The normative-theoretic implications of reductionism about personal identity

Abstract

This paper examines the implications of reductionism about personal identity for normative theories. It begins by discussing three possible reactions to reductionism: the ‘directional’, ‘conservative’, and ‘revisionist’ reactions. The author argues that the conservative reaction is implausible because normative facts are already indeterminate for many reasons. The directional reaction, which argues that reductionism supports boundary-ignoring normative theories, is also considered to be unsatisfactory. The author then proposes a revisionist approach that rewrites normative theories in terms of R-relations, which are relations that hold between timeslices of a person’s life. This approach is shown to be successful in the case of non-aggregative questions and prudential value. However, the author acknowledges that the revisionist approach faces difficulties when applied to aggregative questions of moral value. To address these difficulties, the author proposes modified versions of prioritarianism, egalitarianism, and sufficientarianism that incorporate R-relations. These modified theories are shown to avoid the problems of the standard versions of these theories. The paper concludes by noting that further work is needed to refine and develop the revisionist approach. – AI-generated abstract.