Abstract

The intuition that a person can survive in a different body has a long philosophical pedigree. It finds support not only in substance dualist views like Descartes' but also in psychological views of personal identity such as those of John Locke and Derek Parfit. The defense of this intuition by the psychological theorists relies on a claim first stated by Locke that "consciousness alone makes personal identity." I consider four ways of understanding this thesis: the one traditionally attributed to Locke; a different one I argue is actually found in Locke; an account traditionally attributed to Hume; and the one defended by Parfit. I argue that each should be rejected based upon Joseph Butler's influential---and, I argue, widely misunderstood---challenge to psychological accounts of personal identity of the sort offered by Locke and his contemporary Henry Dodwell. ;I show that Butler's most important argument against his contemporaries relies not on assumptions about immaterial substances, as is usually supposed, but on the empirical distinction between self-love and benevolence, a distinction that forms the basis of his enduring refutation of psychological egoism. I argue that the distinction between self-love and benevolence is one that must be respected by a correct metaphysics of persons and that psychological views cannot do so. The problem is not, as is usually supposed, that self-love requires the existence of a simple subject of experience, but, rather, that both self-love and benevolence are mental states whose content includes bodies with a particular history. In other words, psychological views fail because the person-centered mental events prized by the theory include bodily content to which psychological views are, by their very nature, not entitled. I believe that this shows not only that no purely psychological theory can succeed, but also that the correct metaphysics of persons must include the body as an essential feature of persons