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Notes
As I will use these terms, x and y are physically continuous iff they share a body and brain, x and y are psychologically continuous iff they share a sufficiently high degree of psychological connectedness (i.e., a sufficiently high number of shared memories, beliefs, desires, aims, and so on), and x and y are narratively continuous iff they tell themselves a story according to which they are a single individual rather than separate individuals. See Eric Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) for a defense of a physical continuity theory of personal identity. See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) for a defense of a psychological continuity theory of personal identity and what matters in morality. And see Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) for a defense of a narrative continuity theory of personal identity and what matters in morality.
Parfit 1984, pp. 321–350. To be clear, I will not be taking a stand in this paper on whether the relation ‘what matters in morality’ has the logic of numerical identity.
For more on the circumstances of justice, see David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals Section III Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
For an overview of the debate about whether persons endure or perdure, see Katherine Hawley, “Temporal Parts”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/temporal-parts/>. And for an overview of the debate about whether persons can have multiple selves, see Jennifer Radden, “Multiple selves, “in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, S. Gallagher (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Throughout this thought experiment, I will use ‘you’ to refer to the personality that controls this new body from 6am to 6pm and ‘Doug’ to refer to the personality that controls this new body from 6pm to 6am. I will be using these names only for ease of exposition; nothing in my argument will rest on the metaphysical view that you and Doug survive this fusion.
Some philosophers use ‘quasi-memory’ to refer to a state which is neutral with respect to whether the remembering subject is the same person as the subject whose experience is being remembered. So, if you prefer, you can read me as saying that you and Doug share quasi-memories instead of memories. For more on quasi-memory, see Sydney Shoemaker, “Persons and Their Pasts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 7, 1970.
Rawls (1999), pp. 109–112.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Justin Clarke-Doane, Jonathan Cottrell, Dale Jamieson, Matthew Kotzen, Colin Marshall, Derek Parfit, John Richardson, Gina Rini, William Ruddick, Jonathan Simon, Sharon Street, J. David Velleman, and the participants at the NYU Thesis Preparation Seminar, the 2nd Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, and the University of Washington Graduate Student Conference on Moral Psychology for invaluable discussion about this paper and topic. Thanks also to an anonymous referee at The Journal of Value Inquiry for very helpful comments on the penultimate draft.
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Sebo, J. The Just Soul. J Value Inquiry 49, 131–143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9465-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9465-6