One of the standard approaches to the metaphysics of personal identity has some counter-intuitive ethical consequences when combined with maximising consequentialism and a plausible doctrine about aggregation of consequences. This metaphysical doctrine is the so-called ‘multiple occupancy’ approach to puzzles about fission and fusion. It gives rise to a new version of the ‘utility monster’ problem, particularly difficult problems about infinite utility, and a new version of a Parfit-style ‘repugnant conclusion’. While the article focuses on maximising consequentialism for simplicity, the (...) problems demonstrated apply more widely to a range of ethical views, especially flavours of consequentialism. This article demonstrates how these problems arise, and discusses a number of options available in the light of these problems for a consequentialist tempted by a multiple occupancy metaphysics. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is often rejected on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons, instead treating people as mere “receptacles of value”. I develop several different versions of this objection, and argue that, despite their prima facie plausibility, they are all mistaken. Although there are crude forms of utilitarianism that run afoul of these objections, I advance a new form of the view—‘token-pluralistic utilitarianism’—that does not.

We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism —the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning : dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.

I argue that four-dimensionalism and the desire satisfaction account of well-being are incompatible. For every person whose desires are satisfied, there will be many shorter-lived individuals (‘person-stages’ or ‘subpersons’) who share the person’s desires but who do not exist long enough to see those desires satisfied; not only this, but in many cases their desires are frustrated so that the desires of the beings in whom they are embedded as proper temporal parts may be fulfilled. I call this the frustrating (...) problem for four-dimensionalism. In the first half of the paper I lay the groundwork for understanding the frustrating problem, and then in the second half, I will examine six possible responses to the frustrating problem on behalf of the four-dimensionalist, (i) the Parfit (1984) inspired claim that identity is not what matters, (ii) the personal pronoun revisionism of Noonan (2010), (iii) the indirect concern account of Hudson (2001), (iv) the sensible stages account of Lewis (1986), (v) a multiple-concepts account of desire satisfaction, and (vi) a No Desire View according to which subpersons have no mental states and thus no desires to frustrate. I argue that none of these solutions will help the four-dimensionalist; she does better to reject the desire satisfaction theory, while the defender of the desire satisfaction theory does better to reject four-dimensionalism. (shrink)

Composite materialism, as I will understand it, is the view that human persons are composite material objects. This paper develops and investigates an argument, The Vague Singulars Argument, for the falsity of composite materialism. We shall see that cogent or not, the Vague Singulars Argument has philosophically significant ramifications.

Some philosophers believe that everyday objects are 4-dimensional spacetime worms, that a person (for example) persists through time by having temporal parts, or stages, at each moment of her existence. None of these stages is identical to the person herself; rather, she is the aggregate of all her temporal parts.1 Others accept “three dimensionalism”, rejecting stages in favor of the notion that persons “endure”, or are “wholly present” throughout their lives.2 I aim to defend an apparently radical third view: not (...) only do I accept person stages; I claim that we are stages.3 Likewise for other objects of our everyday ontology: statues are statue-stages, coins are coin-stages, etc. At one level, I accept the ontology of the worm view. I believe in spacetime worms, since I believe in temporal parts and aggregates of things I believe in. I.. (shrink)

It is argued that, given certain reasonable premises, an infinite number of qualitatively identical but numerically distinct minds exist per functioning brain. The three main premises are (1) mental properties supervene on brain properties; (2) the universe is composed of particles with nonzero extension; and (3) each particle is composed of continuum-many point-sized bits of particle-stuff, and these points of particle-stuff persist through time.

This paper is about the neglected question of what sort of things we are metaphysically speaking. It is different from the mind-body problem and from familiar questions of personal identity. After explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, the paper tries to show how difficult it is to give a satisfying answer.

