International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyProceeding Paper of ICSSHRT 2023 Conference
Derek Parfit on Personal Identity: Relation-R and Moral Commitments
Authors- Nargish Afroza
Abstract- -When we are going to describe personal identity, many questions will be arising, like am I the same person as when I was born and now I am writing this paper? How do we persist overtime? But these questions were the beginning of the modern discussion since John Locke’s famous work “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (Locke, 1975), wrote about the importance of psychological continuity in determining personal identity. In contemporary metaphysics, there has been interesting debate around psychological continuity that stems largely from another great English philosopher at late 20th and early 21st centuries, Derek Parfit. Parfit was concerned with the perplexing question of self and personal identity. Do we have self? If so, what is it? Does self-possess any value? And so on. His philosophical examination of these issues was presented in seminal works such as is 1971 work “Personal Identity” (Parfit, 1971) and his classic book “Reasons and Persons” (Parfit, 1984). Parfit holds a reductionist view, and he concludes that personal identity must be a Psychological Criterion (which is called Relation-R) which approaches our persistence with three versions. These three versions of Psychological Criterion are Narrow, Wide and Widest with the right kind of cause. But the Wide and Widest version do not deal with personal identity as longer, only the Narrow version holds our personal identity in terms of normal cause. It is true that all types of versions are the mental states of psychological continuity of the strongest connections between two or more branches, which states, we persist as a chain of overlapping mental states to the connections from present I to the future I. But Parfit argues that the Narrow version is not totally applied for the persistence of personal identity because this version is necessary but not sufficient for all moral commitments. In that case, he claims that personal identity is often framed in the language of survival, and that the implicit assumption that survival implies identity is false. I will argue in this paper, Parfit’s theory of “Relation-R” e.g., psychological connectedness and/or continuity is absurd to elaborate the person’s moral commitments on his/her survival.
