It has been a common assumption among philosophers that an account of personal identity should explain why facts about identity carry so much practical significance. As it turns out, providing a view that does this is extremely difficult. This is largely because personal identity is important to us in so many different ways that it is difficult to see how a single relation could capture and explain all of these many types of significance. Two possibilities for responding to this difficulty are to give up on providing a single unified account of personal identity or to give up on the assumption ... More

It has been a common assumption among philosophers that an account of personal identity should explain why facts about identity carry so much practical significance. As it turns out, providing a view that does this is extremely difficult. This is largely because personal identity is important to us in so many different ways that it is difficult to see how a single relation could capture and explain all of these many types of significance. Two possibilities for responding to this difficulty are to give up on providing a single unified account of personal identity or to give up on the assumption that an account of personal identity should explain its practical significance. Both approaches have serious drawbacks. This book provides a third alternative. Rethinking both the nature of the relation between personal identity and practical concerns and the range of practical concerns to which we should attend in considering questions of personal identity, it develops a new kind of account in which the most basic and literal facts about the identity of beings like us are inherently connected to practical considerations. This account, the “Person Life View,” defines personal identity in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life-a “person life”-which is made up of dynamic interactions among certain biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions. It is shown that the Person Life View can provide a plausible and attractive account of personal identity that provides meaningful insight into that relation’s practical significance.