In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears that two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases—conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of humans corresponds to the number of bodies—so there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both of these answers are incorrect. Prominent accounts of (...) biological individuation, which treat the organism as an integrated whole, reveal that in these and other cases of conjoined twinning the ‘twins’ share a single human animal. This has a number of consequences for the debate about what we are. First, if animalism is true, individuals of our kind can be—and are—profoundly psychologically divided. Second, cephalopagus twinning does not divide animalism from its rivals, as has been claimed. Finally, animalists can reply to a vicious species of the ‘too many thinkers’ problem to which they are allegedly uniquely vulnerable. (shrink)

Among your closest associates is a certain human animal – a living, breathing, organism. You see it when you look in the mirror. When it is sick, you don't feel too well. Where it goes, you go. And, one thinks, where you go, it must follow. Indeed, you can make it move through sheer force of will. You bear, in short, an important and intimate relation to this, your animal. So too rest of us with our animals. Animalism says that (...) this relation is nothing short of identity. According to animalists, we do not only coincide with or constitute or inhabit or otherwise hang out with these close associates, our animals: we are them. In this article, I offer an opinionated take on what animalism might be and situate it against contemporary rivals. Then, I outline a simple case for animalism. Finally, I sketch non-standard routes for animalists to take in light of standard challenges. My goal in all of this is to open up some new avenues of animalist thinking. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine the nature and structure of consciousness. Conscious experience is often said to be phenomenally unified, and subjects of consciousness are often self-conscious. I ask whether these features necessarily accompany conscious experience. Is it necessarily the case, for instance, that all of a conscious subject's experiences at a time are phenomenally unified? And is it necessarily the case that subjects of consciousness are self-conscious whenever they are conscious? I argue that the answer to the former is (...) affirmative and the latter negative. In the first chapter, I set the stage by distinguishing phenomenal unity from other species of conscious unity. A pair of conscious states is phenomenally unified if they are experienced together as part of a single experience that encompasses them both. In this and the next two chapters I defend the thesis that, necessarily, for any subject (of conscious mental states) at any time, all of that subject's conscious mental states (at that time) are part of a single, maximal state of consciousness. I call this thesis the "Unity Thesis." I proceed by considering some preliminary questions that might be raised about the Unity Thesis. For instance, the thesis presupposes that it is coherent to talk about parts of mental states. I consider objections by Tye and Searle and argue that the notion of an experiential part is unproblematic. In the remaining pages of the chapter, I present the source of the biggest challenge to the Unity Thesis: the data gathered from split-brain subjects. The Unity Thesis is formulated using the notion of a maximal state of consciousness. In the second chapter, I attempt to precisify this notion in a way that does not pre-emptively decide the debate over the Unity Thesis. In informal terms, a maximal state of consciousness is a sum of conscious states that are i) simultaneous, ii) have the same subject, and iii) all have a conjoint phenomenology. I call this the Consensus View. I then consider two unorthodox views that the Consensus View does not take off the table: the views that a "collective consciousness" and a "spread consciousness" are possible. A collective subject is one that can enjoy the experiences of an indeterminate number of "lesser" subjects of consciousness by sharing them together with those subjects. A spread subject is one that can enjoy the experiences of an indeterminate number of lesser subjects of consciousness, but it does so, not by sharing those experiences with the lesser subjects, but by absorbing the lesser subjects of experience into itself, thereby erasing the traditional boundaries between the entities we intuitively think of as subjects of experience. I argue that, although the Consensus View does not decide against them, these views stretch the bounds of coherence and should not, therefore, be accepted. Having presented an account of what maximal state of consciousness is, I define a stream of consciousness in terms of a maximal states of consciousness. In the rest of chapter two, I consider and argue against a number of different ways of interpreting the split-brain data that are either inconsistent with the Unity Thesis or attribute more than one subject of consciousness to split-brain subjects. Among the views I consider are Lockwood's partial-unity view and the views, by theorists such as Sperry, Koch, Puccetti, Marks, and Tye, that split-brain subjects have two non-overlapping streams of consciousness. In chapter three, I consider a recent attempt by Bayne to account for the split-brain data in a way that does not attribute two streams of consciousness to them. According to Bayne's Switch Model, the consciousness of split-brain subjects can be likened to that of a ball that is passed back and forth between the two hemispheres of the upper-brain. The hemispheres take turns supporting a single