Moral Responsibility and Personal Identity

The article analyzes the relationship between two groups of theories — Strawsonian theories, the leading modern theories of moral responsibility (MR), and a group of personal identity (PI) theories (including substantialist view, narrative approach, biological and psychological theories) — with concern on the issue of PI over time as a necessary condition for the appropriateness of holding someone morally responsible. In the Strawsonian theories, it is usually assumed that the person who is to be hold morally responsible for some action should be the same person as the person who committed this action in the past. However, within these theories, this condition is mostly accepted as satisfied by default and without its problematization. By contrast, in the PI-theories, it becomes a subject of careful analysis. In most of such theories, to be “the same” person as a person at some different moment is understood in terms of numerical PI. However, in those PI-theories where PI is defended as a necessary condition for MR (substantionalism, narrative view), MR itself is usually understood quite differently from how it is interpreted in the Strawsonian theories. On the other hand, in those PI-theories where MR is understood in the Strawsonian vein (biological and psychological approaches), the special arguments are presented to show that numerical PI is not a necessary condition for the so-understood MR. The state of affairs in which one theoretical area (MR-theories) assumes an answer to the question (about PI as a condition for MR), that (at least at first glance) disagrees or even directly refuting in a related theoretical area (PI-theories) could be treated as evidence for inconsistency between these two areas. This article aims to clarify and to resolve this apparent meta-theoretical conflict. My goal is to demonstrate that there is no contradiction between the Strawsonian thesis that in order to be an appropriate target of MR the person has to be “the same” as a person at a different time, and the thesis of some of the PI-theories that numerical PI doesn’t matter for the appropriateness of the Strawsonian MR.