Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View by Lynne Rudder Baker

(CUP 2000)

0 521 59263 1 hardback 0 521 59719 6 paperback

David Mackie

What is the relation between me—the person DM—and the human being—call it ‘Fatso’—that occupies my chair? If we assume that persons are wholly material beings, then there are two possible answers. The simple view, known as animalism, is that I am strictly identical with (the very same thing as) Fatso. On the alternative view, a version of which Baker defends in this book, human beings constitute, but are not strictly identical with, persons. On this constitution view, although we are intimately related, since we are made of the very same stuff, Fatso and I are two things, not one.

Baker’s book covers a broad range, with detailed discussions of constitution in general as well as of personal identity. But it is of interest especially because it is the first sustained attempt to respond to a range of arguments recently advanced against the constitution view, and in support of animalism, most notably by Paul Snowdon (whose name Baker contrives to misspell throughout) and Eric Olson.

A key element in Baker’s replies to many of these arguments is a distinction between having properties derivatively and nonderivatively. For example, one challenge to the constitution view runs as follows. According to standard versions of the view, I am a person and Fatso isn’t. But since Fatso and I share the same matter, we are intrinsically exactly alike down to the last atom. How, then, does Fatso fail to be a person? What does he lack that I have?

No problem, says Baker: for on her view, Fatso is a person: he is a person derivatively, in virtue of constituting something (viz me) that is a person nonderivatively. Quite generally, when one thing constitutes another, each has some of its characteristics derivatively and others nonderivatively. To possess a property derivatively is to possess it in virtue of constituting or being constituted by another thing that has the property nonderivatively (that is, independently of its constituting or being constituted by anything else).

In this and other contexts, however, it is far from clear that Baker’s new distinction helps. For, first, her solution obliges her to introduce some ad hoc rules about how to count persons in order to dodge the charge that since both Fatso and DM are persons, she is committed to the absurd thesis that there are two persons where I am; secondly, the solution does no more than push the original objection one stage back. For what is the difference between Fatso and DM that makes the latter a person nonderivatively, while the former is merely derivatively a person? As before, since they are atom-for-atom exactly alike, in what can this difference consist?

Baker’s ultimate response to such challenges is that is that the demand for an underlying explanation for the alleged differences between Fatso and DM can just be dismissed: that DM, but not Fatso, is a person nonderivatively is simply a brute fact which admits no further explanation. This, however, seems no less bizarre than the standard constitution view’s claim that, without there being any explanation for this fact, DM, but not Fatso, is a person.

The strangeness of Baker’s position would be less of a problem if she could offer strong reasons to believe that some version of the constitution view must be correct. But her account of the motivation for her view is in fact the weakest part of the book.

The central objection to animalism has always been based on considerations of the following kind. Plausibly, being a person essentially involves the possession of certain sophisticated psychological characteristics. Human beings, however, are not essentially psychologically endowed at all. When he was an early-stage foetus in my mother’s womb, Fatso had no significant psychological characteristics at all, because his brain was as yet insufficiently developed. My mother’s womb contained a human being, but no person. So, Fatso existed before I did. And since nothing can exist before itself, the conclusion drawn is that the person and the human being must be two things, not one.

But animalists have a different account of such cases. It is true that there was once a human being, but no person, in my mother’s womb. But it does not follow that the subsequent appearance of the person DM was the arrival on the scene of a new entity different from the human being. Rather, according to animalists, what happened was that one thing—Fatso—came to qualify as a person. Since on this view I am the very same thing as Fatso, this means that I existed before I was a person. But this, animalists insist, is no stranger than the obvious truth that I existed before I was a philosopher.

The crucial question in this area is whether there is any compelling reason to reject this alternative view. Apart from a boast that her view is consistent with materialism (an irrelevance, since animalism equally has this virtue) Baker’s sole argument for her view is that, unlike animalism, it has the virtue of ‘taking persons seriously’. But ‘taking persons seriously’, it soon emerges, is really a code for ‘assuming without argument that the animalist’s interpretation of the relevant cases is incorrect’. According to Baker, any view that answers the question ‘What am I most fundamentally?’ by citing something that could exist without being a person, as animalism does, is a view that fails to take persons seriously. But this means that what Baker calls ‘taking persons seriously’ is really just another name for refusing to take the opposing view seriously.