Bernard Williams (1970), “The Self and the Future”, The Philosophical Review 79(2), April 1970, pp. 161–180 — DOI-10.2307/2183946
On the citation. The brief’s details are all right: author, title,
journal, 1970, volume 79, issue 2, pages 161–180. Crossref gives the first
page and the month; the JSTOR cover page gives the range. published: is
the issue month, since no source gives a day. The paper was reprinted as
ch. 4 of Williams’s Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press,
1973), which was not seen here.
Key takeaways
- The third-person telling says the persons swap bodies. A and B, told that one emerging person gets $100,000 and the other torture, choose selfishly. Whatever they choose, the reactions afterwards (complaints, satisfaction, recalled choices) make “a strong case for saying that the B-body-person really is A, and the A-body-person really is B” (p. 164). “The only rational thing to do … would be to identify oneself with one’s memories, and so forth, and not with one’s body” (p. 167).
- The first-person telling says I am the one tortured. Told that I will be tortured, then that I will first forget, then have my character changed, then receive another’s “memories”, fear stays the proper reaction at each step. “My undergoing physical pain in the future is not excluded by any psychological state I may be in at the time” (p. 169).
- The step that completes the swap changes nothing for me. In the series (i)–(vi), the last step, putting A’s information into B, “is absolutely no difference at all in what happens to him, the only difference being in what happens to someone else” (p. 174).
- Indeterminacy does not help. “To be told that a future situation is a borderline one for its being myself that is hurt … is something which, it seems, I can do nothing with” (p. 175). Fear “seems neither appropriate, nor inappropriate, nor appropriately equivocal” (pp. 176–177). Conventionalist decision, fit for lawyers, “seems to have no sense at all” as a guide to one’s own fears (p. 178).
- The first-person argument supports the body, the third-person argument the mind, against the expectation that the first person goes with the mental and the third person with the bodily (p. 179).
- A shaky resolution. The neat swap is artificial, produced by the experimenter’s will, while the principle that fear reaches through psychological change “seems positively straightforward”. So, deciding selfishly, A “should pass the pain to the B-body-person. It would be risky” (p. 180).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, to fill out the record’s coverage of personal identity. NOTE-387 is the reading, and it placed the work: Active. It is the standard first-person objection to the psychological criterion and the source of the “risk” that Parfit’s “Personal Identity” sets out to dissolve. Read it as an argument about what fear and expectation can follow, not as a theory of identity: Williams claims no criterion, ends “not in the least clear which option it would be wise to take”, and calls his resolution “rather shaky”.
No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
Where it meets the record:
- Birch’s teletransporter “with a twist” (LIT-111, NOTE-183) recreates a person’s states from a generative model without scanning, and Birch argues that this breaks the causal continuity Relation R needs. That is Williams’s case (iv), “memory” impressions modelled on a real person but not caused by him. Williams argues that from the subject’s side the causal link added in case (v) makes no difference to what he should expect (p. 173). The two readings meet on the same case and weigh the causal condition oppositely: Birch makes it decide who persists, Williams doubts that it can decide what one should fear. The comparison is mine.
- Dennett’s “Where Am I?” (LIT-405, NOTE-338) is also told in the first person, and reaches the opposite verdict: the narrator follows his point of view, not his body. Williams’s torture series is the reply a reader of Dennett could make, that a point of view can be changed by changing what is in it while the body goes on being hurt.
- Damasio and Carvalho (LIT-388). Williams chooses physical pain because it is “absolutely minimally dependent on character or belief” (p. 170). Their account of feelings as experiences of body states that report homeostatic value, not memory or character, is a scientific version of what makes pain the right test. The pairing is mine.
- The survey (LIT-130, NOTE-166) gives the biological criterion and animalism as the rival to the psychological one. This paper leans to the body from the first person, from what one may fear, not from biology. Olson’s animalism, being filed in parallel by another agent, argues that we are animals on metaphysical grounds; the two reach the body by different routes.
Parfit’s “Personal Identity” (1971), filed beside it, answers it in its footnote 11. Lewis’s “Survival and Identity” does not discuss it.