Intrinsic survival, multiple survival, and vague survival

Up to the present day, people are being prosecuted for crimes committed in the second world war. A person might have led a blameless life for sixty years; their current personality may be entirely without malice; they may have little memory of the crimes they committed. Yet we hold them morally and legally responsible for those past events. One natural rationalization for this practice is that the person today is the very same individual who committed those crimes: this fact creates at least a prima facie case for holding them responsible for the earlier actions.

Philosophers, lawyers and the general public debate the merits of cases such as these. Philosophers in particular have struggled with the question at the heart of the matter: what it is for one person to survive to a later point in time? Some have thought that, for the war criminal in 1940 to be the very same person as the old man in 2006, there must at least be significant psychological connections---perhaps memories, perhaps shared goals and projects---between the two. If that is right, it will be a substantial question---and one on which key legal and moral claims should turn---whether the old man really stands in the right kind of psychological relations to (what we would usually call) his 'earlier self'. On such a view, absent these relations we no longer have someone morally or criminally resonsible for the crimes (and insofar as current moral and legal practice fails to fit with this, it stands in need of revision). A leading defender of such psychological constraints on personal survival is Derek Parfit; and his discussion of these issues in the seminal 'Reasons and Persons' is the starting point for this project.

This project focuses on metaphysical questions about survival: and in particular, on the nature and consequences of a Parfittian claim I call the 'principle of intrinsic survival'. This is, at basis, the idea that survival in the sense in which it is relevant to issues of moral or criminal responsibility can't be something that depends on what goes on 'external to' the person themselves. To determine whether or not the old man is the surviving war criminal, and so can be held responsible for war crimes, we should look only to the bodily and psychological relations the old man bears to the young man who committed those crimes. This principle rules out theories which would make facts about survival depend on facts about the surrounding environment, the activities and opinions of others, and so forth. It is a substantive and disputable principle, but one that Parfit holds to be at the core of anything worth calling personal survival.

The core of the project is to provide an exact formulation of the principle of intrinisic survival, which despite its influence and intuitive appeal has not received the focused attention it deserves. This provides the basis for evaluating the consequences of the principle, which turn out to be sensitive to its exact formulation (to begin with, one question might concern the scope of the principle: should it just govern the survival of persons, or does it equally constrain the persistence through time of other natural objects and artefacts?) I bring this sharpened tool to bear on fundamental questions in the philosophy of persistence, vagueness, and personal identity. In particular, I argue that among its consequences are claims about the nature of persons so extreme that many will prefer to reject the priniciple itself, rather than accept its implications. In this way this project makes available an evaluation of the principle of intrinsic survival itself, as well as tracing its implications for other philosophical debates.