Locke’s work is important, for me it is useful though flawed but the project he undertook has been reformulated by other philosophers to be a more complete account. Locke saw PERSON as, importantly, a separable substance to MAN. I will attempt to understand his theory and why it is necessary, look at the accounts of others who have challenged it and formulate my thoughts as to whether Locke’s approach in separating these parts of the human entity brings us a better understanding of personal identity as representative of moral responsibility; which is by my reading the major context in which he held his theory to be applicable. I like his work on this but I am not swayed by it, as an anti-theist I don’t recognise the soul and find no reason for this separation.

Locke and theory

Locke believed in tabula rasa, person born blank and that sensory data would shape personal identity, he also believed in a natural order of morality in which rational actors do not cause injustice, in his attempt to formulate his theories of human understanding he proposed the idea of the personal self as being separate to the entity that is the physical being, which he knew to be an organism that changes in material makeup over time, that does actually but not by necessity reside within along with the soul which he dismisses from the discourse by explaining its lack of necessity of input. For Locke the binding component of the person is the continuity of memory, a person is responsible for acts they can attribute to themselves through recall and admonished of blame if they cannot remember these acts as they can for him rightly claim not to be that person any longer, so if the grown man does not remember the events of childhood then he was not the same person as he had once been, for Locke it is fine that he is still the same physical entity and has the same soul but is a different person.

The initial criticism I am inclined to is that this theory is just not a rich enough account of human existence to be sufficient as an explanation for acts. I go along with the idea that I am a self that is only knowable to itself but not with the idea that that self is separate from my corporeal being or in any way needs to be. Like most people I think I have desires and motivations that are not experience based and an imagination that is not bounded by reality. I strongly disagree with Locke’s postulate that all selves are self interested and would simply site environmentalism as a proof that interests may go beyond the lifespan of the individual.

The enlightenment and the self

As AC Grayling points out the need for a clear and distinct definition of the person is made necessary by other philosophical questions. The attempt to identify the moral component of the entity is reformulation of religious philosophy’s attempt to explain the purpose of such in a time when that project had become necessary as a result of the damage the enlightenment was doing to the self’s understanding of itself.  It is in the enlightenment where dogmatic belief is being challenged, as a by product the self is no longer clearly identifiable as creation and subject of God. It was no longer true that all things could be explained and made justifiable by biblical exegetes; scientific progress brought questions that preachers could not easily answer with scripture. In this respect we see, also by knowing Locke’s other work as a natural and social theorist, that there is political necessity for his efforts; the masses could, in the face of greater information, cease to accept subordination.

The Thomas Reid logic

If I understand Reid’s criticism (REF) correctly then A, B and C are a person at different stages in a linearly alphabetic lifespan. Under Locke’s conditions C is the morally responsible actor for the actions of A if and only if C has in memory (=) A’s actions.

So, if A=B and B=C then C=A

But, if A=B and B=C but subsequently C<>A then Lock’s theory is incorrect.

Following Reid’s logic If A=B and B=C but Locke is correct that A=C and subsequently C replaces A by traversing time then B will be likely to act differently when becoming C and accordingly that would mean that Locke is incorrect.

Locke’s view attempts to be but is not universal in the process of judgement whether by a deity or in a court of law where, in either case, more than awareness in memory of action is considered. We accept in modernity that an individual can perform an action that they are in no doubt within memory that they have done but through circumstance may break from their reasonable self temporarily therefore diminishing responsibility for their actions but in Locke’s day this was no defence before God, his judiciary on earth or under the parameters of Locke’s theory. Can C be the responsible moral being that will be punished for the action that A represents only on the basis of memory recall?

So if A=B and B=C and C=A and B remembers the actions of A and approves but C remembers also the actions of A but disapproves then from a moral point of view C<>B in a way that cannot be easily dismissed as C would not act as B would in the same circumstance as A. Considering this I propose that likeliness of action is indication of the self as much as anything. Consistency of memory does not constitute consistency of action or consistency of responsibility; as we are aware from our own experiences (retrievable memories) the child that comes to regret their actions may be no less responsible for those actions than the child that holds no regret but will be held to less account for them. Judgement even in the eyes of God by this reasoning does not correlate with moral accountability, this is not a digression from Locke’s theory because Locke very definitively places the ACT of the PERSON and CONSEQUENCE of JUDGEMENT at the heart of his writings on this subject so as not to be separate to the moral self i.e. the self is, in his view, not separable to the actions of itself in any moral way like the soul would be; under his conditions the soul is neither the PERSON nor the MAN but may constitute the fundamental substance which allows for the existence of the PERSON.

