This is a rewarding book. Touching on fundamental issues in epistemology, action theory, philosophical psychology (and psychopathology), Rovane injects a much-needed dose of vigor into the rather stale debate over personal identity. Rejecting both animalist and traditional Lockean accounts of our identity, Rovane develops a model of personal identity based on the unification of intentional episodes brought about by the normative commitment to rationality. Although Rovane’s discussion is not always easy to follow, her account deserves close and serious scrutiny.

Famously, Locke distinguished the concepts of ‘person’ and ‘human being’. Human beings are a species of animal, while persons are psychological entities, where, at least for Locke himself, ‘psychological’ is to be unpacked primarily in terms of consciousness. According to Rovane, animalists reject Locke’s distinction between persons and animals; they hold that persons just are animals. Rovane defends the Lockean distinction between persons and animals, but rather than construe personhood in terms of the unity of consciousness as Locke did, she argues that we should individuate persons in terms of normative commitments to unifying projects. For Locke, a person is a phenomenological point of view, for Rovane, a person is a rational points of view, a set of intentional episodes unified by normative relations. Rovane argues that her account has two surprising consequences. First, there can be multiple persons located in one human being, and second, a number of human beings can compose a single group person. A single human being is home to multiple persons when parts of it pursue their own unifying projects and are individually committed to the norms of rational unity. A number of human beings constitute a group person when they commit themselves to adopting a single rational point of view. Importantly, Rovane argues that a phenomenological point of view and a rational point of view can come apart: some of a person’s intentional states might lie outside the reach of their consciousness, while some of those psychological states that they have phenomenological access to might not be theirs (26).

The path to Rovane’s account of personhood is far from easy to trace. She begins by arguing that the debate between Lockeans and animalists is intractable. Both camps can muster intuitions in support of their position, and both camps can preserve the metaphysical-cum-logical constraints on personhood. Rovane concludes that theories of personhood must be revisionary – i.e. they must sometimes conflict with our pre-theoretical intuitions. But any account of personhood must preserve at least some central aspect of our pre-theoretic concept. Rovane bases her account of personhood on what she calls the ‘ethical constraint.’ The ethical constraint is the claim that persons have a special form of ethical status, an ethical status that Rovane unpacks in terms of rational agency. Engaging in rational agency, for Rovane, involves both being a rational agent oneself, and recognizing rational agency in others. Whenever one engages with persons, one has to decide whether or not to respect their agency; failing to respect someone’s agency is failing to treat him or her as a person.

In what follows, I want to isolate, and take exception to, three elements of Rovane’s discussion.

Rovane identifies animalism as the chief rival to Lockean accounts of personal identity. This, I think, is misleading. As Rovane characterizes the debate, Lockeans and animalists give competing accounts of personhood. I doubt that many animalists would endorse this description of their project. Animalists usually regard ‘person’ as akin to ‘baker’ or ‘student’ rather than ‘tree’ or ‘boat’, that is, the term refers to a property that a thing may have for only a portion of its existence rather than identifying an object as a particular kind of individual. Animalists don’t, or at least need not, deny that we are persons; rather, they deny that we are essentially persons, that personhood fixes our identity or existence conditions. An animalist can even endorse a Lockean account of personhood, but she will deny that such an account tells her what sort of thing she is. So, if one regards the debate over personal identity as a debate over our existence conditions, then Lockeans and animalists are rivals. But it’s not clear that Rovane does take the question of personal identity as such a debate, and certainly the thrust of her argument is deeply at odds with such a characterization of the debate.

In fact, Rovane is less than clear about what animalism actually is. She says that the dispute between Lockeans and animalists ‘concerns whether such an agent [that is, a rational, self-conscious agent], is necessarily an animal, whose condition of identity is the condition of animal identity’ (67). But this statement collapses two importantly different claims. One claim is that all persons are also animals. The second claim is that, for those persons that are animals, their conditions of identity are the conditions of identity that individuate the particular kind of animal that they are. The first claim is not a part of the animalist thesis, and I can see no obvious reason why animalists should adopt it. The other claim, however, does capture the animalist position. Animalists need not hold that non-organic entities – machines as opposed to animals, if you like – are incapable of attaining Lockean or Rovanian personhood; they don’t claim that personhood is restricted to animals. Rather, they are concerned to argue that we, you and I, should not be individuated in terms of this capacity.

That Rovane and animalists are (primarily) interested in different questions is brought out very clearly in the fact that Rovane’s analysis of personal identity is entirely premised on the claim that persons have a certain ethical standing: ‘we will being our investigation into the kind ‘person’ by assuming that it is a certain ethical kind’ (66, italics in original, cf. 68). Animalists are not interested in any question that has (direct) moral import. Animalists can grant that some human beings fail to have serious moral status, even though such individuals are essentially human beings. Since Rovane’s ethical constraint is meant to articulate what is involved in having a particular form of ethical significance, there is little reason for animalists to see the results of her inquiry as threatening their project.

Rovane’s discussion of the ethical constraint on personhood – in particular, her analysis of what it is to engage in agency-regarding relations – contains some deep and important insights. Unfortunately, I was unconvinced that the ethical constraint suffices to ground Rovane’s normative analysis of personhood. Even if one thinks that ‘person’ is an ethically significant term, it is far from clear why one should be moved to unpack the ethical significance of ‘person’ in just the way that Rovane does. I found it difficult to follow Rovane’s path from the ethical constraint to the normative account of personhood, but here is my best attempt at reconstructing the argument.

