CFP: Personal Identity and Public Policy

The metaphysics of personal identify is not only of interest to philosophers, but underpins a number of important questions in public policy. From defining “death” to assessing the appropriateness of retributive punishment, many everyday practical concerns relate to the boundaries of the person and what it is that makes each of us persist through time. In this workshop we will examine the relationship between such practical concerns and their theoretical underpinnings. We are therefore seeking innovative papers and interested discussants to address some of the following issues:

Many evaluative tools that are used in policy analysis, such as QALYs, DALYs and risk benefit analysis, imply that the location of goods within a life is irrelevant to their value. Such tools are only an evaluation of features of lives, and therefore overlook key facts about the nature of the people who live these lives, such as the following:

To what extend does the value of a person’s death depend upon their degree of connectedness to the future life that they forego? According to the ‘time-relative interest theory’, if a person is more strongly connected with a period in her future, that period has a greater value to her than it would if she had been more weakly connected with that future period. Whilst intuitively plausible, this theory has implications that can be hard to accept, such as the non-transitivity of the value of lives.

How much is the value of goods (and bads) affected by their connections with other valuable features of that person’s life? People who go through prolonged periods of suffering might be harmed more than those who go through the same quantity of suffering where this was discontinuous, because their shorter periods of suffering can be more readily compensated for by other good things in their life. Similarly, suffering may be seen to have a retributive value when it closely follows an immoral action, but this value is likely to diminish over time.

Are people always benefited by additional goods, even where these change their connections to their past and future selves? When goods come from interventions that are so radical as to disrupt a person’s identity over time, their life would effectively be ended at the point of the intervention and the additional goods would accrue to a new person with a different life. Examples of such interventions might include gene editing therapies, especially where these are used to change a person’s cognitive capacities, or certain radical social interventions. Under such conditions raising a person’s quality of life may not be in her self-interest, and it may even be said to constitute a kind of harm.

What is the relationship between personal identity and moral patiency? Some have argued that being a person, or having the potential to be a person, is a necessary condition for whole classes of moral concern. This need not imply that nothing is owed to non-persons, but does suggest that they are of significantly less moral value and are unable to form part of our moral community. It is not always clear to what extent the concept of personhood depends upon our theory of personal identify.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words and expressions of interest in being a respondent or discussant to [email protected].

Deadline for submissions of abstracts and expressions of interest: September 12th

Notification of acceptance: September 30th

 Limited funds are available to assist with travel and accommodation expenses for attendees who are unable to cover their costs. Please mention if you would like to make use of these when applying