Prospects of the Psychological Approach to Personal Identity in the Context of Moral Responsibility

Mertsalov, A.V.

Автор: Mertsalov A.V.
Сборник: ABSTRACTS & PROGRAM SUMMARY The Science of Consciousness – Taormina 2023
Тезисы
Год издания: 2023
Место издания: Taormina
Первая страница: 194
Последняя страница: 194
Аннотация: There are several well-known cases—such as cases of fission, fusion, transplantation, duplication, complete or partial erasure, rapid and incredibly long change of a person—that are commonly considered problematic for the Psychological approach to personal identity. Sometimes they are used to argue that the Psychological approach leads to counterintuitive conclusions and paradoxes in the context of moral responsibility. The aim of my paper is to defend the Psychological approach against such arguments. According to our best theories of moral responsibility—contemporary Strawsonian theories—there are at least two necessary conditions of the appropriateness of holding a person morally responsible for some action: this person should be 1) an agent of this action (i.e. this action should be correctly attributed to that person) and 2) a moral agent (this person should have some moral capacities to be a member of the moral community). It can be shown that however different the interpretations of these conditions are in different theories of moral responsibility, they can be properly satisfied if only the person who is held to be morally responsible for some action is the same as the person who performed that action. I will argue that the claim that the mentioned cases are problematic for the Psychological approach has two main sources. The first one is the ignoring of the necessary conditions of moral responsibility. It can be argued that as far as the cases that supposed to be problematic for Psychological approach are considered in the context of moral responsibility, these conditions cannot be ignored; and it can be shown that taking them into account eliminates half of the problematicity of these cases. The second source is the interpretation of the relation “to be the same person as “ in terms of numerical identity. This interpretation need not to be accepted by Psychological approach theorists. It can be argued that since the numerical identity is a non-branching relation R and since its branching doesn’t matter for the satisfaction of the conditions of moral responsibility, the relation “to be the same person as “ can be plausibly interpretated in terms of the relation R. If this is true, the Psychological approach theorists can deal with the mentioned cases by saying that in these cases, if the relation R is hold between the original and the resulting persons so that the conditions of moral responsibility can be satisfied, and if these conditions are actually satisfied, it will be appropriate to hold the resulting person responsible for the deeds of the original person; otherwise, it will be inappropriate. I will illustrate how this general solution works with a couple of examples, arguing that the same can be applied to the rest of the cases. Such kind of solution is by no means a panacea. There are various kinds of cases and contexts where the Psychological approach faces real problems. But at least it is able to solve many cases that are commonly thought to be problematic for it in the context of moral responsibility.
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