Comments?
I'd love to hear.Robert Bass
One of the more intriguing ideas expressed in Loren Lomasky’s Persons, Projects and the Moral Community is that we cannot properly understand what personal identity is – what it is for a person at one time to be the same person as someone (who will differ in at least some characteristics) at a different time – without invoking the notion of projects. For present purposes, projects may be taken to be relatively long-term, dispositional features of a person that organize large tracts of her life and behavior – or, in short, at the risk of some unfaithfulness to Lomasky, projects are what the person takes her life to be about.
There are at least two interesting directions in which this idea can be pursued or developed. We can ask whether it is true. We can also ask what follows if it is true. But first, there is a potential objection to the possibility of its being true that needs to be cleared out of the way.
It may seem that there is a risk of self-defeating circularity in this notion. On one hand, if it is correct, there will be no way, even in principle, to spell out a determinate set of conditions for a project-pursuer’s identity over time without reference to the projects that shape her life. On the other hand, surely, she must exist in order to have projects. But since projects are, in part, dispositional features, no project exists just at a moment in time. That is, in order to say that X is her project, we will need to say something about her at some other time, but if we cannot correctly speak about who she is at other times (without reference to her projects), we appear to face a problem: We need to specify her projects in order to say who she is, but we need to say who she is in order to specify her projects.
I think this problem can be avoided if we draw two important distinctions. First, to say that identity conditions (where we are speaking about identity over time) are not fully determinate does not imply that nothing can be determinate about identity over time. We may puzzle, for example, over whether the Ship of Theseus is or is not the same after the gradual replacement of all its parts (and, if it is not the same, over the question of how much of it had to be altered in order for it to be a different ship), but that does not imply that there are no relevant identity conditions at all. There seems to be no serious question that it is the same ship at any two times between which no parts have been replaced. The fact that there may be some indeterminacy leaves open the possibility that there are determinate distinctions as well. Second, to say that projects are crucial to understanding a person’s identity over time need not be taken to imply that there are no identity conditions other than those derived from projects. It only needs to be the case that projects (and particular projects) make a difference to her identity. Even without knowing anything about the particular projects a person has, we can identify her as an organism who has certain (maybe not fully determinate) identity conditions as such and we can base our understanding of the projects she has upon her exhibited dispositions over relatively short periods. There are, no doubt, many practical difficulties here in making or justifying such judgments, but there is no in-principle difficulty generated by circularity. What has to be true is that, prior to the acquisition of projects, there are some identity conditions that she satisfies for some period of time, and that her identity over such a period be enough for it to be truly predicable of her that over some (later) subset of that period, she has acquired the sort of dispositional state that is a project. Once she has acquired it, of course, it may, if Lomasky is right, make a difference to what identity conditions apply to her subsequently.
Earlier, I said that we could pursue Lomasky’s idea either in the direction of asking whether it is true or in that of asking what difference it makes if it is true. I want to do a little in each direction. First, I want to say something on behalf of the plausibility of the connection Lomasky makes. One way to approach this is through a consideration of something that I take to be a correct intuition about (instrumental) practical reasoning. The intuition can be expressed this way: Each person has a special reason to be concerned about her own future. This is not to say that she has no reason to be concerned about anything else, of course, but just that considerations about her own future, about what she will do or bring about, what will happen to her and so on (properly) have an importance in her decision-making that is not shared by qualitatively similar events that do not affect her. But there is a problem in saying how much importance to attach to these future events. Suppose that the future event in question involves her (meaning an organism who is physically continuous with herself now) in (possibly) undergoing some suffering five years hence. Does she have as much reason to take action to avoid that outcome as she does to avoid similar but imminent suffering? Are the two cases to be treated as being equally important?[1] Surely, if she has a special reason to be concerned about her own future, then the answer to that question will depend in part on whether she will be identical to the future person. If she will not, then she will have less reason to be concerned about the future person’s fate than about her present predicament.
