Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is John Locke's concept of a person, his theory of personal identity, and the implications of both for the bioethical debate concerning brain death and advance directives. I offer an interpretation of Locke that emphasizes the phenomenology of conscious experience and the narrative quality of the life of a person. This interpretation supports a neocortical formulation of brain death, and affirms the moral authority of advance directives. ;I begin by emphasizing Locke's fundamental distinction between 'man' and 'person,' or between human biological life and human personal life. Through this distinction Locke identifies the capacity for personhood as the distinctive feature of human beings. I then identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood according to Locke as rational, continuing, concerned, self-consciousness . These essential elements of personhood indicate, contrary to the traditional interpretation, that Locke's theory of personal identity is not simply a memory theory, or one which reduces persons to mental states and their causal connections. Continuing consciousness is a complex phenomenon that has cognitive and conative dimensions. The critical perspective from which to consider Lockean persons is the first person rather than the third. ;I combine Locke's "man/person" distinction and his identification of RCCSC as the necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood to construct an argument in support of neocortical death, by which I mean the permanent loss of the capacity for conscious experience. The capacity for conscious experience is that feature of a person that is so essential to it that its permanent loss should be deemed to constitute death. ;A moral and legal challenge of advance directives has been launched by those who advocate the "neo-Lockean" view of persons associated with Derek Parfit. I defend the authority of advance directives as a form of prospective autonomy that would find favor with Locke. While Locke's stringent criteria of personhood might deny that status to the profoundly demented, Locke would affirm the right of their formerly competent selves to determine the treatment that they receive.