John Locke (1632-1704)

1. John Locke (1632-1704) • Influential both as a philosopher (Essay Concerning Human Understanding) and as a political thinker (Two Treatises on Government) • The chapter on personal identity set the terms of all subsequent discussion of the notion up to the present day

2. Locke’s discussion of identity • Identity involves ‘sameness at a time’ or ‘sameness over time’ • Sameness at a time is non-controversial; it merely amounts to saying “a thing is what it is and not something else” (‘sameness’ falls out of or is a consequence of the notion of a ‘thing’) • All doubts, confusions, or controversies about identity concern sameness over time

3. Identity (cont’d.) • The doubts, confusions, or controversies arise because we are not careful to ask or inquire about what exactly we think is or is not the same over time. • In general, this is the principle which governs determination of sameness over time: the item/thing in question is continuous, from moment to moment, with an item/thing which had a determinate beginning (i.e. at a certain time and place) • But we are not always careful to indicate to what we are referring when we ask “is this the same?” [e.g. with respect to the ship puzzle: same set of planks or same ship?]

4. Identity (cont’d.) • These are the kinds of thing (says Locke) to which we can refer: substances (i.e. God, finite intelligences, or bodies) and modes or relations [roughly: infinite things, finite things, or properties of things; e.g. “the black cat”, the finite substance is ‘the cat’, its property is ‘being black’] • Since “God is without beginning, eternal, unalterable, and everywhere,” there is no problem with respect to God’s identity [leave aside, for the moment, the issue of whether there is a God]; God is the only ‘infinite substance’

5. Identity (cont’d.) • For ‘finite intelligences’, a definite time and place of beginning and continuity with that time and place means sameness over time • For bodies, which are ‘masses of matter’, the same mass of matter which constituted the body originally is what makes sameness over time (Q: is a ship a ‘body’ in this sense?) • For properties: since they have no independent existence, sameness of property over time is a nonsensical notion [e.g. is the blackness of the cat now the same as the blackness of the cat then?]

6. Identity (cont’d.) • The previous cases all seem relatively straightforward (and Locke thinks they are unproblematic); issues arise when we move from ‘body’ to ‘living thing’ or to ‘functional object’, e.g. from ‘a piece of chalk’ to ‘an oak tree’ • Why? Because the ‘stuff’ out of which things are constituted changes, and yet we think it correct to say ‘same tree as was planted by my uncle 30 years ago’ (Q: what is the same?)

7. Identity of living things • The kinds of thing at issue here are: vegetables (plants), animals, and men (people) • For plants: “That being then one plant which has such an organization of parts in one coherent body, partaking of one common life, it continues to be the same plant as long as it partakes of the same life, though that life be communicated to new particles of matter vitally united to the living plant, in a like continued organization conformable to that sort of plants.” [Q: what is ‘same life’?]

8. Identity of living things (cont’d.) • An exactly parallel argument is given for animals and people -- participation of some mass of matter in one continued life (the only wrinkle that Locke sees is the possibility, which some people countenance, of a ‘soul’, i.e. an immaterial substance which constitutes our ‘self’ and which continues the same over time, indeed, perhaps even beyond the grave)

9. Consequences of these thoughts about identity • There is no single principle of identity which will ‘work’ for different kinds of thing • Most puzzles arise because of a failure to notice or appreciate this fact • In the case of people, different answers to questions of identity will arise whether we ask “same stuff?” or “same man?” or “same person?” [i.e. these are not the same kind of thing]

10. Personal Identity • Locke distinguishes ‘the man’ from ‘the person’; man = a body of a certain kind, a genetic makeup of a certain kind (roughly equivalent to “being a member of the species homo sapiens”); but what is a ‘person’? • Person = “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” [Q: Are all human beings persons? Are only human beings persons?]

11. Personal identity (cont’d.) • Identity of persons won’t (given that persons are not ‘men’) consist in sameness of stuff or participation in one continued life; so what will it be? • A: “in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.” i.e. conscious memory

12. Personal identity (cont’d.) • For Locke, the issues of sameness of stuff (matter, substance, whatever) and sameness of life (functional/operational definition of ‘man’) are wholly irrelevant for what makes a person the same -- that goes as much for ‘same matter’ (same body can, at least in principle, have different persons in it at different times) as ‘same soul’ (i.e., ‘soul’ doesn’t individuate)

13. Personal Identity (cont’d.) • Locke thinks the preceding is entirely in accord with our basic intuitions: “But yet possibly it will still be objected,- Suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be conscious of them again; yet am I not the same person that did those actions, had those thoughts that I once was conscious of, though I have now forgot them? To which I answer, that we must here take notice what the word I is applied to; which, in this case, is the man only. And the same man being presumed to be the same person, it is easily here supposed to stand also for the same person. But if it be possible for the same man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times, it is past doubt the same man would at different times make different persons; which, we see, is the sense of mankind in the solemnest declaration of their opinions, human laws not punishing the mad man for the sober man's actions, nor the sober man for what the mad man did,- thereby making them two persons”

14. Problems with Locke’s account • Inconsistent with some of our legal practices and moral intuitions? • Interrupted persons? • Status of experiences as memories?