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Metaphysical Egoism and Personal Identity

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Notes

  1. Derek Parfit, On What Matters. Volume One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 130.

  2. David Brink, “Rational Egoism and the Separateness of Persons,” in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 97. See also Robert Shaver, Rational Egoism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Brad Hooker, “Egoism, Partiality, and Impartiality,” in Roger Crisp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) for surveys of the contemporary literature on egoism.

  3. According to some philosophers, this conflict is irresolvable and reveals a feature of practical reason, namely, its dualism. There are different versions and nuances involved in the formulation of this idea, but because the issue is not immediately relevant for the purposes of this paper, I will not discuss it any further. See David Copp, “The Ring of Gyges,” Social Philosophy & Policy 14, 1 (1997): 86–106, Parfit, op. cit., pp. 130-149, Dale Dorsey, “Two Dualisms of Practical Reason,” Oxford Studies Metaethics 8 (2013): 114–39. Another important issue that I will not directly address in this paper is which theory of welfare or well-being is most plausible.

  4. A much-discussed contemporary example is David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See also Gregory Kavka, “A Reconciliation Project,” in David Copp & David Zimmerman, eds., Morality, Reason and Truth (Rowman & Allanheld, 1984) for a clear statement of a reconciliatory strategy different from Brink’s.

  5. Brink investigates this view more extensively in his “Rational Egoism, Self, and Others,” in Owen Flanagan & Amelie Rorty, eds., Identity, Character, and Morality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), “Self-Love and Altruism,” Social Philosophy & Policy 14, 1 (1997): 122–157, and “Rational Egoism and the Separateness of Persons,” in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). In addition, Brink discusses related and overlapping issues in many other publications, e.g., see his “Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community,” Social Philosophy & Policy 16 (1999): 252–89, Perfectionism and the Common Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), “Prudence and Authenticity,” Philosophical Review 112, 2 (2003): 215–45, “Prospects for Temporal Neutrality,” in Craig Callender, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), “Eudaimonism and Cosmopolitan Concern,” in David Brink, Susan Meyer, and Christopher Shields, eds., Virtue, Happiness, and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  6. There are other criticisms of metaphysical egoism (e.g., Colin Farrelly, “A Challenge to Brink’s Metaphysical Egoism,” Res Publica 9 (2003): 243–256 and Dorsey, op. cit., (2016), pp. 217–221), but my argument attempts to refute it for different reasons. See Andrea Sauchelli, Personal Identity and Applied Ethics (London: Routledge, 2018): Chapter 5 for an overview of the psychological approach to personal identity.

  7. Brink, op. cit., (1990), p. 340.

  8. Ibid., p. 351. As I will argue in the main text, this is not what, e.g., Parfit claims in his Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984/87). Following David Lewis, a person stage is a time-slice of a continuant person, a person-at-a-time, see David Lewis, “Survival and Identity,” in his Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976/1983), pp. 76-77.

  9. Brink, op. cit., (1997), p. 138.

  10. Ibid., p. 140. Not all of Brink’s formulations of the psychological account are equivalent, and sometimes, as in the case cited in the main text, he also refers to a version of the best continuer account.

  11. Ibid., p. 141.

  12. Ibid., p. 142.

  13. Brink, op. cit., (1990), p. 350.

  14. Brink, op. cit., (1997), p. 146. This does not mean that all interpersonal causal relations must bear the same weight we give to our intrapersonal connections irrespectively of their intensity or degree: the egoist may argue that the weight of other-regarding which are also self-concerning reasons should be proportional to, for example, the quality and degree of connectedness among the relevant individuals.

  15. The reasoning seems to be that, if it is in my power to have interactions with an individual, I can have ‘forward-looking reasons’ to expand my circle of care. See ibid., pp. 148–152.

  16. Brink, op. cit., (1990), p. 359.

  17. See Parfit, op. cit., (1984/87). Derek Parfit, “Experiences, Subjects, and Conceptual Schemes,” Philosophical Topics 26, 1&2 (1999), pp. 217-270, and “Is Personal Identity What Matters?” Marc Sanders Foundation, December 31 (2007). Retrieved at: http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/paper-Derek-Parfit.pdf contain other formulations and clarifications of his view. See Andrea Sauchelli, “An Introduction to Part III”, in Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (London: Routledge, 2020) for an introduction to Parfit’s account of personal identity.

  18. Parfit, op. cit., (1984/87), pp. 206–207.

  19. Ibid., pp. 205–206.

  20. Ibid., p. 515, note 6.

  21. Ibid., p. 267. His account is amended in op. cit., (2007) and it is to this latter version that I will refer in what follows.

  22. Parfit, op. cit., (1984/87), p. x.

  23. This formulation of the thesis regards Parfit, op. cit., (2007) as the most accurate version of his ideas on the topic. See Johan Gustafsson, “The Unimportance of Being Any Future Person,” Philosophical Studies 175, 3 (2018), pp. 745–750, Jens Johansson, “Parfit on Fission,” Philosophical Studies 150, 1 (2010), pp. 21–35, and Ingmar Persson, “Parfit on Personal Identity,” Theoria 82, 2 (2016), pp. 148–165 for recent discussions. Brink cites approvingly Parfit’s argument for his claim that identity is not what matters.

  24. See Derek Parfit, “We Are Not Human Beings,” Philosophy 87, 1 (2012), pp. 5–28 in which he claims that he has defended a normal-cause view of personal identity (not necessarily of what matters).

  25. C. B. Martin & Max Deutscher, “Remembering,” Philosophical Review 75, 2 (1966), pp. 161–196 and Sydney Shoemaker, “Persons and Their Pasts,” in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970/2003). However, see Sydney Shoemaker, “Brown-Brownson Revisited,” The Monist 87, 4 (2004), pp. 573–593, at p. 581 for the claim that Parfit’s famous example of the ‘Venetian memories’ is not a genuine case of quasi-memory.

  26. See Shoemaker, op. cit., (1970/2003), Endel Tulving, “Coding and Representation,” in H. L. Roediger, Y. Dudai, and S. M. Fitzpatrick, eds., Science of Memory: Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Sven Bernecker, Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

  27. Parfit, op. cit., (1984/87), p. 300.

  28. Sydney Shoemaker, “Personal Identity: A Materialist’s Account,” in Sydney Shoemaker & Richard Swinburne, eds., Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 95.

  29. There are different ways of specifying functionalism in philosophy of mind (e.g., see Sydney Shoemaker, “Some Varieties of Functionalism,” in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and Ned Block, “What Is Functionalism?,” in his Consciousness, Function, Representation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980/2007) but the general formulation in the main text suffices for the purposes of this paper.

  30. Parfit’s thought experiment describes a situation in which one person’s brain is divided into two equally functional hemispheres. After this division, these hemispheres are transplanted into two different but equally functional bodies. See Parfit, op. cit., (1984/87), pp. 254–255.

  31. See Andy Clark & David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998), pp. 7–19 and Andy Clark, “Spreading the Joy?,” Mind 118, 472 (2009), pp. 963–992.

  32. According to some philosophers, functionalism itself entails such a view. See Mark Sprevak, “Extended Cognition and Functionalism,” Journal of Philosophy 106 (2009), pp. 503–27 and Zoe Drayson, “Extended Cognition and the Metaphysics of Mind,” Cognitive Systems Research 11 (2010), pp. 367–77 for discussion.

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  1. Department of Philosophy & Faculty of Arts, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

    Andrea Sauchelli

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Sauchelli, A. Metaphysical Egoism and Personal Identity. J Value Inquiry 56, 587–599 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09792-9

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