Contribution
A change of view by the author of Surviving Death. He gives up the 2010 account of the self, on which what we are is partly fixed by our own future-directed attitudes. He replaces it with a non-reductionist account: we are embodied wills that endure through embodiments that perdure. The argument for the change is ethical: reductionism about persons makes moral life incoherent.
Key insight
If a person is any maximal sum of suitably related stages, then within one life there are countless person-like sums, and each has as good a claim to moral status. A child drilled in scales for a musical future she, as a seven-year-long sum, will never enjoy is wronged. A sinner’s innocent first decade goes unrewarded. Ethical life becomes “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. Only an enduring will, one bearer of moral status per embodiment, restores what Johnston calls ethical singularity.
Assumptions
- Moral status is intrinsic (p. 273): two beings that are moment by moment duplicates over a period both have moral status in that period. The fellow traveler argument runs on it.
- A neo-Aristotelian ur-essence. Having an essence is having one characteristic from which all and only one’s essential properties flow, like a tone’s loudness, pitch and timbre.
- Theism, for the account of where wills come from and for the hope of re-embodiment.
Key results
- The 2010 view and its withdrawal (pp. 263–264). Surviving Death argued that the Christian hope is dashed by the conditions of personal survival and by what justice owes to innocent “personites”. “In place of that standard Christian hope, I there offered a this-worldly analogue or surrogate, a way of living on in the onward rush of humankind—a surrogate developed out of the idea that we are the ‘higher-order’ kind of thing whose deepest future-directed attitudes determine which this-worldly future embodiments will be ours.” Note 6 sets as an exercise finding a fellow traveler problem for that view.
- Four fellow traveler problems (pp. 271–273, 304–305):
- personites in four-dimensionalism, and their sub-process analogue in Parfit;
- R-variants: other continuity relations that build rival person-like things from the same events;
- Dion and the “Theons”: many overlapping candidates for the subject of one pain;
- plural modal profiles under a plenitudinous view of essence.
- The new account (pp. 273–279). We are embodied wills, “embodied conscious valuers of value” able to act to secure those values. That is also the ground of moral status. Wills endure and their embodiments, as biological processes, perdure. Being somehow embodied follows from the ur-essence; this embodiment does not, so another is possible.
- Against emergent substance dualism (pp. 281–285). A fundamental law of soul emergence would be either non-Markovian or oddly self-defending, and “neurocentric” among quantitative laws. Theists should drop the fig leaf and say God creates and embodies each will.
- Mind and brain (pp. 291–304).
- Identity is not reduction, since reduction is anti-symmetric.
- A mental event m is reduced to a physical event p if m occurs wholly in virtue of p’s nature. By that test the mental does not reduce.
- Instead, neural events subserve passive mental events, implement mental acts, or are interdependent with them. These relations allow difference-making with no “oomphy” mind–body causation.
- Conclusion (pp. 308–309). Re-embodiment is possible, not shown actual. Hope for it is livable only “in a community of grace, where the members of that community in their life together have escaped the bounds of self-involvement”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Every reductionist account of personal identity generates fellow travelers whose moral status makes ethical life incoherent | moderate: four problems set out; depends on moral status being intrinsic, and the detail is in his 2016–2019 papers | pp. 271–273, 287–289 |
| C2 | We are essentially embodied wills whose present embodiments are not essential | weak to moderate: argued as the account that solves C1 and grounds moral status; the ur-essence framework is assumed | pp. 273–279 |
| C3 | Mental events are neither identical with nor reducible to neural events; they stand in relations of subserving, implementing and interdependence | moderate on the negative claim, weak on the positive; the author calls the relations “mysterian” | pp. 291–304 |
| C4 | Emergent substance dualism is best replaced by divine creation and embodiment of wills | weak: for theists only, by argument from oddity | pp. 281–285 |
Concepts
- fellow traveler: a being within a person’s spatiotemporal envelope, very like the person, not derivative of it, with different persistence conditions.
- personite: a non-maximal but long-lived sum of person stages.
- ethical singularity: being the only bearer of moral status within one’s envelope.
- embodied will: an embodied agential subject, a conscious valuer of value able to act to secure it.
- ur-essence: a single individual characteristic from which all and only a thing’s essential properties flow.
- subserving / implementing / interdependence: non-reductive dependence of a mental event on a physical one, of a physical event on a mental act, and essential co-occurrence.
Connections
- Surviving Death (LIT-1759), unread. Only the paragraph quoted above and a few references (pp. 57, 65–68, ch. 4) describe the book. The book’s ethics of the good person’s survival is not restated.
- Parfit (THEORY-464) is a main target: reductionism, and his “We are not human beings” (2012).
Bearing on the record
- How the record cites the book. CLAIM-491 says Johnston “takes the same premise to the opposite moral: the good person’s self is as large as humanity”. This paper confirms the premise as Johnston held it in 2010: what we are is fixed by our deepest future-directed attitudes, and the good live on in “the onward rush of humankind”. It also shows he has given the premise up, so the book is a view its author no longer holds. A dated note is added to the claim.
- A new objection to an attitude-fixed self. Johnston rejects it because it multiplies bearers of moral status, not because it is trivial (CLAIM-492). If the extent of my self is set by what I identify with, there are as many candidate selves as ways of drawing that line, each with its own interests. Whether the thesis’s enlarged self inherits the problem is an open question, and the paper does not raise it.
- No THEORY filed. The metaphysics of mind and survival is outside the record’s current questions.
- No ML instruction.
Limitations
- Not the book. Its ethics, the part the record cites, is described here in a sentence.
- Programmatic. Many arguments are deferred to manuscripts and earlier papers (“On the Basis of Morality”, MS; Johnston 2016, 2017, 2019).
- Theological premises carry the account of where wills come from.
- Typos: “ressurection” (p. 263), “blow” for “below” (p. 280), “sematic” (note 29), “Scrinber” (bibliography).
Open questions
- Does an extended self as the owner’s thesis describes it, a self that includes a group, generate fellow travelers, one for each way of drawing the group? If it does, Johnston’s argument applies to the thesis.