Persons and Personal Identity by Kind Amy;

Author:Kind, Amy; [Kind, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2015-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Interestingly, though the bodily theory is usually put forth as a theory of personal identity, proponents of the bodily theory often deny that they are giving a theory in terms of the technical notion of person that we developed in chapter 1. Judith Jarvis Thomson, a contemporary American philosopher who defends the bodily theory, notes that she is giving a theory of “just plain people – ordinary men, women, children, and infants” (Thomson 1997, 203). Thus, she claims, the fact that this view does not cohere well with the Lockean-inspired conception of personhood that we discussed previously is not supposed to count against it.

In addition to having the virtue of simplicity, the bodily theory seems to correspond with many of our ordinary intuitions about ourselves. Damage to my body is damage to me, not merely damage to a possession of mine. My left leg is not merely part of my body; it is part of me. But despite these points in its favor, the bodily theory has not been widely held. One problem stems from an inherent vagueness in the very notion of same body. This vagueness becomes apparent when we consider cases in which part of the body is damaged or even destroyed. When American snowboarder Amy Purdy had both of her legs amputated below the knee at the age of 19, was she left with numerically the same body? Or consider Taylor Morris, a member of the United States Navy trained to work with explosives. While stationed in Afghanistan in 2012, Taylor sustained serious injuries to all four of his limbs, ultimately losing both of his legs, his left arm from the bicep down, and also his right hand. After his accident, did he have numerically the same body? What about Marie Antoinette? When the guillotine was lowered on October 16, 1793, causing decapitation, was the headless body that remained still the same body?

We might also consider cases involving bodily transformations. When Rachel morphs into a bear in the Animorphs book series, does her bear form count as the same body as her human form? When Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk, does his body stay numerically the same? Related issues arise from cases involving bodily replacement parts. Presumably, a body will still be numerically the same even after a heart transplant, even if the heart were artificial. A body would also presumably be numerically the same even if it were also to get several more artificial transplants: kidneys, liver, and so on. But now consider an extreme case: if Raymond Kurzweil's predictions are correct, then within the next couple of decades we will begin to incorporate non-biological nanobot technology into our physical bodies. Consider someone who is an early adopter of this technology; let's call her Nan. After a period of time, 30 percent of her body has been replaced by nanobots and has thus become non-biological. Does Nan still have numerically the same body? What about at 50 percent? Or 100 percent?

Importantly, these cases do not show that personal identity comes apart from bodily identity.

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