stream of consciousness. I consider the empirical data in some detail and argue that the data is not as compatible with the Switch Model as Bayne claims. I close the chapter by presenting the rough outline of an interpretation of the split-brain data that is consistent with both the Unity Thesis and the split-brain data. In chapter four, I turn from defending the Unity Thesis to examining an attempt to account for conscious unity. Rosenthal has offered a theory of conscious unity as an extension of his higher-order theory of consciousness. I consider his account of conscious unity in light of a well-known objection to his theory: the (Representational) Mismatch Objection. It can be asked what it is like for a subject of experience when a higher-order state misrepresents its target first-order state. If what it is like for the subject corresponds to the content of the higher-order state, then it appears as though higher-order representation is unnecessary for conscious experience, for it would appear as though it is possible for a state to be conscious without being represented by a higher-order state. If what it is like corresponds to the content of the lower-order state, then it would again seem as though representation at the higher-order level is unnecessary for conscious experience, for the higher-order state would not seem to be doing any work in generating the experience. I consider and argue against two recent defences of Rosenthal's higher-order theory from the Mismatch Objection. Then I turn to Rosenthal's account of conscious unity. Rosenthal's account posits two mental mechanisms. I refer to the ways of accounting for conscious unity via these two mechanisms as the "gathering strategy" and the "common-ascription strategy" respectively. Both of these strategies, I argue, appear to locate the basis for certain phenomenal facts in higher-order representational facts. This raises a prima facie question: does Rosenthal's account of conscious unity land him square within the sights of the Mismatch Objection? Although the gathering strategy may ultimately be understood in a way that does not make it subject to the Mismatch Objection, Rosenthal has certain commitments that bar this strategy from serving as a complete account of conscious unity. This is problematic for Rosenthal, I argue, because his common-ascription strategy faces some difficult questions. This strategy makes conscious unity due to an implicit expectation a subject of consciousness has that, whenever he or she engages in introspection, an explicit sense of conscious unity will be generated. I argue that it is very difficult to see how such an implicit sense could both avoid the Mismatch Objection and do the work it needs to do in order to account for conscious unity. In chapter five, the discussion turns from the unity of consciousness to self-consciousness. The question that is considered in this and the last chapter is the question whether conscious experience is necessarily accompanied by self-consciousness. The affirmative answer to this question I call the Ubiquity Thesis. I spend some time distinguishing robust conceptions of self-consciousness from minimal conceptions of self-consciousness. The notion of self-consciousness invoked by the Ubiquity Thesis is a minimal one. In spite of the fact that the Ubiquity Thesis invokes only a minimal or thin conception of self-consciousness, I believe the thesis to be false and argue against it. In this chapter I take up the views of Husserl. Husserl is often regarded as the progenitor of the phenomenological tradition, a tradition in which many philosophers affirm the Ubiquity Thesis. I examine and argue against an interpretation of Husserl's work, one defended by Zahavi, according to which Husserl could be seen to defend the Ubiquity Thesis. One claim that Husserl makes is that, in order for an object to become the intentional target of a conscious state, it must be given to consciousness beforehand. It is possible, during acts of deliberate introspection, for consciousness to take itself as its object. On Husserl's view, this requires consciousness to be given to itself beforehand. This self-givenness of consciousness, argues Zahavi, can be seen as a kind of minimal self-consciousness. Husserl has also offered an account of this self-givenness of consciousness and it appears in his discussion of inner time-consciousness. I attempt to argue, using some of Husserl's other views regarding psychological stances (or standpoints), that consciousness is not given to itself outside of the adoption of a certain psychological standpoint. I also offer an alternative way of accounting for inner time-consciousness, one that does not have, as a built-in feature, that consciousness always has itself as a secondary object. In the sixth and final chapter, I take up a contemporary defence of the Ubiquity Thesis. Kriegel, a higher-order theorist like Rosenthal, has argued that every conscious state is conscious in virtue of the fact that it represents itself. This self-representation is understood as a kind of self-consciousness and, thus, his theory can be seen as affirming the Ubiquity Thesis. In the first part of the chapter, I take issue with the way in which Kriegel lays out the conceptual terrain. In particular, Kriegel countenances a property he calls "intransitive state self-consciousness." I argue that this way of speaking is confused. I then turn to considering Kriegel's account. Kriegel identifies the species of self-consciousness that pervades all of conscious experience with a peripheral awareness of one's own mental states. I argue that such a peripheral inner awareness does not accompany all of our mental states and, thus, that Kriegel's views do not give us reason to accept the Ubiquity Thesis. (shrink)

