The Irrelevance/incoherence of Non-reductionism about Personal Identity

FOR "THE IRRELEVANCE/INCOHERENCE OF NON-REDUCTIONISM ABOUT PERSONAL IDENTITY" Before being able to answer key practical questions dependent on a criterion of personal identity (e.g., am I justified in anticipating surviving the death of my body?), we must first determine which general approach to the issue of personal identity is more plausible, reductionism or non-reductionism. While reductionism has become the more dominant approach amongst philosophical theorists over the past thirty years, non-reductionism remains an approach that, for all these theorists have shown, could very well still be true. My aim in this paper is to show that non-reductionism is actually either irrelevant – with respect to the practical questions we want answered – or logically impossible. In arguing for this conclusion, I draw from a case Derek Parfit has employed – the Combined Spectrum – and I provide a number of variations to it which ultimately reveal that we have no possible rational recourse other than to become reductionists. THE IRRELEVANCE/INCOHERENCE OF NON-REDUCTIONISM ABOUT PERSONAL IDENTITY Introduction What is it that we want from a theory of personal identity? That is, what questions are we looking to have answered by this sort of metaphysical theory? I'm sure there is (and always will be) a small minority of people interested in the problem solely because it is a problem, yet another fun little metaphysical puzzle to chew on in the ivory laboratory for a while. But for the majority of people interested in the problem, I suspect, there is something more significant at stake, something truly life or death about the matter. For them, we need a plausible account of identity, not simply for its own sake, but for its service in answering other, crucial questions about our lives. A viable theory of personal identity, then, will be like money: an instrumental good. And while there will always be some philosophical misers on this issue (for whom a theory of identity is solely intrinsically good), most of us want some metaphysical purchasing power out of it. Specifically, we want a theory of identity to help answer two general questions, one forward-looking, one backward-looking: (a) what, if anything, justifies and/or explains my special anticipation/concern for certain events in the future; and (b) what, if anything, justifies and/or explains the way we treat people now with respect to certain events in the past? And each of these general questions involves more specific sub-questions. For example, (b) includes questions about moral responsibility (what justifies our holding someone morally responsible for some past action?) and distributive justice (what justifies certain distributions of benefits/burdens based on fairness and/or desert?). And (a) includes the biggie: is it possible for me to survive the death of my body (in other words (maybe), to anticipate certain events in heaven, say)? Indeed Joseph Butler remarks that "[w]hether we are to live in a future state . . . is the most important question which can possibly be asked . . . ."