Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Personhood — what a person is and what makes one persist — personal identity over time, psychological continuity and what matters in survival, persons as bearers of reasons, rights and responsibility. Not the self, which is self (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
15 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-060 v2 | A life story constructed from adolescence on is the form a person’s diachronic identity takes, and its content shapes later well-being | McAdams (2019), LIT-595: narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It arrives in adolescence and young adulthood, on the back of autobiographical memory and autobiographical reasoning, as the third layer of a psychological self after the actor of traits and the agent of goals. Stories with agentic and redemptive themes go with well-being and generativity, and in one longitudinal therapy study the story “changes first, and then the storyteller gets better”. A review essay: every finding is cited, not shown, and it concedes that having a life story may be a modern cultural construction. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) denies the first half for many people. | Proposed |
| THEORY-065 | The unity that makes a movement an agent’s action is achieved by conformity to the constitutive norms of agency, not given by the causal unity of a mind, so collective agents are agents in the same sense as individual ones | Korsgaard (2014), LIT-587: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and ordinary attribution implies that the agent was active and that the action expresses who she is. Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action the form of self-determined efficacy; the content of the maxims chosen under that form constitutes practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes breaks the unity an animal is given, and reason is the work of rebuilding it, so unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, and people can act together “in the most literal sense”. The Tanner Lectures (LIT-564) supply the reflective structure the chapter assumes. Argued, with the Kantian premise assumed and the collective mechanism stated in a paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-075 | Obligation is the reflective rejection of what would violate the agent’s practical identity, and moral obligation follows only because valuing any practical identity commits the agent to valuing her humanity | Korsgaard (1992), LIT-564: because human consciousness is reflective, an agent must act on reasons, and so must identify with some law, a “practical identity”: “a description under which you value yourself”. “Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids.” Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”, unconditional where violation would be worse than death. Identities are a “jumble” and differ across social worlds, so this much yields no morality. Moral obligation enters because valuing any identity requires valuing one’s humanity, the source of all one’s reasons. “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (LIT-587) later makes practical identity the content of maxims chosen under the formal norms. Argued, with the key steps flagged by their author as sketchy; the commentaries and reply are unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-076 | Diachronic self-governance is constituted by cross-temporal links of intention that are intrapersonal analogues of shared intention, not by narrative unity and not by intertemporal bargaining | Bratman (2018), LIT-567: an agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock as the intentions of people acting together do, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance, which is what lets resolve against temptation be self-governed while following through on Kavka’s toxin is not. He rejects the bargaining model (McClennen, Ainslie) in two sentences and calls narrative unity less basic in one. A philosophical model argued from cases; the analogy is partial by its author’s account and its terms come from a book the record has not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-120 | A motive is the agent’s own, and she acts of her own free will, when she identifies with it, and that is all the freedom moral responsibility requires: identification is the conformity of the effective desire to a decisive higher-order volition (1971), and later wholehearted acceptance with no conflict at any higher order | Frankfurt’s hierarchical, or endorsement, account, from his own texts: the 1971 paper (LIT-692, read) and the 2004 Tanner Lectures (LIT-293, read). A person’s will is the desire that moves him to act; he identifies with a desire by wanting it to be his will, decisively, and he acts of his own free will when the will that moves him is the will he wants. In 2004 the condition is “volitional unanimity” with no conflict “at any higher order”, and identification is “willing acceptance”, which may be resigned. Acting of one’s own free will is what responsibility requires, and alternatives and history are irrelevant. The 1987 and 1992 revisions are held only by report. | Proposed |
| THEORY-131 v2 | A corporation whose Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure, an organizational chart of stations plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy, licenses redescribing its members’ acts as done for corporate reasons is a non-eliminable intentional agent, unlike a mob; and if intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, which French asserts but here says he cannot further argue, such a corporation is a full-fledged moral person | French (1979), LIT-727. Moral persons are non-eliminable subjects of accountability, so intentional agents. A corporation’s CID Structure licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts, and an act that implements established corporate policy is done for corporate reasons. Proposed: the step from agency to moral personhood is asserted, and corporate intentionality is shown by licensed redescription, not by any test. | Proposed |
| THEORY-417 | ’Personal identity’ names several largely independent questions, among them who one is (characterization), what a person is, what it takes for one to persist, how many of us there are and what matters in survival; the persistence question concerns numerical identity, which ‘remaining the same person’ in the characterization sense presupposes, and posing it as ‘a person at one time and a person at another’ assumes that we are persons essentially | Olson (2002; rev. 2023), LIT-454, read in NOTE-374. Seven questions: characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology and what matters. The distinctions are conceptual and the record holds them as stated. They do not say which answer to any of the questions is right; the entry’s own answer, animalism, is argued in other sections and is not part of this account. The self is set aside by the entry, so the map does not cover the self literature. | Active |
