Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• No part of David Wiggins's 1980 book, "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance" is more fascinating than its final chapter₁ where Wiggins's distinctive anthropocentrism and naturalism finds dramatic expression in his account of persons as human animals. The discussion is absorbing because the special problems posed by personal identity represent a test case for any theory of individuation. But more than this, the concept of a person is a pivotal element in Wiggins's philosophy, linking the metaphysical and the moral dimensions of his thought. Such is the issue's importance to Wiggins that he returned to it in several subsequent essays to rework and refine his position₂. This process continues with "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance Renewed", for which Wiggins has entirely rewritten the original chapter on persons.
• The core of the position that emerges in SS, and which remains constant through its refinement in later writings, is this. Although the terms "person" and "human being" differ in sense, the concepts person and human being assign the same underlying principle of individuation, so A cannot be the same person as B unless A is the same human being as B. This is not quite the claim that all and only human beings are persons. The point is rather that for the kind of creatures that we are, namely human beings, our humanity is essential to our personhood. It is possible that "person" might be properly applied to something that is not a human being, and that something non-human might have the psychological attributes that persons typically have. Wiggins doubts, however, that we can make as much sense of these possibilities as we think. Our stereotype or paradigm of a person is a human being, and this tacitly informs all our thinking about persons, including our speculations about those of a supposedly non-human variety.
• In SS, Wiggins develops this account in dialogue with two opposing positions.
  1. The first is the Lockean view that continuity of consciousness, mediated by experiential memory, is the real core of personal identity. Wiggins has considerable sympathy for this view, maintaining against those who construe personal identity in terms of bodily continuity alone, that the Lockean is right to portray the integrity of our mental lives as crucial to our identity. What Wiggins challenges is the idea that we can represent continuity of consciousness as something other than an expression of the vital functions and faculties of a creature engaged, as we are, with the world and with other such creatures. It is not that personal identity consists in the continuity of either mind or body. What is at issue is the continued active existence of an embodied, minded being.
  2. The second opponent is a constructionist who holds that the marks of personhood are socially determined. On this view, what counts as a person is a matter of convention or (tacit) agreement. The essence of personhood is merely nominal, and open to transformation if different patterns of use for the term "person" can be established. Hard cases about identity and survival, of a kind concocted in philosophical thought experiments, show the limits of our existing concepts, though nothing dictates how we should respond to them. It is, broadly speaking, up to us what to make of the concept. Wiggins's case against such constructionism focuses on its moral and political ineptitude₃. It leads, he maintains, to the triumph of a managerial consciousness that embraces facile utilitarian identifications of value and desire-satisfaction and delights in dubious projects of social engineering. A robust conception of human nature, in contrast, enables a deeper politics that can admit that the compass of human desire, and the depth of human potential, may transcend our present conceptions.
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