The Morality Of Derek Parfit: The Importance Of Personal Identity

Your personal identity is what makes up the person that you are from one day to the next. Many philosophers question what personal identity truly is. Some philosophers agree that personal identity has great rational and a moral significance. Today, I will be talking about the philosopher that says the exact opposite of that: Derek Parfit. First, Parfit believes that at some future time, I shall either exist or I shall not exist. His second belief is that there some matters that are important to us that involve survival, responsibility, and memory, which we cannot decide unless the question of personal identity is answered. By answering the question, “am I the same person?”, according to Parfit, we can then determine whether or not we survive or are responsible for some future action. After utilizing many thoughtful experiments, Parfit establishes that survival is not necessarily directly connected to identity. Derek Parfit argues against the importance of identity. In Parfit’s view, he discusses how humans are nothing more than brains and bodies, people are not separately existing entities, and that identity cannot be reduced to either of these. He says that was truly matters is our survival, and not what makes our survival good, but what makes our

To argue this view he notes that a person could survive with less that his whole body and less than his whole brain. To establish what matters is not identity, Parfit gives the example that a man’s brain is split into two and both halves are to separately be transplanted into two brainless bodies. Parfit argues that it would be a reasonable conclusion to this operation that the man will survive as two different people, in which the two resulting people are his later selves that share a past self as each