Animalists accuse the advocates of psychological approaches of identity of having to suffer a Problem of Too Many Thinkers. Eric Olson, for instance, is an animalist who maintains that if the person is spatially coincident but numerically distinct from the animal, then provided that the person can use its brain to think, so too can the physically indistinguishable animal. However, not all defenders of psychological views of identity assume the spatial coincidence of the person and the animal. Jeff McMahan and (...) lately Derek Parfit claim we are roughly brain-size, composed of just those parts of the human animal that directly produce thought. They claim to avoid the Problem of Too Many Thinkers because it is the brain-sized person who truly thinks, while the animal thinks only in a derivative sense in virtue of having a thinking proper part. Waiting in the wings are some dualists who claim that all materialist accounts fail to avoid the Problem of Too Many Thinkers. One such dualist, Dean Zimmerman, insists that wherever there is an ordinary material thing like a brain, there is also a mass with distinct persistence conditions and thus the threat of two material thinkers. Zimmerman contends that only positing an immaterial thinker can avoid the problem. (shrink)

David Lewis's cohabitation theory suffered damaging criticism from Derek Parfit. Though many have defended versions of Lewis's theory Parfit's criticism has not been answered. This paper shows how to defend the cohabitation theory against Parfit's criticism.

One of the standard approaches to the metaphysics of personal identity has some counter‐intuitive ethical consequences when combined with maximising consequentialism and a plausible (though not uncontroversial) doctrine about aggregation of consequences. This metaphysical doctrine is the so‐called ‘multiple occupancy’ approach to puzzles about fission and fusion. It gives rise to a new version of the ‘utility monster’ problem, particularly difficult problems about infinite utility, and a new version of a Parfit‐style ‘repugnant conclusion’. While the article focuses on maximising consequentialism (...) for simplicity, the problems demonstrated apply more widely to a range of ethical views, especially flavours of consequentialism. This article demonstrates how these problems arise, and discusses a number of options available in the light of these problems for a consequentialist tempted by a multiple occupancy metaphysics. (shrink)

Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution. The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the (...) moral permissibility of our treatment of human persons and their parts, fetuses and infants, the irreversibly comatose, and corpses. He argues that his metaphysics provides the best foundation in the philosophy of religion for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Hudson addresses a broad range of metaphysical issues, but among his most strikingly original contributions are his defense of the "Partist" view and his argument for the compatibility of Christianity with a materialistic theory of human persons. (shrink)

Mark Johnston has recently argued that four-dimensionalist theories of persistence are incompatible with some of our most basic ethical and prudential principles. I argue that although Johnston’s arguments succeed on a worm-theoretic account of persistence, they fail on a stage-theoretic account. So much the worse, I conclude, for the worm theory.

Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.

An argument against the bias towards the near; how a defence of temporal neutrality is not a defence of S; an appeal to inconsistency; why we should reject S and accept CP.

Property dualism is enjoying a slight resurgence in popularity, these days; substance dualism, not so much. But it is not as easy as one might think to be a property dualist and a substance materialist. The reasons for being a property dualist support the idea that some phenomenal properties (or qualia) are as fundamental as the most basic physical properties; but what material objects could be the bearers of the qualia? If even some qualia require an adverbial construal (if they (...) are modifications of the thing that is conscious because of them, not properties of something else to which the subject of consciousness is related), then the property dualist can be driven to speculative forms of materialism none of which, at this point, looks more likely to be true than the more modest versions of emergent dualism defended by contemporary substance dualists. (shrink)

According to a view attractive to both metaphysicians and ethicists, every period in a person’s life is the life of a being just like that person except that it exists only during that period. These “subpeople” appear to have moral status, and their interests seem to clash with ours: though it may be in some person’s interests to sacrifice for tomorrow, it is not in the interests of a subperson coinciding with him only today, who will never benefit from it. (...) Or perhaps there is no clash, and a subperson’s interests derive from those of the person it coincides with. But this makes it likely that our own interests derive from those of other beings coinciding with us. (shrink)

A problem of the many Fs arises in cases where intuitively there is precisely one F (in the region you are talking about), but when you look closely you find many candidates for being that F, each one apparently as well-qualified as the next. Imagine an apparently solitary cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Look closer, and you'll see lots of water vapor molecules, with no one collection of them more eligible than the others to count as the cloud. Many (...) things are like this when you look closely enough. The problem arises for mundane things like rocks, houses and coins. It also arises for entities that present special philosophical challenges, like persons and experiencers. In this essay, I present a new argument that the problem of the many experiencers is an especially hard problem of the many, and property dualism—the view that properties that there is something it is like to instantiate are irreducible—may be the best way to solve it. (shrink)