ABSTRACT
Locke claims that the identity of a person reaches wherever its personal consciousness reaches. Locke quite rightly draws a connection between personal consciousness and our moral practices to do with blame and punishment, observing that persons can appropriately be held to account for their thoughts and actions only insofar as they recognize their thoughts and actions as their own. James is far less preoccupied with the issue of personal accountability than Locke, and yet he too puts the ownership relation at the center in his account of consciousness of self. James and Locke also agree that positing an immaterial soul, or ego, does not help people to understand or explain how different thoughts are united within a single consciousness, so that they are owned by a single self. Locke’s stance on this issue is largely motivated by his characteristic modesty about what people are and are not able to know.