Locke’s theory seems to suggest that awareness of memory will produce a consistency of moral self; this is flawed in that an individual may change but not necessarily because of memory, the future actions of an individual can become vastly different and unpredictable through the processes of aging, sickness or injury. A person could be rationally said to be a different self tomorrow than they were yesterday with full recall of memory; Locke would likely dismiss this as reaction to sensory input (in keeping with his theory), but it is conversely true that a person could continue to act in a consistently immoral way as they have done previously without the presence of memory of past actions, for me this would be proof of a psychological element of an individual that Locke’s theory pays little attention to. Could an individual be psychologically responsible for an act that the memory has no recall of? If so does this justify punishment? For Locke his deity will have a solution for this problem but here in the realm of mankind his theory gives us a little more work to do. I think the graduated steps in changing the person from a base model, whether blank or not, are fundamental in answering the question of moral responsibility, if it were a clean break from the past at a specific point then the person is lost but if, much like the ship of Theseus, there is change in degrees over time then the person can be separated from actions they committed but can still be said to retain their personhood.

Expanded theory

Hume’s account seems atheistic in his project of answering the same questions; for Hume pursuit of the self was fruitless, he could find no evidence of the self as Locke had talked about that he could not identify with perception. Hume’s, somewhat but not completely, determinist account does not solve the problem of attributing moral responsibility in the same definite way Locke’s does, the idea of final justice meted by God becomes insufficient; if every act including imagination is simply a response to stimulus and given enough information all acts are predictable, this also makes the case that actions are neither moral nor immoral. His account of the human entity as a BUNDLE of sensations and feelings is of very little use when deciding whether an individual is in fact justifiably punishable without at least a nod to Locke’s forensic account.

Parfit takes both these views into account when formulating his own theory on personal identity and expands, centuries have passed since these earlier projects and he has the benefit of scientific and psychoanalytic work done in modernity. For Parfit identifying physiologically with an earlier self indicates that you are the effect of the earlier self but not a sufficient claim that you are that same self, this breaks with Locke’s rigid continuity and also calls into question the idea of moral responsibility based on continuing personal identity for as I stated earlier if B and C would act differently in A’s place, with both agreeing that they psychologically identify with A, then they must be different selves and Locke’s theory is challenged successfully.

Much like in the ship of Theseus thought experiment the PERSON (conscious) will persist regardless of changes in material that constitutes the MAN (corporeal), the sameness of material is neither necessary nor sufficient to be called sameness of person, for Locke the continuing threads of retrievable memory are the proof of continuity of the PERSON but Freud’s work on the unconscious suggests that much of the experiences we have committed to memory are not easily retrievable, for him we are influenced, motivated and driven by inner information that we may not be consciously aware of but can be said to be responsible for our outward actions, for Locke this inner information would not be sufficient to fulfil the condition of moral responsibility other than if the actions performed because of it were memorable to the actor. Locke’s theories are questioned further by scientists and philosophers who contend that the person is not born blank, instead they make the claim that the self physically as well as in conscience has predefined disposition, a rudimentary operating system that favours certain thoughts and actions. It may by evolutionary that in humans it is easy to imagine a blank slate because we are born useless but in nature most animals are born with innate knowledge of foodstuffs and abilities, we are more reliant on learning.

In conclusion

Intuitively Locke’s account is attractive, its reason easily followed and at first hard to object to but it can have logical holes poked as Thomas Reid does; it represents a good starting point for a discussion that new information had made necessary in his time. Expanded theories of the self differ from Locke’s in that they appear to proffer a consistently, but not precisely, updating thematic of the self’s view of itself rather than a clearly unbreakable timeline of memory events. His theory forms a judicial process that is simple, but in modernity, not sufficient. We must pay homage to Locke for opening this discussion but I feel that later theorists have offered better work in expanding it.

Paul Simon Wilson