Phil 100: Knowledge & Reality (Spring 2023)

The encyclopedia has 15 pages on Locke, including a section about his views on Personal Identity

'Locke on Persons and Personal Identity' offers a fresh perspective on Locke's accounts of personal identity within the context of his broader philosophical ideas and the philosophical debates of his day.

CHapt on Locke in book about "the problem of personal identity, one of the oldest and most fundamental of philosophical questions."

Locke's account of personal identity has been highly influential because of its emphasis on a psychological criterion. The same consciousness is required for being the same person. It is not so clear, however, exactly what Locke meant by 'consciousness' or by 'having the same consciousness'. Interpretations vary; consciousness is seen as identical to memory, as identical to a first personal appropriation of mental states, and as identical to a first personal distinctive experience of the qualitative features of one's own thinking. There is wide agreement, however, that Locke's theory of personal identity is meant to complement his moral and theological commitments to a system of divine punishment and reward in an afterlife. But these commitments seem to require also a metaphysical criterion, and Locke is insistent that it cannot be substance. The difficulty reconciling the psychological and metaphysical requirements of the theory has led, at worst, to charges of incoherence and, at best, to a slew of interpretations, none of which is widely accepted.

Review of Ruth Boeker’s Locke on Persons and Personal Identity

The intuition that a person can survive in a different body has a long philosophical pedigree. It finds support not only in substance dualist views like Descartes' but also in psychological views of personal identity such as those of John Locke and Derek Parfit. The defense of this intuition by the psychological theorists relies on a claim first stated by Locke that “consciousness alone makes personal identity.” I consider four ways of understanding this thesis: the one traditionally attributed to Locke; a different one I argue is actually found in Locke; an account traditionally attributed to Hume; and the one defended by Parfit. I argue that each should be rejected based upon Joseph Butler's influential—and, I argue, widely misunderstood—challenge to psychological accounts of personal identity of the sort offered by Locke and his contemporary Henry Dodwell.

I show that Butler's most important argument against his contemporaries relies not on assumptions about immaterial substances, as is usually supposed, but on the empirical distinction between self-love and benevolence, a distinction that forms the basis of his enduring refutation of psychological egoism. I argue that the distinction between self-love and benevolence is one that must be respected by a correct metaphysics of persons and that psychological views cannot do so. The problem is not, as is usually supposed, that self-love requires the existence of a simple subject of experience, but, rather, that both self-love and benevolence are mental states whose content includes bodies with a particular history. In other words, psychological views fail because the person-centered mental events prized by the theory include bodily content to which psychological views are, by their very nature, not entitled. I believe that this shows not only that no purely psychological theory can succeed, but also that the correct metaphysics of persons must include the body as an essential feature of persons.