Now, add to this the fact that we cannot say what a person has a reason to do at all without making assumptions about the importance she attaches to future outcomes, that is, about her time-discount rates. (We can hide the fact that we are making assumptions about this by not mentioning it and treating any two qualitatively similar events in her life as equally important – but that is just to assume that the time-discount is zero.) Moreover, we cannot derive anything about what time-discount she should observe (because we cannot derive anything about what it is instrumentally rational for her to do) unless we assume some time-discount rate already. But that means that an initial time-discount rate has to come from somewhere else. We might hope that there is a biologically installed discount rate that we can work with, but that seems inadequate because of the commonplace that people can and do become more or less far-sighted over the course of their lives. A biologically installed discount rate may provide a necessary starting point but cannot explain why people vary from it or whether it is ever proper for them to do so.[2] I think that the only satisfactory answer (I cannot here spend time arguing that the alternatives fail, though I think they do) is going to have to derive from the person’s conception of what her life is about, what is important in it, and so on. In short, it will have to derive from her projects. If that is correct, then what her projects are will make a difference to what future outcomes she has reason to attach importance to (and how much). And, if her projects can make a difference, they can, presumably, reduce the importance of future outcomes to the point that they are no more important in her decision-making than similar outcomes that would affect other persons entirely. Is that not tantamount to saying (since I have assumed that each person has a special reason for being concerned about her own future) that those outcomes are not part of her life at all, even if they are part of the life of an organism continuous with her?
Now, to say something about the other direction. If it is true that projects make a difference to our identity, this has interesting connections to questions about the meaningfulness of our lives. What we take our lives to be about, both retrospectively and prospectively, will make a difference to what counts as part of our lives, to what our lives are. I think it is plain that this is not enough for our lives to be meaningful or even, if things go well, to have a chance of being meaningful. (What if I took my life to be about becoming a Messiah – which, I presume, I could only sustain by some species of self-delusion?) What we take our lives to be about may fail tests of reasonable aspiration. (Our aspirations may be unreasonably too high or unreasonably too low.) Or, we may in fact fail even if our aspirations are reasonable. But there does not seem to be any reason that we must fail. And, if we do not, it seems (to me) that success in the light of reasonable aspirations is enough for us to find our lives meaningful.
[1] To avoid a side-issue, assume that the two events are equally likely after all allowance for uncertainty about the future and that measures to prevent the occurrence of either event are (a) equally costly and (b) equally likely to succeed.
[2] Another possibility was brought to my attention by Gayle Dean; I’d like to thank her for urging me to address it. This is the possibility of a biologically installed discount rate that includes a mechanism for changing the discount rate itself, and it comes in two flavors. First, there might be an in-built program for its change over time, specifying that it will alter in specific ways or directions over the course of a lifetime in a way that is not sensitive to experience. Then, there would be no varying from a biologically installed discount rate since all apparent changes would be part of the discount rate mechanism. Second, there might be a biologically installed rate that was automatically altered in certain ways in response to events in our lives.
The first is implausible given the extent of observed variance in time discounting. Wide variance – with some people over the courses of their lives becoming more short-sighted, some more far-sighted, and with many variations of degree – argues that the differences are, if biologically installed, then adaptively approximately neutral. Features such as eye color provide a good model here. If people with, say, blue eyes were significantly more likely to survive and reproduce than others – that is, if eye color were not approximately adaptively neutral – then the pressures of natural selection would tend to eliminate all other eye colors. For parallel reasons, since it is not plausible that different time discounting rates are adaptively neutral, it is also not plausible that the observed variation is to be explained entirely in terms of an in-built program.
The second possibility is more plausible and, if actual, would require some rephrasing of the points made in the text. However, it does not make a great difference unless it is claimed that the factors in relation to which time discount rates sensitively vary exclude one’s projects. Moreover, even if that claim were true, it would not by itself imply that persons could do nothing about their biologically installed discount rates. It might be a fact for which, though it is genetically determined, compensation or counter-measures can be arranged, as my genetically determined (optical) near-sightedness is adequately countered by wearing glasses.
