Is Personal Identity, Moral Identity?

Abstract

The problem of personal identity is a classical problem in philosophy. This question has been variedly tackled by different philosophers and philosophical schools. To address the problem of personal identity, it is essential to explicate the notion of ‘person.' Many philosophers conceive persons as inherently conscious beings, who are capable of intentional mental activities which are explicable from the ability to have the first-person perspective and imagine the same of the other. On the other hand, physicalistic personhood is something that has mechanical/bodily properties but, either lacking consciousness or reducing it to a physical basis. For many others, persons have both the properties of mind and body, not reducing to each other. We would agree partially with the latter position and maintain that persons have not only physical properties but also various forms of consciousness, i.e., self-consciousness, moral consciousness, etc. The ability to take perspectives, we claim, lays the foundation of moral consciousness.  In this paper, we aim to show that the idea of personal identity is very much related to moral consciousness. This is because persons are rational beings, and being rational is natural to the person. If a person does any irrational act, it becomes self-denial to him or her as rationality is natural to her or him. Therefore, rationality is one of the inborn qualities of human being, and thus her or his identity becomes a moral identity. If we accept persons as physical beings ultimately, the question of morality, freedom, and responsibility do not arise. The whole idea of self-determination is occurred only in the case of moral identity, but not in the case of persons as only physical beings.  Therefore, personal identity and moral identity are conceptually connected to the extent that we propose that personal identity is moral identity.

Keywords: Personal identity, Moral identity, Material identity, Self-conscious identity, Moral identity.