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Self-identity and Moral Agency

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Autonomy and the Self

Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies Series ((PSSP,volume 118))

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the contribution self-identity makes to our standing as morally accountable agents. Some of our interest in self-identity, i.e. a sense of self, arises out of concerns of particular importance from the perspective of the person herself. Such matters include the sustained interest we have in our future and in the fact that we anticipate our own behavior in a different way than we anticipate the behavior of others. Yet second-personal concerns are apparent here as well. It is a matter of both first-personal and second-personal concern that we be able to present ourselves as partners in social exchange with others and in the interpersonal enterprise that constitutes moral accountability. Self-identity is foundational for interacting in ways that give expression to our values and concerns. A sense of self enables us to be aware of what we do and to appreciate the motives that lie behind what we do. A sense of self is thus crucial to our status as agents; without a sense of self, we have no reason to place faith in our own agency—in our ability to affect the world through our choices and actions and our position to do so.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The arguments in this chapter appeared in Marina Oshana, The Importance of How We See Ourselves: Self-Identity and Responsible Agency (Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Lexington Books, 2010).

  2. 2.

    For a discussion of this relationship, see John Perry, Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002), and Galen Strawson, “The Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 4, No. 5–6 (1997): 405–428.

  3. 3.

    David Jopling, “A ‘Self of selves’?” in Ulric Neisser and David A. Jopling, eds., The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture, Experience, Self-Understanding (Cambridge, CUP, 1997), 249–267, at p. 249.

  4. 4.

    Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 40–41.

  5. 5.

    Jopling, “A ‘Self of selves’?”, 262–263.

  6. 6.

    See J. David Velleman, Practical Reflection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Reprinted by CSLI Publications, Stanford University, 2007.

  7. 7.

    For an extended argument on this point, see Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

  8. 8.

    Peter Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the Proceedings of the British Academy, 48 (1962): 1–25. Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy, 68, (January, 1971), 5–20. Reprinted in Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Also see John Martin Fischer, “Responsibility and Self-Expression,” The Journal of Ethics Vol. 3, No. 4: 277–297 (1999).

  9. 9.

    Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character, and Morality,” in Amélie O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 197–216, at page 202.

  10. 10.

    Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology ,Vol 1 (1988). Reprinted in Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, ed. Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 386–407. All references are to this text.

  11. 11.

    Philippe Rochat, “Five levels of self-awareness as they unfold early in life,” Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 12 (2003): 722.

  12. 12.

    Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” 386.

  13. 13.

    For a survey of the debate, see Brie Gertler, ed., Privileged Access: Philosophical Accounts of Self-Knowledge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

  14. 14.

    For a discussion of self-recognition and the acquisition of identity-files, see Perry, Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self.

  15. 15.

    J. David Velleman, “The Self as Narrator.” In Self to Self: Selected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 214.

  16. 16.

    Thus Owen Flanagan remarks that “the conditions governing personal sameness require not strict identity or absolute sameness but rather that certain relations of psychological continuity and connectedness obtain. We require that there be narrative connectedness from the first-person point of view, that I be able to tell some sort of coherent story about my life.” Flanagan, “Multiple Identity, Character Transformation, and Self-Reclamation,” in his Self Expressions: Mind, Morals, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 65.

  17. 17.

    The standard taxonomy has been challenged by Sven Bernecker as problematic and inadequate. He argues for a grammatical taxonomy of memory. See Bernacker, Memory: A Philosophical Study, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  18. 18.

    Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, 2000.

  19. 19.

    Velleman, “Self to Self,” Philosophical Review 105 (1996), 39–76. Reprinted in Self to Self, 172. All references are to this text.

  20. 20.

    I even wonder how Shelby fares with proprioceptive forms of self-awareness that might inform him of a sense of being self through time.

  21. 21.

    Kennett and Matthews, Abstract to “Memory, Agency, and Value,” Practical Identity Workshop, Monash University, 2006.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Benedict Carey, “H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82,” New York Times, December 5, 2008.

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    Interview with Suzanne Corkin, “The Man Who Couldn’t Remember,” February 2009 by Sarah Holt, for “How Memory Works,” PBS Nova.

  27. 27.

    See, e.g., William Hirst, “The remembered self in amnesics,” [sic] in The Remembering Self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative, ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 252–277. Hirst argues that if we allow for a more nuanced understanding of the self, and attend to the fact that memory draws on multiple systems that are able to operate independently of one another, we will find a strong sense of self in amnesiacs, one that extends beyond the onset of their disability.

  28. 28.

    Kenneth Gergen, for example, contends that “the very concept of memory, as a specific process within human minds, is a discursive artifact,” and nothing more. He writes, “We have no means of identifying a particular psychological state associated with or responsible for producing various actions which we publically index as ‘memory.’ The conditions for ascribing memory are not then signaled by the existence of a mental event, but are socially designated. That is, under circumscribed conditions we collectively treat certain actions as ‘remembering’.” Gergen, “Narrative, Moral Identity and Historical Consciousness: a Social Constructionist Account,” in Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness (Making Sense of History), ed. Jürgen Straub (Oxford, U.K.: Berghahn Books, 2005), 111.

  29. 29.

