ABSTRACT
Transtemporal personal identity transfers normative commitments undertaken earlier: When I am today the same person I was yesterday, the commitments I have undertaken back then “stay with me” and I am – ceteris paribus – still subject to them. (Subject to them, that is, in the default case, i.e. unless there are sufficient reasons, e.g. for me to change my mind.) This feature of commitment transfer seems to be a fairly trivial fact about personal identity, which any viable account of personal identity should accommodate. In this chapter, I want to look at the transfer of commitments which result from making future-regarding decisions or forming intentions for future courses of action. Any plausible metaphysical account of personal identity should not only leave room for this kind of transfer, but, ideally, provide an account of it, rather than leaving it as an unexplained “brute fact” about identity over time. I will argue (by examining, inter alia, the kind of account suggested by Christine Korsgaard in her Self-Constitution) that neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity fail to provide such an explanation and leave commitment transfer mysterious. Afterwards, I will suggest a more Aristotelian picture, which is prima facie more promising with respect to explaining transfer of commitment. But, as we shall see, even for such an account there are serious grounds for scepticism about its potential to provide an informative and non-circular explanation of the connection between personal identity and transfer of commitment.
