Discworld and Philosophy by Nicolas Michaud

Author:Nicolas Michaud
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699234
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2016-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

When All Else Fails, Reid More

There is one other view I should mention, however, but it also has a downside. Thomas Reid (1710–1796) responds to this whole debate by saying that these other views are trying to answer the wrong question. They want to explain what personal identity is in terms of some further, more fundamental thing. Reid suggests that personal identity isn’t determined by some other thing at all. It’s the more basic concept. Whether I continue to exist can’t be reduced to some more fundamental facts about me and my circumstances, whether of psychological facts, biological continuation, or the existence of a soul. According to Reid, the most fundamental fact is not any of those supposed bases of personal identity. Our psychological, biological, and even soul-related properties (if we have any) would be facts about us, and thus they are not as fundamental in any explanation of what’s going on as the facts about whether I am present or whether someone else is instead.

The downside of this view is that it does seem to be giving up the game. We might have hoped that we could analyze personal identity in terms of something else, both because it’s nice to have deeper explanations of things and because we could then have some criteria by which we could examine any problem cases and then have an answer to whether the Librarian really is the same guy he was before he became an orangutan. On Reid’s view, there is a correct answer to that question, but there aren’t some more fundamental facts to explain why. That’s not all that satisfying, but that also doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. His view does avoid nearly all the problems of the other views.

It’s tempting to come away from all this thinking that philosophy hasn’t gotten us very far. After all, it doesn’t just show us what the right answer is, the way some other disciplines can. But I expect fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories to know better than that. Something doesn’t have to give us all the right answers to be helpful. What does philosophy give us, in this case? It helps us examine what the options are, and on some issues it does give us good reasons to prefer some options to others. With personal identity, it helps us see downsides of every view we might take. That means that, no matter what view we end up with, we’re going to have to accept something we might not have wanted to accept. Like Moist when he has a choice to work for Vetinari or die, sometimes we just have to keep moving and see what happens next.

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