Abstract
I consider whether there is a plausible conception of personal identity that can accommodate the ‘Multiplicity Thesis’ (MT), the thesis that some ways of creating and deploying multiple distinct online personae can bring about the existence of multiple persons where before there was only one. I argue that an influential Kantian line of thought, according to which a person is a unified locus of rational agency, is well placed to accommodate the thesis. I set out such a line of thought as developed by Carol Rovane, and consider the conditions that would have to be in place for the possibility identified by MT to be realised. Finally I briefly consider the prospects for MT according to neo-Lockean and animalist views of personhood.
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Notes
Of course, the term ‘personal identity’ fails to cleanly pick out a single topic of inquiry for a philosopher to be interested in. See Olson (1997) for a survey of the various topics of investigation that might fall under that heading. The goal of a theory of personal identity of the kind in which I’m interested here is to spell out the essential properties that make some entity a person. A successful theory of this kind would supply materials to address other questions about persons and identity. For example, a specification of the essential conditions of personhood will frame an account of the persistence conditions of a person through time.
I do not claim that Turkle explicitly endorses the Multiplicity Thesis. The scope and strength of the conclusions she wishes to draw for our conception of identity from our online practices appears to vary with context and the cases she discusses. This is not intended as a criticism of Turkle—providing a philosophically rigorous characterisation of the metaphysics of persons is simply not a concern that animates her work.
This is the most common use of ‘neo-Lockeanism’. However, Rovane (2006) uses the term differently so as to include any account of personhood that allows for a dissociation between personal and animal identity of the kind that Locke’s example of the Prince and cobbler might be thought to provide. See McDowell (1997) for an argument that the possibility of such distinction is not central to Locke’s position.
Note that McDowell is atypical among neo-Lockeans in being a non-reductivist about persons. That is, he does not think that the essential properties of persons can be specified in psychological terms which are essentially independent of the animal life in which they are involved. See the brief discussion of animalism, below.
An anonymous reviewer notes a particular problem arising from Rovane’s occasional description of the necessary grasp of rational norms as ‘reflective’ (see e.g. Rovane 2004). This appears in tension with the claim that those norms are grasped in the same way as the rules of grammar on a Chomskyan model. It seems to me that the invocation of ‘reflectivity’ is dispensable to Rovane’s view, and certainly to the Kantian view in general, so I have omitted it here. I assume, in what follows, that some appropriate precisification of the requisite grasp of rational norms is available to the Kantian.
As two anonymous reviewers independently note, there may be responses available to non-Kantians here—perhaps there are good reasons to reject this view of the roots of the moral dignity of persons, or perhaps neo-Lockeans and animalists can show that their views are equally incompatible with the bad justifications offered for morally abhorrent acts.
It bears emphasising that the extremely brief sketch above does not adequately reflect the intricacies of Rovane’s view, her arguments for it, or the dispute between neo-Lockean and Kantian conceptions of personhood. It does, though, suffice to set the stage for the discussion of the Multiplicity Thesis that follows. The fullest defence of Rovane’s views on these matters is her (1998). See also Korsgaard (1989) on the debate between Kantian and neo-Lockean views.
One reason for not doing so is that there is a compelling line of objection to Rovane’s thinking on group agents which further pursuit would need to address. Unless we hold that when engaged in appropriately concerted activity the members of groups lose their status as individual persons, it is open to object that the application of the concept of personhood to the group appears secondary to its application to the group’s conscious, human members. Rovane, however, needs the status of the personhood of groups and of normal human agents to be on an equal footing. See McDowell (2006) for this objection. The other reason for not pursuing this line of thought is that doing so would distract from my primary purpose of assessing the status of MT with respect to philosophical views of personhood.
An anonymous referee notes: perhaps there are relevant differences between the experience of unity involved in non-pathological cases and the relevant DID cases. And perhaps a neo-Lockean could appeal to these differences to ground an account of the separation of the experiences of the putatively different persons in DID cases. Unfortunately, investigating these possibilities is beyond the scope of this paper—as noted above, my aim is only to show that the neo-Kantian view can make sense of MT, not to conclusively establish or defend that view. The same referee also notes that a neo-Lockean might include plans and intentions in their list of states which must be suitably related to form the basis of a person. I am sympathetic to this suggestion, and discuss its bearing on MT briefly in section “Neo-Lockeanism, Animalism and Multiplicity”.
For an engaging cinematic explorations of this kind of case, see the films “Stuck on You” and “All of Me” (my thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to the latter).
See Yee (2006) for a survey of common motivations of online gamers.
We can perhaps find a precedent for the unusual kind of access that one agent in such a case has to the desires of the other in the way some schizophrenic patients experience inserted thoughts or actions. See Frith (1992) for a lucid and influential account and theory of the phenomena, and Campbell (1999) for a discussion of their significance for philosophical conceptions of thought. Given the present context, it is interesting to note such anomalous patterns of access are frequently argued to result from disorders of agency.
As Williams (1970) shows, our views about the identification of persons in specific cases can be dramatically affected by the description we give of the cases. So it’s possible that my description of the above cases involves an implicit bias in favour of the Kantian view, or MT, or both. However, note again that my goal here is not to demonstrate the truth or falsity of the Kantian view, or of MT. I aim only to show that the Kantian view is a candidate conception of personhood that can make good sense of MT. Demonstrating that we should accept or reject that view or its conceptualisations is a much more difficult task, which I do not attempt here. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
See the first part of Hurley’s (1998) for exploration of such a view.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to two anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This publication was made possible by a research grant awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the project ‘The Construction of Personal Identities Online’, ID No. AH/G011230/1.
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Ward, D. Personal Identity, Agency and the Multiplicity Thesis. Minds & Machines 21, 497–515 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9256-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9256-9