Personal Identity and Trivial Survival

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Your replica is created on Mars and you, on Earth, are destroyed. Parfit claims that your replica may still have what prudentially matters for you—provided that you are psychologically connected and continuous with your replica. If someone accidently destroys the tapes containing your psychological profile used in the production of your replica and this same action fortuitously produces a functionally equivalent tape, Ehring claims that Parfit should maintain that the resulting new individual may still have what matters. Nihilism about what matters follows, or so Ehring claims. I argue that Ehring is wrong and that the difference between the two ways of creating a replica is not trivial—there is no trivial survival.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)402-411
Number of pages10
JournalTheoria
Volume85
Issue number5
Early online date9 Sept 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019

Bibliographical note

Many thanks to Rafael De Clercq and Chiu Wai Wai for their comments and suggestions on an early version of this article.

Keywords

  • Personal identity
  • Memory
  • Derek Parfit
  • memory
  • survival
  • what matters
  • personal identity
  • Parfit

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Personal Identity and Trivial Survival'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this