Standard disclaimer: My lecture notes are primarily meant to help me remember what to talk about in class. As a further service to students, I have been endeavoring to write them out clearly enough for others to make sense of them and then to make them available to students. However, this is a long and laborious process, and in most cases it is unfinished. Therefore these notes should be taken with a grain of salt, as I have not had time to make them absolutely complete or to proofread them carefully enough to guarantee that they are without mistakes. As always, your primary source of information should be the lectures and class discussions and, most important of all, the texts we are reading. 

I.  We embark this week on a somewhat different pattern of argument.

II.  This type of argument uses claims about human nature or the nature of persons to defend a moral theory.

III.  This strategy goes all the way back to Aristotle: the idea is that the good of a thing depends on its nature. That is, what makes a thing good depends on the nature of that thing. To make the idea a bit more concrete, we would say that the rules that apply to person depend on the nature of persons.

IV.  Now there are two ways to use this strategy.

A.  One is via ethical naturalism–the claim that moral facts are identical to or purely derivable from purely descriptive facts.

1.  In this case we derive moral rules directly from the facts about what human beings are like. 

a.  This was Aristotle’s strategy: He thought that it was simply a scientific fact that humans have a certain function (reason, in fact). 

b.  From this, he claimed that a good person is one whose life fully includes reason in all of its facets. 

c.  Or, to put it in terms of rules, we could say that we derive the rule "get reason into all of facets of your life" from the fact that the function of human beings is reason.

2.  Now the idea that moral rules can be derived directly from pure descriptive facts fell into disrepute during the early part of this century. 

a.  G.E. Moore called it the "naturalistic fallacy" and claimed (following up on some important themes from Hume and Kant) that one cannot derive moral rules from purely descriptive facts because there is a logical gap between IS and OUGHT. 

b.  That is, you cannot find out what OUGHT to be (or what OUGHT to be done) simply by looking at what IS the case. The idea here is that any statement of moral rules (i.e. rules about what people OUGHT to do) depends on SOME value judgment that goes beyond a purely descriptive account of the facts. 

c.  Another way to say this is to say that you cannot derive a PRESCRIPTION from a pure DESCRIPTION. The facts do not issue orders. They simply are what they are.

B.  The second way to use descriptions of what people are like to derive moral conclusions is to use what I call a LINKING PRINCIPLE (as far as I know, no one else calls it this.  If there were an accepted name for it, I would use it, but there is not.  If I ever succeed in getting my paper on this topic published, then maybe people will follow my terminology.)

1.  A LINKING PRINCIPLE is a moral principle that is very, very general.

2.  It says, in effect, that moral rules OUGHT to reflect the nature of persons. 

a.  Since this claim contains an OUGHT, it is not a descriptive fact. 

b.  Instead, it is a moral principle. 

c.  But (if it is true) it can be used as a bridge or link between facts about what we are like on the one side, and more specific moral rules that tell us what we OUGHT to do. 

d.  The derivation of such rules would not commit the naturalistic fallacy because there is no attempt to derive an ought from a purely descriptive fact about human nature or the nature of persons.

3.  Of course a Linking Principle is not true simply because we give it a name.  We should have some sort of argument for it.

4.  Oddly enough, very little attention has been given to the question of how to justify Linking Principles. 

5.  But, as we shall see, several important moral arguments seem to either rest on a Linking Principle or commit the naturalistic fallacy. 

C.  For our purposes, we need not really worry too much about the specifics of the Linking Principles or the naturalistic fallacy. 

1.  Certainly the people that we will read who use this kind of argument (i.e. from the nature of persons to the structure of morality) do not seem too worried about them.  

2.  However, I do want to let you know that there is a deeper question here about whether it is legitimate to draw moral conclusions from facts about human nature or the nature of persons.  

3.  (The investigation of Linking Principles, by the way, is one of my ongoing–but so far unpublished--research projects. If you like, I can make a draft of my current work on this available to you, but it would be easier to understand after we’ve talked some about Kagan’s book.)

I.  The argument we are going to discuss today goes back at least to Sidgwick. It is developed in detail (though in slightly different forms) by Thomas Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism (1970?) and by Derek Parfit in this paper and, even more fully, in Reasons and Persons (1982?)

II.  Now, Sidgwick and Parfit both give versions of this argument that are explicitly tied to considerations of personal identity. Nagel’s version does not, at least not in any obvious way. I say this mainly to suggest that if there is some problem with the "nature to morality strategy", then Nagel’s version of this argument may get round it.

I.  When philosophers talk about personal identity (which I will often abbreviate as "PID"), they generally mean the identity of persons over time.  Questions about PID are questions about whether and why a person is the same person despite the fact that she changes greatly over time.

