ABSTRACT
Focusing on English law, this chapter begins by explaining what advance decisions are, how they were developed, how they fit into the legal corpus and how they function. Following this, it outlines some of the main theories of personhood that have been used as a basis for contesting the legitimacy of advance decisions, through the suggestion that the creator of the advance decision is not to be considered the same person as the individual to whom the advance decision may apply in future. The chapter argues that the acceptance of some conceptions of person-hood would, in practical terms, defeat the right to make autonomous decisions over one’s future self in the way that the British Parliament intended. It would be ‘strange’ and counterintuitive if our connection to our future selves were dependent on Parfit’s claim about personhood, because we can observe that people are treated as being the same person throughout their lives within different social networks.
