ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Mark Johnston’s arguments against our ontological trashiness, raise some questions about his positive view of persons, and criticize Johnston’s rejection of alternatives, such as Peter van Inwagen’s animalism—a view that altogether denies the existence of the ontological trash that drives Johnston’s argument. It describes two main fault lines among rival metaphysics of human persons: the distinction between substance dualism and substance materialism, and the distinction between the ontologically trashy and the ontologically unique. The chapter argues that the anti-animalism argument is a bruised reed on which Johnston had better not lean, on pain of piercing his own hand. It suggests that Johnston’s combination of ontologically unique persons with ontologically trashy embodiments requires that he construe these embodiments in an event-like way. The chapter provides a few remarks and raise some questions about Johnston’s arguments from the assumption of our ontological trashiness to the collapse of practical reason and a workable morality.
