Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Brent Meeker writes:
>
> >
> You don't have to. Body identity is not sufficient to establish the "fact of the matter". People
> >
> may be acquited to murder (by reason of insanity) because they suffer from multiple personality
> >
> disorder. In such cases, one "personality" is generally not aware of the other(s).
>
> Mainstream psychiatry where I come from does not believe in MPD, but I
> suppose it is theoretically possible that several independent
> personality streams could co-exist in the same brain, and it is a good
> model for our discussion. Suppose that one of the personalities commits
> a crime, then lies dormant so that the personality in the pilot’s seat
> when the police arrest the suspect honestly has no knowledge of the act,
> but later, through psychotherapeutic intervention, both personalities
> are reintegrated. Would it then be fair to punish “both” personalities
> for the crimes committed by one before the reintegration took place?
I think that leads to digressions on "fair" and the purpose of punishing crimes.
>
> The question is, can you come up with a definition of personal identity
> which allows us to decide in these and other unusual cases whether two
> instances of a person are in fact the same person?
That's a good question. Maybe, as in the case of punishing a crime, it depends on why we need to
make this decision, i.e. what action we're contemplating. According to the popular description of
MPD (and I don't know whether such really occurs or not) one personality knows about the other(s)
but not vice versa. But suppose they were completely separate - by that I think you would mean they
didn't share any memories, they just time-shared the body.
Brent Meeker
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list-unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Fri Jun 02 2006 - 14:17:43 PDT