It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr. Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.

Was sind wir? Wie immer man sich zu dieser Frage stellt, eines scheint offenkundig: Wir sind Tiere, genauer gesagt: menschliche Tiere, Mitglieder der Art Homo sapiens. Dabei mag es überraschen, daß viele Philosophen diese vermeintlich banale Tatsache abstreiten. Plato, Augustinus, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant und Hegel, um nur einige herausragende zu nennen, waren alle der Meinung, wir seien keine Tiere. Es mag zwar sein, daß unsere Körper Tiere sind. Doch sind wir nicht mit unseren Körpern gleichzusetzen. Wir sind etwas (...) anderes als Tiere. Kaum anderer Meinung sind Denker nicht-westlicher Traditionen. Und rund neun von zehn Philosophen, die heutzutage über Probleme der personalen Identität nachdenken, vertreten Ansichten, die ausschließen, daß wir Tiere sind. (shrink)

Eric Olson distinguishes his animalistic account of transtemporal personal identity from the apparently similar Bodily Criterion, among other things, by accusing the latter of being contaminated with Cartesian implications owing to its usage of the term ‚body‘. In contrast, Olson argues, Animalism is able to avoid these implications by substituting the concept of body for the concept of organism, which makes Animalism not only a distinct position, but also the better alternative to the Bodily Criterion. The paper critically reconstructs (...) Olson’s charge of Cartesianism against the Bodily Criterion, thereby differentiating between several variants of it. This eventually adds up to an evaluation of how suitable these criticisms are for defending Animalism at the expense of the Bodily Criterion. (shrink)

In the Second Meditation, Descartes famously asks at one point, ‘But what then am I?’ – to which his immediate answer is ‘A thing that thinks.’ It is this question, or rather the plural version of it, that Eric Olson examines in this excellent book. He thinks that it is – today, at least – a rather neglected question. He points out that it is wrong to confuse the question with the much more frequently examined question of what personal (...) identity consists in. In fact, he thinks that possible answers to the two questions, even if not entirely independent of one other, constrain each other only to a rather limited extent. It is important to appreciate that Olson is not inquiring into what persons in general are, but only into what we human persons are. Olson explores all the major, and some of the less well-known, answers that have been offered to this question. He begins with the answer that he himself has defended in an earlier book, The Human Animal – the answer that we are human animals, that is, biological organisms of a certain kind. Indeed, Olson is, along with Peter van Inwagen, one of the best known ‘animalists’ – although he admits to being a little more tentative in his endorsement of this position now, for reasons that we shall come to later. The other views that he considers are these: that we are entities that are ‘constituted’ by, but not identical with, human animals (the view of Lynne Rudder …. (shrink)

Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several famous thought-experiments (...) dealing with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)

‘When did I, a human person, begin to exist?’ In developing an answer to this question, I utilize a Thomistic framework, which holds that the human person is a composite of a biological organism and an intellective soul. Eric Olson and Norman Ford both argue that the beginning of an individual human biological organism occurs at the moment when implantation of the zygote in the uterus occurs and the ‘primitive streak’ begins to form. Prior to this point, there does (...) not exist an individual human organism, but a cluster of biological cells which has the potential to split and develop as one or more separate human organisms (identical twinning). Ensoulment (the instantiation of a human intellective soul in biological matter) does not occur until the point of implantation. This conception of the beginning of human personhood has moral implications concerning the status of pre‐implantation biological cell clusters. A new understanding of the beginning of human personhood entails a new understanding of the morality of certain medical procedures which have a direct affect on these cell clusters which contain human DNA. Such procedures discussed in this article are embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, procured abortion, and the use of abortifacient contraceptives. (shrink)

We consider one of Eric Olson's chief arguments for animalism about personal identity: the view that we are each identical to a human animal. The argument was originally given in Olson's book The Human Animal . Olson's argument presupposes an epistemological premise which we examine in detail. We argue that the premise is implausible and that Olson's defense of animalism is therefore in trouble.

Eric T. Olson has argued that those who hold that two material objects can exactly coincide at a moment of time, with one of these objects constituting the other, face an insuperable difficulty in accounting for the alleged differences between the objects, such as their being of different kinds and possessing different persistence-conditions. The differences, he suggests, are inexplicable, given that the objects in question are composed of the same particles related in precisely the same way. In response, I (...) show that the differences are not at all inexplicable once it is recognized that the conditions for a persisting object to be composed by certain particles at a moment of time must involve facts concerning other moments of time, and that the relevant facts are different for persisting objects of different kinds. Philosophers who neglect this sort of constraint on composition principles may be said to be victims of the 'cinematographic fallacy'. (shrink)