1. Personhood is an ethically significant property that demarcates the realm of the ethical (107).
2. The only ethically significant property that demarcates the realm of the ethical is that of having a point of view, of being something to which things matter (108).

Therefore,

3. Having a point of view, of being something to which things matter, is both necessary and sufficient for being a person

Crucially, (2) admits of two readings. Rovane would have us read it as a claim about rational points of view. But one can also read it as a claim about phenomenal points of view. To put the same point in terms of mattering, one might distinguish between phenomenal mattering and rational mattering. Something matters phenomenally when a stream of consciousness is, or might be, affected by it. Something matters rationally when the intentions of a rational agent are, or might be, affected by it. Kicking a dog involves phenomenal mattering, it probably does not involve rational mattering (at least, that would seem to be Rovane’s view). As far as I can see, there is no ethically uncontroversial way of privileging one of these readings of (2) over the other. Mattering does not uncontroversially demarcate the realm of the ethical, for different ethical theories will privilege (and indeed, recognize) different forms of mattering.

Personally, I am inclined to think that Rovane’s analysis of personhood in terms of capacity to engage in agency-regarding relations is right on the button, but as I am not inclined to think that personhood demarcates the realm of the ethical in an uncontroversial way, I don’t think that she succeeds in providing much of an argument for her position.

I turn now to Rovane’s criticisms of Locke’s account of personal identity, on which persons are individuated in terms of the unity of consciousness. Rovane rejects the Lockean model on the grounds that two mental states might be part of the same stream of consciousness without being part of the same person. In fact, she suggests that this possibility is realized in certain cases of multiple personality disorder (MPD), in which one personality or alter has conscious access to a mental state that doesn’t belong to it but instead belongs to one of the other alters (172). Let us call this ‘third-person’ form of phenomenological access to a mental state ‘q-phenomenology’. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility of q-phenomenology outright, but I do want to briefly suggest that these waters are a lot murkier than Rovane’s rather swift discussion indicates.

A number of worries might be raised against Rovane’s uses of the reports that multiples make here, but I have space for just two brief comments. Although one also finds claims of q-phenomenology in other psycho-pathologies, such as thought-insertion in schizophrenia, such claims are always restricted to thoughts. I know of no case in which someone claims to be aware of a sensation which they claim is not his or her own. Indeed, it is very difficult to conceive of what it would be like to have phenomenological access to a pain, and yet for that pain not seem to belong to one. Yet Rovane seems to allow that one might have third-person phenomenological access to mental states of all types, including sensations. This, I suggest, is rather implausible. Second, it is far from clear that one should interpret these alters as claiming that the thought they have access to does not belong to them, instead of understanding them as saying that the thought in question was not one that they brought about. As a parallel, consider a case in which my arm seems to me to have been raised by Jane. I might say, ‘That was not my arm raising’. In saying this, I don’t mean that the arm in question was not part of my body, but rather, that I was not responsible for moving it. In short, q-phenomenology is a rather more complicated affair than Rovane’s rather cursory discussion of it suggests.

Finally, let me take issue with Rovane’s normative account of personal identity. According to Locke’s model, the conditions under which mental episode belong to persons are, at least in outline, fairly straightforward: persons simply are streams of consciousness, and a mental state belongs to a person if and only if it is part of a certain stream of consciousness. I find Rovane’s account of psychological ownership – what makes my mental states my mental states – less clear. She says that ‘a thought counts as mine just in case it belongs to my rational point of view, and thoughts belong to my rational point of view just in case I ought to take them into account in my deliberations, so that they are duly reflected in my all-things-considered judgments’ (25). But this doesn’t really answer the question that was posed. What I want to know is which thoughts I ought to take into account, and on this point Rovane has nothing to say. Rovane writes, ‘when I deliberate, I ought to resolve all of the contradictions and conflicts within my own points of view, but I need not resolve all of my disagreements with you. Likewise, I ought to rank all of my preferences, but this ranking need not reflect your preferences’ (24). But there is a circularity here, for whether or not something is part of my rational point of view depends on whether or not I ought to take it into account, that is, whether or not I ought to resolve contradictions and conflicts between it and my other intentional episodes.

An additional problem with Rovane’s theory is its failure to take account of sensations and perceptions. Even if one grants that all mental episodes have intentional content, it is far from clear that all of a person’s mental episodes stand in intentional or normative relations to one or more of their other mental states. Rovane’s normative account of personal identity seems to be in grave danger of leaving many intentional episodes unowned and orphaned. Consider the commonplace phenomenon of a tune running through one’s head. Does this intentional episode stand in rational relations with other intentional episodes, such that one ought to take it into account in one’s deliberations? No doubt one could construct a scenario in which it does, but in the ordinary course of events such experiences seem to be free-floating, unrelated to one’s other states by normative relations. Rovane’s account of such mental states would seem to leave them unattached to persons, a result that is deeply counter-intuitive.
 

Timothy Bayne was until recently a graduate student in the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Arizona.  He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (his native country).

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Categories: Philosophical