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Personal identity and bioethics: the state of the art

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Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics on the topic of personal identity and bioethics, I provide a background for the topic and then discuss the contributions in the special issue by Eric Olson, Marya Schechtman, Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan, James Delaney and David Hershenov, and David DeGrazia.

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Notes

  1. There may, of course, be other reasons to resist this moral verdict, but for our purposes, we can focus just on the cases in which the only thing preventing moral agreement is metaphysical disagreement.

  2. This is a paraphrase of Eric Olson’s first sentence in his contribution to this issue.

  3. Mark Johnston, in a series of articles, seems to suggest an account like this. See [2–4].

  4. One might take Eric Olson’s early work [5] to suggest an account like this.

  5. This could flow from a reading of Parfit [6] that interprets him in a descriptive and not revisionary way. The relation grounding (and unifying) our various concerns and commitments is, for him, Relation R, consisting of psychological continuity and/or connectedness.

  6. A position I recently attempted to advance for three specific areas of bioethics, viz., abortion, the definition of death, and advance directives [7].

References

  1. Sider, Theodore. 2001. Four-dimensionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  2. Johnston, Mark. 1987. Human beings. Journal of Philosophy 84: 59–83.

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  3. Johnston, Mark. 1989. Fission and the facts. Philosophical Perspectives 3: 369–397.

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  4. Johnston, Mark. 1992. Reasons and reductionism. The Philosophical Review 101: 589–618.

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  5. Olson, Eric. 1997. The human animal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  6. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  7. Shoemaker, David. 2009. The insignificance of personal identity for bioethics. Bioethics. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2009.01719.x.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to the dream team of reviewers—Tim Campbell, David DeGrazia, James Delaney, David Hershenov, Jeff McMahan, Eric Olson, and Marya Schechtman—for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction.

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  1. Department of Philosophy & Murphy Institute, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    David Shoemaker

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  1. David Shoemaker
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Correspondence to David Shoemaker.

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Shoemaker, D. Personal identity and bioethics: the state of the art. Theor Med Bioeth 31, 249–257 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9147-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9147-8

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