Is personal identity what matters?

Abstract

Personal identity over time consists in physical and psychological continuities rather than the persistence of an irreducible, immaterial substance or a further superlative fact. In complex cases such as fission or teletransportation, numerical identity may fail to obtain or become indeterminate, yet the underlying relations—specifically psychological connectedness and continuity—retain the prudential and moral significance typically attributed to survival. This reductionist framework demonstrates that what matters in survival is located in these lower-level continuities rather than in the conceptual fact of identity itself. Because identity is constituted by these basic relations, it lacks independent rational or moral importance; any significance it appears to possess is derivative of the continuities it summarizes. Consequently, special concern for one’s future is properly grounded in the presence of these relations, even when they take a branching, one-many form that precludes identity. Arguments suggesting that identity provides an additional ground for concern mistake linguistic or conceptual descriptions for substantive differences in reality. Shifting focus from numerical identity to psychological and physical continuity recalibrates the foundations of egoistic concern and moral compensation, revealing that the boundaries of the self are a misleading basis for determining what is of value in a life. – AI-generated abstract.