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Derek Parfit claims that the idea of personal identity (having a unique personality exclusive to one person) is not as important as psychological continuity, which is having an uninterrupted mental connection between the person who you were two weeks ago and the person you are today, at least when reflecting on ones self. His arguments for this view are relatively sound, personal identity is not essential to survival or responsibility, he claims. Also, the thought experiment in which one brain is split into two parts and transferred to two separate bodies stomps all over the idea of personal identity being fundamental to our existence. However, ones personal identity, their idea of who they are, play a crucial role in their emotions and, most importantly, their happiness. …show more content…
Forgoing the many arguments surrounding this topic, the basis of transsexualism is being unhappy with your biological gender and wanting to change it to reflect the gender that you identify with. Say you have two males who self identify as women and don't feel comfortable in their current bodies. One undergoes gender reassignment treatment and the other does not. Both would be psychologically continuous, the only difference being that one male now has the physical features of the gender they identified with. This, hopefully, would result in the person who received the treatment happier than they would have been if they did not receive
Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self-inside.
Derek Parfit, one of the most important defender of Hume, addresses the puzzle of the non-identity problem. Parfit claims that there is no self. This statement argues against the Ego Theory, which claims that beneath experience, a subject or self exists. Ego Theorists claims that the unity of a person’s whole life including life experiences is also known as the Cartesian view, which claims that each person is a “persisting purely mental thing.” Parfit uses the Split-Brain Case, which tells us something interesting about personal identity, to invalidate the Ego Theory. During the Split Brain procedure, there are neither ‘persons’ nor ‘persons’ before the brain was split. Within the experiment, the patient has control of their arms, and sees what is in half of their visual fields with only one of their hemispheres. However, when the right and left hemisphere disconnect, the patient is able to receive two different written questions targeted to the two halves of their visual field; thus, per hand, they write two different answers. In a split brain case, there are two streams of consciousness and Parfit claims that the number of persons involved is none. The scenario involves the disconnection of hemispheres in the brain. The patient is then placed in front of a screen where the left half of a screen is red and the right half is blue. When the color is shown to one hemisphere and the patient is asked, “How many colors do you see,” the patient, with both hands, will write only one color. But when colors are shown to both sides of the hemisphere, the patient with one hand writes red and the other writes blue.
Parfit’s view on the nature of persisting persons raises interesting issues in terms of identity. Though there are identifiable objections to his views, I am in favor of the argument he develops. This paper will layout Parfit’s view on that nature of persisting person, show support as well as argue the objections to the theory. In Derek Parfit’s paper Personal Identity, Parfit provides a valid account of persisting persons through time through his clear account of psychological continuities. He calls people to accept the argument that people persist through time but people do not persist or survive by way of identity.
Although the concept of identity is recurrent in our daily lives, it has interpreted in various ways.
Imagine going through life believing that you were born into the wrong body. This is how a transgender feels as they go through life. A transgender is a person who whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to male or female sex. This topic is very controversial due to many arguments about the differences between the male and female physique. The natural biological differences between males and a females play a huge role in this controversy.
In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matter. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question of identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail, and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism. Problems of personal identity generally involve questions about what makes one the person one is and what it takes for the same person to exist at separate times (Olson, 2010).
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
A good portion of society is unknowingly misinformed about these kinds of people. When an individual identifies themselves as transgender, it means that they feel that their biological gender does not match their psychological gender. To put that into a simple man’s term, the individual feels they “were born in the wrong body”. For example, a man feels that he was meant to be born a woman and vice versa. It does sound rather unusual, but why does that matter?
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
Transsexuals, defined simply is a person who from the very core of there being feels like they are in the wrong orientation and transgenderism is that state of being when one's gender doesn't match those feelings. In the case of transgender children they usually feel like god made a mistake and in some case scenarios boys particularly try to alleviate the situation themsel...
Looking at the Functionalist perspective it is perceived that the transgender community goes against society’s traditional concept of sex and gender. Transgender gender-nonconforming individuals face many obstacles in a society that is unforgiving of any individual who does not fit into the “appropriate” expectations or behaviors of gender identity or a gender binary system. The rules of behavior in our society that are considered “appropriate” for women or men inhibit us all. This is the social construction of gender roles, patterns of socially defined behaviors and expectations that are associated with the female and male; men have to dress, act, and speak in a hard, masculine way, while women are to be feminine and soft. There’s not much room for individuality there and for some of us, this is a little more challenging. There seem to be some misconceptions about gender and sex, I believe it is much more complex than we came to
The Transsexual have a resistance to their bodies, the experience of gender dysphoria. Similar Nong Toom, they would try to find money to do the sex reassignment surgery as soon as they could. They are different from the gay men because they identify themselves as heterosexual women, even though they are attracted toward men as well (LeVay & Baldwin, 2012). When text describes that transgender is like when “women trapped in men’s bodies”, I do not understand what it meant. The textbook Human Sexuality asked the readers to imagine themselves in the body of the opposite sex in one day, likely they will be shock, discomfort, and pray to go back to their old selves. (LeVay & Baldwin, 2012). After viewing the documentary in class about the middle sex and watching the film, I am convinced that the transgender are not comfortable with their bodies since they know to how to express their
When someone is transgender it means they are relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex. Transgender hormone therapy, also sometimes called cross-sex hormone therapy, is a form of hormone replacement therapy in which sex hormones and other hormonal medications are administered to transgender or gender variant individuals for the purpose of more closely aligning their secondary sexual characteristics. When someone is transfeminine they were born male but identify as female. When someone is transmasculine they were born female but identify as a male. There are six different surgeries a transgender may
Transsexual individuals encounter a sexual orientation character that is conflicting with, or not socially connected with, their appointed sex, and yearning to forever move to the sex with which they distinguish, generally looking for therapeutic help, including hormone substitution treatment and other sex reassignment treatments, to offer them some assistance with aligning their body with their recognized sex or sex. Transsexual is by and large considered a subset of transgender, yet some transsexual individuals dismiss the mark of transgender. A medicinal finding of sex dysphonia can be made if a man communicates a craving to live and be acknowledged as an individual from their distinguished sex, or if a man encounters impeded working or trouble as an aftereffect of their sex character.
When discussing the topic of transsexuality a lot of confusion is in the air. For starters, the definition is; a person who emotionally and psychologically feels they belong to the opposite sex. Notice how it says physically, meaning under the knife. While this may cause debate, it’s stated that it simply is a person who has undergone treatment in order to acquire the physical characteristics of the opposite sex. When defining ethics it simply is the moral philosophy that involves defending and recommending the concepts of right and wrong conduct. In practice, ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality, by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, justice and crime. When on the topic of transsexuality the term ethics