PERSONAL IDENTITY (1/2) - Teleportation, blackout & responsibility - Philosophical grain #7
Who am I and what am I responsible for? We are talking about it with Locke and Spock. Because talking about personal identity without mentioning Star Trek teleportation, it would be a shame!
In this video, I regularly avoid speaking about punishment; globally I agree to follow Locke on the idea that personal identity (and so the memory) is the base of responsibility but I don’t push the concept until saying that it justifies punishment; to me it seems to be another question, too hard to be discussed in the video. Though, I do agree with adding few words here for people who would like to know more.
Assume that a psychopath enjoyed killing many people, then, when he is going to be arrested, he drinks a potion that erase all memory of the crime and even all tendency to commit it (so he stops being a psychopath and become a very sane person).
Is this person who drank the potion responsible for the deeds of the psychopath? No according to Locke and it seems intuitive: He cannot recognise them as his deeds (he doesn’t remember it and would even feel some disgust about it). Though, should we leave this person without punishment? The answer is not so simple. On the one hand, assume that we decide not to punish the person who drank the potion but, therefore, this behaviour starts spreading: Many psychopaths follow the same strategy (enjoy the killing and drink the potion); on the other hand, punishing people who drank the potion might be an efficient way to dissuade such a behaviour. Would it be enough to justify the punishment? The question is touchy. (It’s sill punishing someone for deeds that he is not responsible… In some extend, it looks like blackmailing: It’s like threatening the psychopath to punish a member of his family rather than himself, but if it is efficient…) By this thought experiment, I would like to draw attention to the fact that asking why and how to punish can make us wonder in which extend a punishment is useful to society; and if it is often more useful to punish the persons that are responsible and that are the cause of the crime, we can picture these bizarre cases like the one where these 2 aspects are dissociated. Finally note that you can see why the freedom of will is not a necessary condition to justify the punishment: Absolutely determined or not, it will definitely remain useful to punish people who break the law.
Chapter 27, Book II, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” by John Locke (from where the quotes in the video are extracted and which is the most classical text on personal identity) : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Ess...
Extract of video used:
Video from Kurzgesagt "What are you”: • What Are You?
Animation for Theseus boat: • Theseus Paradox Animation
To support me on Tipeee (crowd-funding):
https://www.tipeee.com/monsieurphi
To follow me on social networks:
/ graindephilo
/ monsieurphi
Blog: monsieurphi.com
Watch video PERSONAL IDENTITY (1/2) - Teleportation, blackout & responsibility - Philosophical grain #7 online without registration, duration hours minute second in high quality. This video was added by user Monsieur Phi 26 February 2017, don't forget to share it with your friends and acquaintances, it has been viewed on our site 177,178 once and liked it 6.7 thousand people.