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Self-Unity, Identification and Self-Recognition

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Abstract

The concept of identification is often appealed to in explanations of how it is that some actions are authored by an agent, and so autonomous, or free. Over the last several decades, different conceptions of identification have been advanced and refined, and the term is now commonplace in moral psychology and metaethics. In this paper I argue that two dominant accounts of identification implicated in self-unity (represented respectively by Christine Korsgaard and Harry Frankfurt) fail to acknowledge the significance of a related form of self-unifying activity, self-recognition. Self-recognition is self-authoring because it involves identification with a new description of oneself, but it is excluded by standard accounts of identification which over-emphasize action and volition in autonomous agency. Although self-recognition is unlikely to produce immediate action, it accords with the activity of self-unity that is said to be constitutive of identification.

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Notes

  1. I will take Frankfurt as my representative of the hierarchical view. Another sophisticated version of that approach is advanced by Bratman (2007).

  2. As Schechtman (2008) puts it: “Constructionist accounts view persons as constructs out of temporal parts, while non-constructionist accounts see these parts as abstractions from a unifed person.”

  3. As the issue is not germane to my argument, I set aside the many criticisms of Korsgaard’s further arguments attempting to show that the principle of choice must be universalizable including those advanced by Tubert (2011) and Fitzpatrick (2013).

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O’Hagan, E. Self-Unity, Identification and Self-Recognition. Philosophia 47, 775–789 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0024-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0024-4

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