This chapter considers the view that we are literally brains. It argues that the view is best supported by the claim that brains are the primary subjects of mental properties, giving a “thinking‐brain problem” analogous to the thinking‐animal problem that supports animalism. The brain view is shown to have implausible consequences about our identity through time, and to presuppose that something is a part of a thinking being if and only if it is directly involved in that being's mental processes. (...) It is then argued that the notion of direct involvement is too interest‐relative to give this principle any useful content, and that the principle is in any case unfounded. (shrink)

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This chapter first surveys the main questions of personal identity, and then focuses on the one that has received most attention in recent times, namely our persistence through time. There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. The familiar ones include: who am (...) I, what is it to be a person, and what does it take for a person to persist from one time to another. There are three main sorts of answers to the persistence question in the literature: the most popular psychological‐continuity views, according to which the holding of some psychological relation is necessary or sufficient (or both) for one to persist; brute‐physical views; and anticriterialism. (shrink)

Eric T. Morton ABSTRACT: Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin have argued that substantive versions of value pluralism are incompatible with pragmatism, and that all such versions of pluralism must necessarily collapse into versions of strong metaphysical pluralism. They also argue that any strong version of value pluralism is incompatible with pragmatism’s meliorist commitment and will...

In discussions of the ethics of human gene therapy, it has become standard to draw a distinction between the use of human gene transfer techniques to treat health problems and their use to enhance or improve normal human traits. Some dispute the normative force of this distinction by arguing that it is undercut by the legitimate medical use of human gene transfer techniques to prevent disease - such as genetic engineering to bolster immune function, improve the efficiency of DNA repair, (...) or add cellular receptors to capture and process cholesterol. If disease prevention is a proper goal of medicine, these critics argue, and the use of gene transfer techniques to enhance human health maintenance capacities will help achieve that goal, then the “treatment/enhancement‘ distinction cannot define the limits of legitimate gene therapy. In this paper, I argue that a line can be drawn between prevention and enhancement for gene therapy (and thus between properly medical and nonmedical uses of gene therapy), but only if one is willing to accept two rather old-fashioned claims: 1) Some health problems are best understood as if they were entities in their own right, reifiable as processes or parts in a biological system, with at least as much ontological objectivity and theoretical significance as the functions that they inhibit. 2) Legitimate preventive genetic health care should be limited to efforts to defend people from attack by these more robust pathological entities, rather than changing their bodies to evade social injustices. (shrink)

A decade after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the widespread appeal of personalized genomic medicine's vision and potential virtues for health care remains compelling. Advocates argue that our current medical regime “is in crisis as it is expensive, reactive, inefficient, and focused largely on one size fits all treatments for events of late stage disease.” What is revolutionary about this kind of medicine, its advocates maintain, is that it promises to resolve that crisis by simultaneously increasing the ability (...) to be “personalized,” “predictive,” “preventive,” and “participatory.” Some call personalized genomic medicine “P4 Medicine,” inscribing these cardinal virtues into the movement's name. All of these putative virtues have interesting implications for the future of health care. In this essay, we are especially interested in the claims that personalized medicine will lead to a more “participatory” or “patient‐centered” approach to health care, in which patients are “empowered” to take more personal control over their care. The rhetoric of patient empowerment is nothing new in health care, but personalized medicine is an interesting case study because it portrays empowerment as one of its key virtues and as a mechanism for fixing the health care “crisis.”. (shrink)

In 2015, a flourish of “alarums and excursions” by the scientific community propelled CRISPR/Cas9 and other new gene-editing techniques into public attention. At issue were two kinds of potential gene-editing experiments in humans: those making inheritable germ-line modifications and those designed to enhance human traits beyond what is necessary for health and healing. The scientific consensus seemed to be that while research to develop safe and effective human gene editing should continue, society's moral uncertainties about these two kinds of experiments (...) needed to be better resolved before clinical trials of either type should be attempted. In the United States, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine convened the Committee on Human Gene Editing: Scientific, Medical and Ethical Considerations to pursue that resolution. The committee's 2017 consensus report has been widely interpreted as “opening the door” to inheritable human genetic modification and holding a line against enhancement interventions. But on a close reading it does neither. There are two reasons for this eccentric conclusion, both of which depend upon the strength of the committee's commitment to engaging diverse public voices in the gene-editing policy-making process. (shrink)

Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin have argued that substantive versions of value pluralism are incompatible with pragmatism, and that all such versions of pluralism must necessarily collapse into versions of strong metaphysical pluralism. They also argue that any strong version of value pluralism is incompatible with pragmatism’s meliorist commitment and will block the road of inquiry. I defend the compatibility of a version of value pluralism (the strong epistemic pluralism of John Rawls) with pragmatism, and offer counterarguments to all of (...) these claims. (shrink)

