Annette Dufner (2025), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/
Key takeaways
- Which theory of persistence is true (psychological or biological), and whether identity or only the relations composing it is what matters, jointly settle a family of ethical questions — prudence, responsibility, abortion, advance directives, distributive justice — and the priority between metaphysics and ethics is itself unsettled.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-166. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The entry surveys how our being temporally extended and distinct individuals bears on ethics. It sets out the psychological and biological accounts of personal identity and Parfit’s challenge that identity itself is not what matters, then works through the practical consequences: special prudential concern for one’s future, responsibility for past acts, the beginning and end of life (abortion, death, dementia and advance directives), and the separateness of persons in normative ethics and distributive justice. It ends by noting that it is unclear whether a theory of what matters should be fixed first or developed in reflective equilibrium with ethics.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 5 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-166 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the current, compact reference map from theories of persistence to applied ethics; it is a survey that takes no side, so it is a route to the primary sources (Parfit 1984, Olson 1997, McMahan 2002, Schechtman 1996, Korsgaard 1989) rather than a source of claims.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-166, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — t=5s, a reference survey whose map the skim already gives.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-166 is that reading):
- The fission argument in §3 is the standard route by which “what matters” is detached from identity — relevant to any record discussion of copying, forking or merging agents.
- §10’s metaphysical-vs-normative reading of separateness is a methodological point worth checking against the record’s identity documents.
- Confirm whether this 2025 entry replaced an older SEP entry and what changed.
Access when seeded: Fetched the full entry from plato.stanford.edu with curl; read preamble, the opening of all eleven sections and the conclusion (§11). The page gives “First published Mon Jun 30, 2025” and no later revision; author Annette Dufner (copyright 2025). An earlier SEP entry of the same name by David Shoemaker existed; this page as fetched is Dufner’s and gives 2025 as first publication, so the earlier history is unverified here.