Parfit’s View of Personal Identity and Human Behavior
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document in english
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published 07/08/2007
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SummaryI intend to explicate Derek Parfit’s view regarding personal identity as nothing more than non-branching psychological continuity. I will be brief in my discussion to avoid redundancy, as I have more deeply explicated Parfit’s infamous view in my previous paper, “Parfit’s View of Personal Identity.” Further, I will discuss the vast implications of Parfit’s view of persons as a series of psychologically continuous selves related by differing degrees of psychological connectedness. I will defend Parfit’s identification of psychological continuity as the criterion for personal identity. However, in defending the basic theory, I will argue that the psychologically continuous successive selves that constitute a person will typically never be as distantly related as Parfit implies. Therefore, I will argue further that the prevailing beliefs of persons that Parfit himself identifies as susceptible to his view are in fact mostly compatible with his view, and therefore, additional evidence for a Parfitian view of personal identity.
Table of Contents
- In his essay 'Personal Identity,' Parfit discusses his infamous view of a person as a series of psychologically continuous selves
- However, human behavior suggests there is a substantive self underneath
- The implications of Parfit's view of the nature of persons are greatly unsettling and even disturbing
- Generally, most persons maintain a much greater degree of psychological connectedness to their former selves than the amnesiac
- However, Parfit excessively discounts the role of instinct in this irrational fear
- They typically closely psychologically resemble the criminal earlier selves that were originally incarcerated, although there are of course, exceptions
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