Personal Identity and Dual Character Concepts

Abstract

In an important recent study, Tobia (2015) gave participants a vignette about a person who gets into an accident:Phineas is extremely kind; he really enjoys helping people. He is also employed as a railroad worker. One day at work, a railroad explosion causes a large iron spike to fly out and into his head, and he is immediately taken for emergency surgery. The doctors manage to remove the iron spike and their patient is fortunate to survive. However, in some ways this man after the accident is remarkably different from Phineas before the accident. Phineas before the accident was extremely kind and enjoyed helping people, but the man after the accident is now extremely cruel; he even enjoys harming people.Participants then received a simple question. Consider the man after the accident. Is that man Phineas, or would it be more accurate to say that he is not Phineas at all?Participants answered this question on a scale that went from completely agreeing that the man is Phineas to completely agreeing that he is not Phineas. Strikingly, the mean response was at about the midpoint of the scale. In other words, people regarded this as a difficult case. They were drawn in some way toward the view that the man after the accident is Phineas, but they were also drawn in some way toward the view that he is not Phineas. Since this is an intuition about a case of radical moral change, let's refer to it as the moral change intuition.In what follows, we will be looking in detail at recent empirical findings regarding the moral change intuition, but before we discuss any of those findings, it is important to see that the intuition is deeply surprising just in itself. After all, there seems to be some straightforward sense in which people think the man after the accident is obviously Phineas, and it's hard to see what people could possibly mean by saying that he is not.To illustrate, suppose the man went to a bank and tried to withdraw money. People would presumably not find it remotely plausible to say: "You can't withdraw money from Phineas's account -you aren't Phineas." Similar points would no doubt hold for many of the other ordinary practices that depend on intuitions about personal identity (see Starmans & Bloom, 2018). In short, it seems that we face a puzzle about the moral change intuition. Given that there is a sense in which the man after the accident is obviously Phineas, what exactly do people mean when they say that he is not Phineas? I will argue that if we want to understand people's intuitions in cases like this one, it will prove helpful to look to frameworks from a literature that might at first seem quite remote from the study of personal identity. Specifically, I suggest that it might be helpful to look to the literature on what are called dual character concepts

Are there really any dual‐character concepts?

“…99See, for example, (Knobe 2022) on personal identity, (Liao, Meskin, and Knobe 2020) on art, (Flanagan and Hannikainen 2022) on law, (Guo, Dweck, and Markman 2021) on gender, and (Newman and Knobe 2019) on natural kind concepts.…”