Locke’s views on personal identity

In II.27 of the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ Locke presents and defends his criterion of personal identity.

According to Locke’s view the only possible substances are God, finite spirits, and material atoms.

His strategy is as follows:

• To present an analysis of what it is for bodies and animals to be identical.

• To sharply distinguish between men qua animals and men qua persons ‘capable of a law’, and to present a corresponding analysis of identity.

• To show the adequacy of his own account (and the inadequacy of other accounts), especially in the context of justice

Criteria for identity

Locke presents the following

Identity of bodies consists in being made up of the same atoms, organised in the same way.

But if one chops a limb off an animal or a tree, it remains the same living thing. So we find

Identity of living things consists in its sustaining the same life. It is the same living thing so long as it maintains the organisation of the parts necessary to sustain the same life.

Any account trying to say otherwise will struggle to explain how infant, madman and grown man are one and the same person in a way that does not make it possible that that man be the same as Socrates. If the identity of the soul were enough for personal identity, for example, there would be nothing to stop Socrates and Pilate being the same man.

We must, therefore, look at the idea that the word stands for, and consider whether it is being applied to man, substance or person. For example, a parrot may be able to talk in an apparently intelligent manner but would not be a man. On the other hand, a man is just an animal in a certain form: even if we see another being looking like us unable to talk or reason less than the parrot, it would nevertheless be a man. We must therefore distinguish carefully between identity conditions for substances, for persons, and for men.

A person is a “thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places”. It follows that, as consciousness always accompanies thinking, it is that [ambiguous reference – to consciousness or thinking?] which makes everyone to be what he calls self, and distinguishes him from other beings. Hence:

Identity of persons: consists solely in consciousness. So far as a rational being’s consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of the person.

Hence, as Jolley puts it:

A is the same person as B IFF A can be conscious of the actions and experiences of B (where A is a person picked out at t and B is a person picked out at an earlier time t’).

Why does Locke provide differing criteria of identity?

William Uzgalis suggests the following reasons for why Locke made the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘person’:

• Adopting the distinction from the Cartesians for the purpose of refuting the Cartesian claim that the soul is the bearer of personal identity.

• Solving the problem of the resurrection of the dead (cf. Boyle’s question about the resurrection of people eaten by cannibals). Locke does explicitly tell us the case of the prince and the cobbler shows us the resolution of the problem of the resurrection.

Critiquing other views

We cannot take identity of persons to lie in bodily substance. Change of substance does not entail change of person, any more than changing one’s clothes does. For example, if one cuts off a limb, one’s substance is changed, but one remains the same person.

Nor can we take identity of persons to lie in some immaterial substance. For example, if someone had the same immaterial spirit as Nestor at the siege of Troy, but is nonetheless not concerned for Nestor’s actions, nor attribute them to himself, then surely he is not the same person as Nestor.

Nor can we take identity of persons to lie in thinking substance. It is the case that our perceptions do not deceive us, and that we do no appropriate to ourselves actions we never did. But until we have a clearer idea of the nature of thinking substances, we must resolve this into the goodness of God, who would not allow punishment to be made unjust in this way.

Personal identity and justice

Person is a forensic term: it appropriates actions and their merit. As such it belongs only to agents capable of a law, happiness and misery. By extending consciousness one’s personality becomes accountable and owns its actions. On the other hand, if we cannot reconcile a certain action in our consciousness, it no more concerns us than if we had not done it. Thus at the resurrection the sentence each person receives shall be justified by his consciousness, independent of whatever substances their body may be made up of.

Personal identity tracks justice. If I cut off my little finger and it somehow gains a consciousness, then the actions of that finger are outside of my consciousness and concern, and therefore I am not culpable for them. Similarly, we see this in mitigating the guilt we attach to a mad person’s actions when he is sober, and in our language of ‘he is not himself’ or ‘he is beside himself’. We recognise that guilt tracks consciousness.

Other ways of bringing this out: if one were one person at night, and another during the day, and each were unconscious of the other, if would surely be unreasonable to punish the day-person for the night-person’s actions. Similarly, if a prince swapped consciousness with a cobbler, the prince (in the cobbler’s body) would be the same person and still be culpable for his actions prior to the swap (in the prince’s body).

Classic objections: Reid and Butler

Reid and Butler both strongly reject Locke’s relational view of personal identity in favour of a substance-based view. As David Shoemaker points out, however, they agree with Locke that identity grounds certain moral and prudential ‘patterns of concern’: it is the foundation of our rights and obligations , for example.

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