James DiGiovanna

Enhancement and AI create moral dilemmas not envisaged in standard ethical theories. Some of this stems from the increased malleability of personal identity that this technology affords: an artificial being can instantly alter its memory, preferences, and moral character. If a self can, at will, jettison essential identity-giving characteristics, how are we to rely upon, befriend, or judge it? Moral problems will stem from the fact that such beings are para-persons: they meet all the standard requirements of personhood (self-awareness, agency, intentional states, second-order desires, etc.) but have an additional ability—the capacity for instant change—that disqualifies them from ordinary personal identity. In order to rescue some responsibility assignments for para-persons, a fine-grained analysis of responsibility-bearing parts of selves and the persistence conditions of these parts is proposed and recommended also for standard persons who undergo extreme change.

One can have a justified, true belief without much understanding of the proposition believed. This would be a low-value form of knowledge; for example, knowing that it is true that E = mc2 without understanding what it would mean for these things to be equal. Pedagogically, we seek to instill not bare knowledge of the JTB variety, but a form of knowledge that includes the ability to rephrase a claim, relate it to other claims, draw conclusions from it, and make practical use of it. This would be knowledge with understanding, a high-value form of knowledge. Such knowledge comes in degrees as understanding deepens. Marks of understanding are presented, and some pedagogical strategies for using this schema in order to add to a student’s partially present knowledge and deepen it with greater understanding are given.

It is not the case that there is only one literal sense of “same person.” When presented in different contexts, “she is/is not the same person” can have different answers concerning the same entity or set of entities across the same period of time. This is because: Persons are composed of many parts, and different parts have different persistence conditions. This follows from a reductionist view of the self. When we ask about sameness of persons, or “personal identity,” we are asking because of certain practical concerns. Different concerns will look to the persistence of different parts of the person for criteria of sameness. No single criterion of sameness tracks all concerns. By combining reductionism with contextualism, the disparate answers to the personal identity question can be clarified without losing the practical concerns motivating them.