    See Frederic Barth, “How is the self conceptualized? Variations among cultures,” in The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture, Experience, Self-Understanding, ed. Ulric Neisser and David Jopling, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75–91.

  30. 30.

    Galen Strawson, “The Self,” in Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol. 4, No. 5–6 (1997), 405–428.

  31. 31.

    This good transcends a strictly Aristotelian understanding of well-being and flourishing. For further discussion, see my “How Much Should We Value Autonomy?” Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 20, No. 2, (2003), as well as Christine Korsgaard, “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1989). Reprinted in Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, eds., Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, (New York: Macmillan, 1991).

  32. 32.

    Joëlle Proust, “Thinking of oneself as the same,” Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003): 506. Emphasis original.

  33. 33.

    Amélie O. Rorty and David Wong, “Aspects of Identity and Agency,” in Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, 30. For more on this point, see Jan Bransen, “Alternative of Oneself: Recasting Some of Our Practical Problems.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 60, No. 2, (Mar., 2000): 381–400.

  34. 34.

    Although I have named this character after the lead singer of the Four Tops, the description I have provided is in no way meant to depict any person living or deceased. Mr. Stubbs, a soulful baritone, passed away on October 17, 2008. His namesake, Levi Stubbs the cat, is a member of my household.

  35. 35.

    The most familiar interpretation of authenticity of recent memory is owing to Harry Frankfurt. Frankfurt deploys the language of “identification” or “satisfaction” to refer to this phenomenon, and argues that a person’s conduct is authentic when it is under the direction of proattitudes that the person either has reflectively sanctioned and with respect to which a state of heartfelt equilibrium has been achieved, or when the person finds herself volitionally constrained to act in such ways. The latter represents Frankfurt’s more recent position. See Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Thus, if we discover that on the occasion of his uncharacteristic behavior Levi could not reflect upon the content of and the motives for his behavior, we would have reason to believe that Levi’s behavior was inauthentic.

  36. 36.

    The sustained enterprise of racial passing in the life of literary critic Anatole Broyard is instructive in this regard. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Passing of Anatole Broyard,” in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 180–214, and Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007).

  37. 37.

    It is an open question whether susceptibility to praise and blame rests on satisfaction of the conditions for accountability, and whether accountability means sanctioning a person by means of praise, blame, or the reactive attitudes. My view is that it does not. See Marina Oshana, “Moral Accountability,” Philosophical Topics, special issue on Agency, vol. 32, nos. 1/2, Spring and Fall 2004: 255–274. For a view to the contrary, see David Shoemaker, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” Ethics 121 (2011): 602–632.

  38. 38.

    T. M. Scanlon, The Significance of Choice, 1986, The Tanner Lectures (University of Utah Press, 1989). A fuller development of the view is found in Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998). My use of Scanlon’s language should not imply a wholesale endorsement of his contractualist thesis.

  39. 39.

    Scanlon, The Significance of Choice, 166–167.

  40. 40.

    I thank David Copp, Steven Davis, and a referee for this volume for urging me to make this point explicit.

  41. 41.

    Daniel C. Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amélie O. Rorty, (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 175–196; at page 191.

  42. 42.

    Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

  43. 43.

    Bernard Williams, “Ethical Consistency,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary volume xxxix (1965). Reprinted in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 166–186. All references are to this text. This quote appears at 179.

  44. 44.

    Put somewhat differently, in order for the statement “I am a sneaky rascal and food thief” to be true when Levi utters it, Levi must have collected and arranged in his “self-idea” file certain concepts he has about himself, thereby facilitating self-recognition. The belief that he is the sneaky rascal responsible for stealing the food is attached to Levi’s idea of himself as a discrete personality, a distinct, unified, accountable agent.

  45. 45.

    Velleman, “Self to Self,” in Self to Self: Selected Essays, 198.

  46. 46.

    Rochat, “Five levels of self-awareness as they unfold early in life.” As Kenneth Gergen notes, “An actor’s success in sustaining a given self-narrative is fundamentally dependent on others’ willingness to play out certain parts in relationship to the actor.” Gergen, “Narrative, Moral Identity, and Historical Consciousness: A Social Constructionist Account,” 115.

  47. 47.

    Paul Benson, “Taking Ownership: Authority and Voice in Autonomous Agency,” in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, John Christman and Joel Anderson, eds., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 114. Also see Benson, “Free Agency and Self Worth,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 91, No. 12 (1994): 650–658.

  48. 48.

    Stephen L. Darwall developed the idea of recognition respect, along with the idea of appraisal respect in “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics vol. 88 (1977). Reprinted in Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect, ed. Robin S. Dillon, (New York: Routledge, 1995).

  49. 49.

    Oshana, “Moral Accountability,” op. cit.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Marina Oshana

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  1. Marina Oshana
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Correspondence to Marina Oshana .

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  1. Centre for Advanced Study in Bioethics, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Geiststraße 24-26, Münster, 48151, Germany

    Michael Kühler

  2. Philosophische Fak., Fachgruppe Philosophie, Universität Konstanz, Universitätsstr. 10, Konstanz, 78464, Germany

    Nadja Jelinek

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Oshana, M. (2013). Self-identity and Moral Agency. In: Kühler, M., Jelinek, N. (eds) Autonomy and the Self. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 118. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4789-0_11

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