Surviving, to some degree
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Surviving, to some degree David Braddon-Mitchell1
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Kristie Miller1
Ó Crown 2020
Abstract In this paper we argue that reflection on the patterns of practical concern that agents like us exhibit strongly suggests that the same person relation comes in continuous degrees rather than being an all or nothing matter. We call this the SPdegree thesis. Though the SP-degree thesis is consistent with a range of views about personal-identity, we argue that combining desire-first approaches to personalidentity with the SP-degree thesis better explains our patterns of practical concern, and hence gives us reason to endorse such an approach. We then argue that the combination of the SP-degree thesis and the desire-first approach are best modelled by a stage-theoretic view of persistence according to which temporal counterpart relations are non-symmetric relations that come in continuous degrees. Ultimately, we think that the overall appeal of this package of views provides reason to accept the package: reasons that outstrip the reasons we have to endorse any particular member of the package. Keywords Personal identity Survival Degree Psychological continuity Desirebased
1 Introduction Either the poison will kill me, so I will not survive to any degree at all, or I’ll survive, and survive to degree 1. Survival, that is to say, is an all-or-nothing affair: I can’t survive to some degree or other, less than 1, and more than 0. It seems to be pretty much common sense that survival is an all-or-nothing matter. There’s nothing that can happen to me, which results in a healthy person who is only, say, two-thirds & David Braddon-Mitchell [email protected]; [email protected] 1
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
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D. Braddon-Mitchell, K. Miller
me. This paper argues against this common sense contention. It argues that the same person relation (henceforth SP-relation) comes in degrees; so for example Annie at t1 might be the same person as Annie at t7 to some degree other than 0 or 1. We’ll start by clarifying two things: first, exactly what we mean by talk of the SP-relation and second, the connection between this relation and the factors relevant to whether it holds. We intend the SP-relation to be, in the first instance, a very metaphysically neutral notion. It’s what corresponds to same-person judgements that people form. Consider this question: ‘‘That woman you had coffee with this afternoon (t2). Is she the same person as Annie, whom I met last week (t1)?’’ If the answer is yes, then the SP-relation holds between Annie at t1 and Annie at t2. You might think that it follows from this that the SP-relation is a numerical identity relation. That’s not our view. Nor is our view that it isn’t a numerical identity relation. Rather, it’s whatever kind of relation it is which (sometimes, when things go well) makes judgements of this kind true. And that, of course, depends on the right metaphysics of personalidentity. Indeed, if you think that talk of the personal-identity relation is metaphysically neutral in this
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