| THEORY-447 v2 | Granted that a person survives a brain transplant and that half a brain would do, each product of a division stands in all that matters in ordinary survival, so what matters is not identity, which is one-one and all-or-nothing, but psychological relations that can branch and come in degrees | Parfit (1971), LIT-447, read in NOTE-378, with the fission dilemma as Olson’s survey states it, LIT-454 (NOTE-374). The division argument is strong given its premises, and the premises are stated: brain-transplant survival is assumed, not argued. It does not say that connectedness matters more than continuity, which Parfit asserts for lack of space, or that a copy or a transcript is a survivor: the dependence q-memory needs is left “(whatever that is)”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-464 | In the ethical questions that seem to turn on whether someone is the same person, among them prudential concern, responsibility, abortion, advance directives and the separateness of persons, the relation that decides is usually not numerical identity but one that comes apart from it, so the metaphysics of persistence constrains these questions and rarely settles them | Dufner (2025), LIT-130, the SEP entry that replaced Shoemaker’s, read in NOTE-166. A survey that takes no side; the account is the reading’s synthesis of what it reports, correcting a seeded summary that said the metaphysics “jointly settle” the ethics. It does not say identity never matters: uniqueness may matter for positional goods, and biological views support prohibiting abortion more strongly than psychological ones, without forcing it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-476 | If continuant persons are maximal aggregates of person-stages interrelated by the psychological relation R, then the relation of belonging to one person is R itself, so Parfit’s premises do not show that identity is not what matters; the price is that persons overlap in fission and are counted by a relation weaker than identity | Lewis (1976), LIT-446, read in NOTE-373. Shown: that identity being one-one and all-or-nothing, and what matters branching and coming in degrees, do not entail that identity is not what matters, once stages and continuants are told apart; and that under supervaluation degrees of I-relatedness equal degrees of R-relatedness. Stipulated: that persons are the maximal R-interrelated aggregates. Conceded as costly: counting persons by tensed identity, which “is not a kind of identity”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-531 v2 | Told in the third person, a transfer of memories and character between two bodies reads as the persons exchanging bodies; told in the first person, no predicted psychological change removes the subject’s reason to fear pain to his own body, and the step that completes the exchange happens only to the other man, so the two tellings support opposite criteria | Williams (1970), LIT-462, read in NOTE-387. The strongest step is shown given its premise: the last step of the series that turns amnesia into a body exchange changes nothing for the subject. The premise, that psychological change cannot remove the reason to fear pain, is argued from cases. Williams claims no criterion of identity, calls his resolution “rather shaky” and “risky”, and does not treat fission. | Proposed |
| THEORY-546 v2 | A person persists by psychological continuity, not by sameness of substance or of the human animal; Locke’s sameness of consciousness, which he leaves undefined, meets the charges of circularity, intransitivity and gaps when recast as overlapping chains of causally dependent psychological states with quasi-memory, and fission then needs either a clause against branching or multiple occupancy | Locke (1694), LIT-464, read in NOTE-385, with the repairs as Olson’s survey (LIT-454, NOTE-374) and Parfit (LIT-447, NOTE-378) give them. Locke shows that same man, same substance and same person can be given different conditions; that the person’s are those of consciousness he asserts and illustrates. The repaired criterion is the majority view in the survey, and its author, an animalist, argues it implies two thinkers in every chair. It is a criterion of persistence, not an account of what matters or of what we are made of. | Proposed |
| THEORY-590 | The self whose governance makes action autonomous is not the self whose persistence is personal identity: governance by an essence of volitional necessities would make action authentic, not autonomous; losing a defining care costs one’s grasp of who one is, not one’s existence; and wholeheartedness won by extruding a desire is a defence, not health | Velleman (2002), LIT-292, read in NOTE-268. A critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) view that autonomy is governance by the essential character of the will, an essence that is also the condition of one’s identity. It argues by counterexample (Winnicott’s False Self, the Agamemnon sequel), from Freud’s Rat Man, and by debunking genealogy. The positive view, that “self” marks reflexivity and that autonomous action is motivated in part by the understanding, is stated “briefly” and argued elsewhere. Frankfurt’s reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-650 | Whether a self at one time is the same as a self at another has an answer only relative to a level of abstraction fixed by the purpose of asking, and asked at no such level it has none; the question with a substantive answer is what makes a self one thing at a time | Floridi (2011), LIT-136, read in NOTE-130. The deflation of diachronic identity is an informal argument from examples that rests on the method of levels of abstraction, assumed from elsewhere; that this “is not relativism” is one sentence, and that individuation comes before identification is asserted. It is not, as its title suggests, a criterion of personal identity, and its positive answer to the synchronic question, the three-membranes model, is “somewhat figurative” by its author’s word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-681 | If every real idea derives from an impression, there is no idea of a simple self persisting through life; the mind is a bundle of perceptions, and the identity ascribed to it is produced by the imagination passing easily along resemblance and causation, as with a rebuilt ship or a growing oak, though Hume’s Appendix concedes that this does not explain what unites the perceptions | Hume (1739, with the Appendix of 1740), LIT-451, read in NOTE-386. The negative half is as strong as the copy principle. The mechanism of the fiction is argued by analogy from cases of usage. The account of what unites the bundle is withdrawn by its author, who names the two principles he cannot reconcile. It does not say there is no self in any sense, and it leaves identity “as it regards our passions” to Book 2. | Proposed |