Personal Identity in the Wild

Personal Identity in the Wild offers a groundbreaking new approach to theorizing about personal identity and its relation to our practical concerns. The standard "metaphysics-first" theorists start by figuring out what we are most fundamentally, urging that we are souls, persons, or animals. Their theories of identity involve showing how that fundamental core is preserved across time, eventually delivering a theory of reidentification, of ourselves and others. This theory finally grounds our identity-related practical concerns like responsibility, compensation, and prudential planning.

In this book, the authors reverse that method by starting with a detailed examination of reidentification and its associated practical concerns, leaving metaphysics for later. And as it turns out, it is especially illuminating to start by investigating the non-human animals in the wild that reidentify each other all the time: some birds aggress less against seasonal neighbors; when eating, dwarf mongooses show greater vigilance when hearing some individuals but not others; American crows scold some humans but not others. The authors investigate what precisely is going on with animal reidentification, something that's always motivated by their practical interests in tracking their neighbors, pack leaders, reliable warners, kin, and general threateners.

Drawing from cutting-edge work in cognitive and perception science, the authors show that these animals are simply tracking physical objects given their interest in specific attributes of those objects. We humans are doing the same thing: motivated by our concerns to track our kids, neighbors, friends, enemies, colleagues, and more, we open mental files^—^representations^—^of them that enable us to track them through all sorts of attributional changes. But physical objects as such give us no reasons to do anything (other than to avoid running into them). Any practical reasons we have with respect to our familiar person-associated concerns have their source in the attributes of those physical objects. The aim of the last half of the book is to investigate just what those reasons are, not just for our concerns regarding responsibility, compensation, and prudential planning, but also for our bioethical concerns about when life begins and ends and our fears of future pains and death.

Shaun Nichols is Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences in Philosophy at Cornell University. He works at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, and his research concerns the psychological underpinnings of philosophical thought. He is the author of Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility, and Rational Rules: Towards a Theory of Moral Learning, as well as over 200 articles in academic books and journals.

David Shoemaker has professed at California State University, Northridge, Bowling Green State University, Tulane University, and Cornell University. He has published over 70 articles and five monographs on topics such as personal identity and ethics, agency and responsibility, humour and morality, property rights, and the philosophy and moral psychology of emotions. He is the founder and co-organizer of the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), the general editor of the OUP series Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, and is currently the Book Review Editor of The Philosophical Review.