Source
Dufner (2025), “Personal Identity and Ethics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, LIT-130, read in NOTE-166. It is a new entry, first published 30 June 2025, replacing David Shoemaker’s at the same URL; a citation of that URL before mid-2025 is to Shoemaker’s text.
What was actually shown
The entry reports positions; the account is the reading’s synthesis of them (NOTE-166, Corrections).
- What matters (§3). Parfit’s fission case: both recipients are continuous with me, neither is me, yet I should care about their pain as my own (Parfit 1984: 254f). Four candidate views follow: numerical identity, continuity, connectedness, or both. The entry endorses none.
- The biological view concedes (§4). Its proponents generally grant that psychological relations are what matter ethically, and that the persistence relation and the relation that matters may come apart (Olson 1997: 70; 2022).
- Prudence (§5). Heavy weight on connectedness implies “a succession of overlapping multiple selves” and a discount rate on self-concern. McMahan holds a late-stage dementia patient the same person but owed somewhat reduced prudential concern.
- Responsibility (§6). Positions run from identity (Locke, Butler, Reid) through continuity to degree-sensitive connectedness. The accountability and attributability distinction lets severe dementia remove the first and leave some of the second.
- Abortion (§7). Psychological relations may matter “irrespective of whether we are numerically identical with fetuses”. Biological views support a prohibition more strongly than psychological ones, but do not force it.
- Death and advance directives (§8). “What is relevant … is not whether someone’s identity has been preserved.” For advance directives “numerical identity is not decisive”: Dworkin’s critical interests and Jaworska’s remaining capacity to value do the work. Dresser (1986) is the exception that argues from identity.
- Separateness (§9). The appeal “is not specific enough to lend positive support to a particular ethical view”, and may work at best as a negative argument against unrestricted utilitarianism.
- Priority (§§10–11). The dependence may run from ethics to what matters (Scheffler, Darwall, Korsgaard 1989), and the entry ends with three open questions: the right theory of identity, whether identity or its constituent relations matter, and which comes first.
What could have come out otherwise. The applied debates could have turned, case by case, on which persistence criterion is true. In the entry’s report they turn on continuity, connectedness, critical interests, the capacity to value or consciousness, each of which can hold or fail while identity does not.
What this does not say
- That identity never matters. Uniqueness may matter for positional goods: sole ownership, a unique partner, a unique title (Johnston, Wolf, Unger). Biological views still bear more strongly on abortion than psychological ones.
- That continuity is what matters. The entry reports Parfit’s argument and separates four views; it does not endorse the continuity view, and the weight of continuity against connectedness is left open.
- That the metaphysics is idle. It constrains: §10 shows that ethics may drive what matters, but does not assess whether that makes the persistence question practically idle.
- Anything about copies or artificial agents. The entry has nothing on duplication or uploading beyond the fission case, and nothing on AI.
- That the survey covers the field. Four-dimensionalism, constitution views and non-Western accounts are absent or passing, and social identity is excluded (§1).
Connections
- Presupposes Parfit’s division argument (THEORY-447). The account takes as its premise that the relation that matters can come apart from numerical identity. If that falls, the cases would need another route to show that identity does not decide them.
- Which question is which. Olson’s map (THEORY-417) separates the persistence question from what matters; this account is about the second, applied.
- Locke’s forensic person (THEORY-546) is the first statement of the link the survey maps, from what persists to who is accountable.
- Floridi (THEORY-650) makes identity questions teleological. §10’s view that ethics may fix what matters is the nearest mainstream counterpart, though the entry treats the metaphysics as open where Floridi deflates it.
- Responsibility. THEORY-147 separates attributability and accountability as independent kinds of deep responsibility. The survey uses the same distinction for dementia.
- Abortion’s premise. “Each of us was once a fetus” is what Meincke’s process view of pregnancy (THEORY-448) bears on.