Parfit

How is it possible that we stay the same over time even though we continuously change? Looking at the analytic debate on personal identity, we will find, very generally, three types of answers: 1) Staying the same while changing is possible, but we are not properly the same then, only more or less. Identity becomes replaced with similarity. 2) Staying the same while changing is possible, but we do not properly change after all; deep down we are unchanging. 3) Staying the same while changing is not possible. Personal identity – identity of a person through time – is an illusion. In my paper, I shall show that all three of these answers are not convincing and have to be rejected. I shall defend the thesis that the difficulties analytic metaphysics has with making sense of personal identity ultimately stem from the idea that a person is some kind of thing, or a conglomerate of things, and that we can leave these difficulties behind if we think of a person as a process instead.
The idea that persons are processes is not new; it has been suggested some time ago, in particular by philosophers who nowadays have become regarded as ‘continental’. However, the idea has not yet sufficiently been linked to the more recent ‘analytic’ debate on personal identity, not least because of the difference of schools. Against this background, the paper can be seen as an attempt to merge the ‘analytic’ and the ‘continental’ debate on personal identity by using process ontology as a unifying key. More ambitiously, given that the benefit to be gained from process ontology is as little restricted to the problem of personal identity as is the tendency in analytic metaphysics towards what I call ‘thing ontology’, the discussion presented is an exercise in reconciling ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy as such, with personal identity serving as a test case.

Prioritarianism is nowadays understood as the doctrine in distributive justice, which advocates the maximization of weighted utility. This article argues that this narrow reading does not correspond to Parfit's original introduction of the view. I suggest to understand prioritarianism more broadly as referring to a family of views that are developed in light of the prioritarian intuition that benefitting people matters more the worse off these people are. Broad priori-tarianism is neither committed to a utilitarian currency, nor weighting, nor maximization. Making this distinction has a number of important taxonomic and substantial implications. First, recent arguments against prioritarianism do not refute prioritarianism in the broader sense but only the narrow, utili-tarian variant of it. Second, narrow and broad prioritarianism fail to live up to Parfit's claim that prioritarianism is a complete view that can replace exist-ing views in distributive justice. Third, broad prioritarianism is not an antag-onist but rather combinable with views such as utilitarianism, egalitarianism and sufficientarianism. Last, the prioritarian intuition has strong force but is by no means universally accepted. Prioritarians need to put more attention to defending and specifying their basic intuition.

The relationship between Parfit’s theory of Personal Identity and his research on Population Ethics is underexplored. In this paper I both examine this relationship and support the principle stating that it is moral to cause the greatest total wellbeing. Once introduced the basic concepts of Population Ethics and Parfit’s theory of Personal Identity, I report Parfit’s distinction between Different Number Choices, that affect both the number and the identity of future people, and Same Number Choices, that affect only future people’s identity. Parfit underlines how, in Different Number Choices, it is doubtful whether someone ought to cause a higher average or a higher total of good. Assuming Parfit’s theory of Personal Identity I argue that personal choices such as choosing between possible careers determine the chooser’s future identity: such choices are thus Same Number Choices. Since personal choices can influence a life’s length and enjoyed wellbeing, Same Number Choices share wit...