It should be evident that in the conceptual framework suggested here such a therapy has to be described as re-integration of a human being’s dissociated personality and not as elimination of persons or fusion by therapeutic force.
If one takes ‘personal identity’ in the sense of persistence it is plausible to assume that intervention in the psyche will have little consequences for the ‘identity’ of human persons (cf. DeGrazia (2005) for such a position).
I consider here only the case that such an incompatibility is sufficient to make the intervention ethically unacceptable, since this will be the standard case. Probably one can find cases in which an intervention in the psyche of X which is incompatible with the personal autonomy of X might be ethically justified.
This is a general problem of the notion of enhancement not restricted to interventions in the psyche (cf. Bayertz and Quante 2003).
References
Bayertz K, Quante M (2003) Genetic enhancement. In: Cooper DN (ed) Nature encyclopedia of the human genome, vol 2. Nature Publishing Group, London, pp 824–827
DeGrazia D (2005) Enhancement technologies and human identity. J Med Philos 30:261–283
Locke J (1975) An essay concerning human understanding. In: Nidditch PH (ed) Clarendon, Oxford, Book II, chap. XXVII, sect. 9
Quante M (1996) Meine Organe und Ich. Zeitschrift für medizinische Ethik 42:103–118
Quante M (1999) Precedent autonomy and personal identity. Kennedy Inst Ethics J 9:365–381
Quante M (2000) Manifest versus scientific worldview: uniting the perspectives. Epistemologia 23:211–242
Quante M (2002) Personales Leben und menschlicher Tod. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
Quante M (2003) Einführung in die Allgemeine Ethik. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Quante, M. Personal identity between survival and integrity. Poiesis Prax 4, 145–161 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10202-005-0015-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10202-005-0015-y