II.  Let’s start with a couple of examples of questions about identity over time for non-persons

A.  The first example is adapted from an old--and not very funny--joke: 

1.  A visitor goes to the museum where they keep the ax that George Washington used to cut down the cherry tree 

By the way, this did not actually happen.  Ironically, the story of the cherry tree was a MADE UP story that was then plagiarized by a minister who falsely attributed it to the young Washington to illustrate the virtue of truthfulness (See David Nyberg, The Varnished Truth).

2.  So the visitor says to the curator: "So this is really the very same ax that GW used?" 

3.  "Yes it is the exact same ax that GW used. It has been carefully restored, of course. By the turn of the century the ax head had rusted so badly that it had to be replaced. Then in the 1920s there was a fire and the handle was destroyed, so we replaced that. But it is the very same ax that GW used."

B.  There’s another, older story about something called the "Ship of Theseus." . . .(click on the link here (WVU Philosophy) to go to an interactive telling of the story.

III.  So the question here is this:  Given that a thing changes--often quite radically--over time, what determines whether it is THE VERY SAME IDENTICAL THING over time?  If we make two ships in the ship of Theseus example, which one is the same as the original?  Is the ax the very same ax as the one that cut down the tree, and if not, then what happened to it?

IV.  OK, now that you get the hang of what the question is, let's turn to a person. Take me, for example.

A.  Brace yourself for the world's most boring autobiography:

1.  I was born in 1966. At that time, I was quite different from how I am now. I was a lot smaller, for one thing.

2.  A year later, I was of course much different from how I was in 66, but still a lot different from how I am now.

3.  By 72 I was old enough for my Dad to make me watch Nixon resign, but still too young to know what exactly that meant. (He told me that some day I would be glad he had made me watch it. He was right.)

4.  By 76 I had a pretty distinctive personality, and while I can see traces of it in my present personality, I was much different then from what I am like now.

5.  By 86, I was in college. Pictures of me from back then look like me, more or less: Less weight, more hair, but other than that, I can recognize them as pictures of me. Yet I was still quite a bit different. Shy to a fault, for instance.

6.  By 90, I was in grad school. Although in some ways I am pretty much the same person now as I was then, there have still been many changes. For instance, if I go back and read papers I wrote back then, I sometimes am amazed that I could have been the same person who wrote that naive crap. On such occasions I can see how different I became over the ten years since then.

7.  By 95 I was teaching in FL and had grown into a person who is very, very similar to the person standing here today. But even at that, I was to develop certain parts of myself–in particularly in my teaching and in my ability to cope with new situations and to deal with seeing really big cockroaches and the occasional alligator. So even that recently, there are certainly differences.

B.  For most of you, the differences between how you are now and how you were five, or ten, or 15 years ago are probably even greater.

C.  Now the point of this–perhaps the most boring autobiography ever–is to illustrate a point. We often say things like: "in 1976 I was a completely different person."

D.  Now the question is: How seriously and how literally should we take such statements?

E.  Well, one way to take them is very, very literally.

1.  We might be tempted to say that I was literally a different person back in, say, 1988.

2.  That would be nice, since that would mean that my somewhat disappointing performance on the GRE that year was SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT.

3. It would also mean that the guy who got dumped by my first serious girlfriend back in 86 was, in reality, some other guy.

F.  The problem, of course, is that if the bad things in my past were done by someone else, then so were the good things.

1.  That high school varsity letter (in cross country–what did you expect?) was earned by a different person.

2.  And my PHD, of course, was earned by some poor schlep who worked really hard so that I could now enjoy it. Thanks, buddy.

G.  Now of course we don’t think that way at all.

1.  We don’t think that way about our own pasts, and society is based on not thinking that way.

2.  The VISA company does not say: Oh, OK, it was SOME OTHER PERSON who ran up the bill. Well, it would not be fair to make you pay it.

3.  When an older convicted murderer says that the murder happened so long ago that the prisoner is now a different person ("born again," perhaps), we are normally skeptical.

V.  So it looks like when we say things like "I was a different person back then" we are speaking metaphorically rather than literally.

VI.  But things are not that simple: What is it about me is the same now as it was in, say, 1979?  What makes me the same person that I was then?

A.  After all, most of the cells of my body have been replaced. All my clothes are different (that heavens!). 

B.  My brain cells may not have died and been replaced, but the atoms and molecules have probably come and gone. (And Parfit at one point asks us to consider a gradual replacement of each cell in our brain with an artificial neuron.  When, if ever, would I stop being me?  The question here is like the question of when the Ship of Theseus stops being the same ship.  And it is just as difficult to answer.)  What about me is the same, when you get right down to it?