Personal Identity in the Wild

Abstract

Personal Identity in the Wild offers a groundbreaking new approach to theorizing about personal identity and its relation to our practical concerns. The standard “metaphysics-first” method is to start by figuring out what we are most fundamentally, use that knowledge to posit a theory of what preserves our identity and grounds reidentification across time, and finally reveal what the theory implies for identity-related practical concerns like responsibility, compensation, and prudential planning. In this book, the authors reverse that method by starting with a detailed examination of reidentification and its motivating practical concerns. This requires investigating the nonhuman animals in the wild that reidentify each other all the time. The authors investigate what precisely is going on in such cases, as well as the practical interests motivating animals’ tracking of neighbors, pack leaders, reliable warners, kin, and general threateners. Drawing from cutting-edge work in cognitive and perception science, the authors show that these animals are simply tracking physical objects given their interest in specific attributes of those objects. As continuous with animals, we humans are typically doing the same thing: motivated by our concerns to track our kids, neighbors, friends, enemies, colleagues, and more, we open mental files—representations—of them that enable us to track those physical objects through all sorts of attributional changes. But physical objects as such give us no real reasons to do anything. Any practical reasons we have with respect to our familiar person-associated concerns have their source in the attributes of those physical objects. The aim of the last half of the book is to investigate what those reasons are, not just for our concerns regarding responsibility, compensation, and prudential planning but also for our concerns and fears about the beginning and end of life.