A course of dialogical reasoning involving the atheist and the theist reveals a connection between the Curry phenomenon and the step-wise construction of a sound version of the modal ontological argument. The exercise is both adversarial and cooperative as the participants are committed to the norms of shared truth-seeking, respect for one's opponents and a desire to continue the dialectic for as long as possible. The theist relies on the interaction between the properties of a Curry-style sentence and the structure (...) of implication in order to show that the atheist's own commitments imply Anselm's principle (God necessarily exists if He actually exists at all). As Anselm's principle and the possibility premise are the only assumptions required for the modal ontological argument it follows that the theist has, given the norms of the dialogue, a winning strategy against the atheist. This follows since the possibility premise is granted by the atheist as part of their commitment to the norms governing the dialectic though the theist in virtue of those same norms must accept that God is at best maximally perfect in the light of the argument from evil and the Stone paradox. (shrink)

Slowing the aging process would be one of the most dramatic and momentous ways of enhancing human beings. It is also one that mainstream science is on the brink of pursuing. The state of the science, together with its possible impact, make it an important example for how to think about research into all enhancement technologies.

The view that we are animals -- animalism -- is often misunderstood. It is typically stated in unhelpful or misleading ways. Debates over animalism are often unclear about what question it purports to answer, and what the alternative answers are. The paper tries to state clearly what animalism says and does not say. This enables us to distinguish different versions of animalism.

: Some argue that human groups have a stake in the outcome of population-genomics research and that the decision to participate in such research should therefore be subject to group permission. It is not possible, however, to obtain prior group permission, because the actual human groups under study, human demes, are unidentifiable before research begins. Moreover, they lack moral standing. If identifiable social groups with moral standing are used as proxies for demes, group approval could be sought, but at the (...) expense of unfairly exposing these surrogates to risks from which prior group approval is powerless to protect them. Unless population genomics can proceed without targeting socially defined groups, or can find other ways of protecting them, it may fall to individuals to protect the interests of the groups they care about, and to scientists to warn their subjects of the need to do so. (shrink)

Expectations are high around the world that more research on human genomic variation will improve the utility of “precision medicine” and help address population health disparities through “precision public health”. In large measure, these expectations rest on the premise that researchers will be able to share human DNA samples and genomic data freely and widely across the international scientific community. The human genomics community pioneered polices of early deposit of genomic research data into open databases to facilitate the exchange and (...) use of data during the mapping and sequencing of the human genome in the 1990s, and the success of those policies has made a... (shrink)

Over the last decade, more U.S. taxpayers money has been spent trying to anticipate and address the bioethical issues raised by advances in human genetics than any other set of issues in the field. Does this make sense? Not everyone in bioethics thinks so. Some think there are more important topics, like issues of health care justice, that will be neglected if the field continues to follow the money to dwell on the moral challenges of a relatively small community of (...) research scientists. Others decry genetic exceptionalism as inappropriately singling out this scientific enterprise for criticism and regulation, when the same issues are faced even more acutely in other parts of the biomedical world. Human genetics is not accelerating as fast as pharmacology, for example, or as easy to abuse as virology, or as philosophically challenging as neurology. (shrink)

Over the last decade, more U.S. taxpayers money has been spent trying to anticipate and address the bioethical issues raised by advances in human genetics than any other set of issues in the field. Does this make sense? Not everyone in bioethics thinks so. Some think there are more important topics, like issues of health care justice, that will be neglected if the field continues to follow the money to dwell on the moral challenges of a relatively small community of (...) research scientists. Others decry genetic exceptionalism as inappropriately singling out this scientific enterprise for criticism and regulation, when the same issues are faced even more acutely in other parts of the biomedical world. Human genetics is not accelerating as fast as pharmacology, for example, or as easy to abuse as virology, or as philosophically challenging as neurology. (shrink)

On October 1, 1988, thirty-five years after co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule, Dr. James Watson launched an unprecedented experiment in American science policy. In response to a reporter's question at a press conference, he unilaterally set aside 3 to 5 percent of the budget of the newly launched Human Genome Project to support studies of the ethical, legal, and social implications of new advances in human genetics. The Human Genome Project (HGP), by providing geneticists with the molecular maps (...) of the human chromosomes that they use to identify specific human genes, will speed the proliferation of a class of DNA-based diagnostic and risk-assessment tests that already create professional ethical and health-policy challenges for clinicians. “The problems are with us now, independent of the genome program, but they will be associated with it,” Watson said. “We should devote real money to discussing these issues.” By 1994, the “ELSI program” (short for “Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications”) had spent almost $20 million in pursuit of its mission, and gained both praise and criticism for its accomplishments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Human Genome Project and BioethicsEric T. Juengst, Ph.D. (bio)The fifteen-year "human genome project" at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy officially began on October 1, 1990. With it began a new dimension in federally supported scientific research: concurrent funding for work to anticipate the social consequences of the project's research and to develop policies to guide the use of the knowledge it produces. As (...) a result, the National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR) at NIH will support the largest public investment in bioethical analysis to date.NCHGR was established to work with other federal, private, and international organizations on the scientific effort to characterize the form and content of the human genome. The research will yield information—high-resolution genetic linkage and physical maps of all the human chromosomes as well as human DNA sequence data—that will be a resource for studies of gene structure and function. It will greatly increase our understanding of the genetic aspects of human health and disease. That increased understanding will eventually provide insights into the prevention and treatment of the 3,000 known inherited disorders, and of conditions caused by our (gene-governed) physiological reactions to pathogens, toxins, and mutagens of external origin.It has been clear since the conception of the human genome project, however, that professional and public deliberations concerning the responsible use of genetic information must be a part of the process. The most immediate consequence of genome research will be the development of new diagnostic and predictive tests, well in advance of corresponding therapeutic or curative advances. The implications of acquiring and using that knowledge about individuals raise policy questions at many levels within society. The primary purpose of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Program at the NCHGR is to anticipate and address these questions early in the life of the scientific project, to help optimize the [End Page 71] benefits to human welfare and opportunity from the new knowledge, and to guard against its misuses.The program has identified three sets of questions as particularly important to pursue as the genome initiative proceeds:1.Issues involved in the integration of new genetic tests into medical practice. Human genome research is expected to increase greatly the number of gene-based diagnostic and prognostic tests available to health professionals. The bioethical policy problems involved in integrating those tests effectively into medical practice include developing standards for:— accuracy and quality control of genetic tests;— medical indications for testing and design of testing protocols;— professional responsibilities of clinicians who perform tests;— confidentiality of information obtained from testing;— access to and use of test results by third parties, such as health insurers; and— reimbursement for testing and test-related counseling.These are problems for both those charged with regulating the use of new genetic tests and for those establishing the standards of practice within the health professions. Thus, in addition to soliciting and funding scholarly research proposals on both the factual and normative questions raised by these problems, the program is commissioning a major new study by the National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine aimed at providing professional guidelines for the integration of genetic services into mainstream medical practice.2. Issues involved in educating and counseling individuals about genetic test results. The primary risk that health professionals will face in using genetic tests is the misinterpretation of their findings and the resulting potential for psychological trauma, stigmatization, and discrimination. Sometimes, out of ignorance, patients, families, and social institutions already stigmatize genetic disorders and treat those with them unfairly. This risk broadens as the genetic elements of more health problems are uncovered and gene-based tests for susceptibilities and carrier states are developed.To protect against these risks, NCHGR is soliciting and supporting projects aimed at improving professional and public understanding of these tests and their implications. For example, a philosopher is leading a team of geneticists and physicians in a scholarly effort to clarify [End Page 72] concepts of genetic susceptibility and draw out the social meaning of their different interpretations. Other projects involve social scientific studies of genetic risk perceptions, stigmatization, and discrimination. The conclusions of these studies, and... (shrink)

Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (The philosophy of information. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” A small number of epistemologists have employed the concept of information as a cornerstone of their theoretical framework. How this concept can be used to make sense of seemingly intractable epistemological problems, however, has not been widely explored. This paper examines Fred Dretske’s information-based epistemology, in particular his response to radical epistemological (...) skepticism. We discuss the relationship between information, evidence and knowledge in relation to the problem of skepticism and the options available to an information-based epistemology for dealing with it. (shrink)

Recently, in this journal, Jeremy Gwiazda has offered a critique of our separationist view of hell. His objection relies on two key assumptions, and we show in our reply that both assumptions can be denied.

Humberstone has shown that if some set of agents is collectively omniscient (every true proposition is known by at least one agent) then one of them alone must be omniscient. The result is paradoxical as it seems possible for a set of agents to partition resources whereby at the level of the whole community they enjoy eventual omniscience. The Humberstone paradox only requires the assumption that knowledge distributes over conjunction and as such can be viewed as a reductio against the (...) universal validity of that principle. A new route to this paradox is presented which does not require the distribution principle, building on earlier work of Jago and Williamson on Fitch’s paradox. The result relies on an axiom strictly weaker than one necessary for the Jago-Fitch variant. It is shown that the same reasoning behind the variant form of Humberstone’s paradox can recover Bigelow’s results in action theory in a way that is immune to an objection brought against it by Guigon and Humberstone. (shrink)

Kai Wehmeier’s Wittgensteinian Predicate Logic is a formulation of first-order logic under the exclusive interpretation of the quantifiers. W-logic has a distinguished relation constant for co-reference but no sign for objectual identity. Wehmeier denies that objectual identity exists on the grounds that it cannot be a genuine binary relation. Fortunately W-logic is equi-expressive with standard first-order logic with identity and it appears that objectual identity is dispensable across the broader logical enterprise. This paper challenges the latter claim as objectual identity (...) seems to be needed in the exclusive interpretation of quantified modal logic, specifically, for implementing certain kinds of de re quantification. (shrink)