Critical Study of Carol Rovane's The Bounds of Agency

Critical Study of Carol Rovane’s The Bounds of Agency1 Forthcoming: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Tamar Szabó Gendler Department of Philosophy Syracuse University [email protected] “Like much recent work on personal identity,” Carol Rovane writes in the opening sentence of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, “this effort takes its main cue from Locke” (3). The work also—as its title suggests—takes inspiration from Strawsonian neo-Kantianism. And although direct allusion to his writings is limited to a few passing references, Rovane’s essay is largely Davidsonian in spirit. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that The Bounds of Agency answers a (Lockean) question about personal identity by providing a (neo-Kantian) transcendental analysis of the conditions for personhood whose analysans turns out to be a commitment to (neo-Davidsonian) agency. In situating the work within such an intellectual context, I do not mean to cast aspersions on its originality; there is no question that Rovane offers a tremendously innovative and sophisticated account of personal identity. But it may be helpful for readers approaching the book on the basis of its title to realize at the outset that it is neither a work of analytic metaphysics (in the style of, say, Eric Olson’s The Human Animal), nor a work concerned with the internal structure of agency (in the style of, say, Michael Bratman’s Intention, Plans and Practical Reason). Rather, The Bounds of Agency offers a sustained exploration of the preconditions and implications of taking seriously a particular conception of personhood that (Rovane argues) uniquely satisfies a cluster of methodological constraints that should be accepted by all parties in the debate concerning the nature of persons and the conditions that govern their identity over time. According to such a conception, what distinguishes persons from other sorts of beings is their capacity to engage in agency-regarding relations. What underpins that capacity is a commitment to rational agency, that is, a commitment to achieving overall rational unity. So, argues Rovane, what it is to be a person is to be committed to acting upon all-thingsconsidered judgments in rationally optimal ways. And what it is for a person to persist over time is for certain sorts of rational relations to hold among certain sorts of intentional episodes, in ways that allow the commitments of the person at one time to govern the intentional actions of a person at another. There are reasons to be frustrated by this fine, imaginative, stimulating book. Several of the crucial concepts are disappointingly under-characterized. (Despite its centrality to her central thesis, for instance, Rovane has little to say about the notion of rationality at play in her discussions of rational unity.) And occasionally she is too quick to appeal to received answers to standing questions. (I found her discussion of responses to objections to neo-Lockeanism in chapter 2.3 to be particularly unsatisfying.) 1

For comments on earlier drafts of this critical notice, I am grateful to Michael Della Rocca, John Hawthorne, Tamar Schapiro, Ted Sider, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Jennifer Whiting and Dean Zimmerman. 1

But it is important not to let these minor flaws overshadow the ways in which Rovane’s book represents a first-rate piece of philosophy. Throughout her discussion, Rovane is meticulous in considering alternatives and offering systematic and often compelling reasons for choosing the ones she does. She is particularly scrupulous about acknowledging the counterintuitive implications of her own view and correspondingly ingenious about deflecting criticism on such grounds. And she is extraordinarily sensitive and sophisticated concerning questions of philosophical methodology. Though I remain in the end unconvinced that agency is the concept at issue in debates about personal identity, Rovane does a remarkable job of making her view plausible and convincing. Anyone interested in its central topic will profit tremendously from reading this book. The Bounds of Agency has three main goals. The first, negative, project is to show that no non-revisionary account of personal identity could provide a consistent characterization of the phenomenon under investigation. The second, positive, project is to provide the required revisionary account. And the third, related, project is to spell out some of the implications of that account. In the remainder of my discussion, I will highlight some of the central elements of each of these projects, and offer a number of critical remarks. The negative project is primarily confined to the book’s second chapter. Rovane contends there that our pre-reflective concept of personhood embodies “a contradiction” (38); she writes: “it is deeply rooted in our commonsense thinking that persons are human beings whose life spans are constituted by the biologically defined sequence of birth, maturation and death…on the other hand, it is just as deeply rooted in our commonsense thought that a person’s life can in principle diverge from any particular human life2” (35). Because of this, Rovane maintains, it is futile to consider (real or imaginary) cases where these two criteria diverge; given the contradictory picture that lies at their base, there is no reason to think our intuitions about such cases will shed light on the contours of the concept we seek. This has two related dialectical implications for Rovane’s project. First, assuming that her principled reasons for being unmoved by the sort of case-based arguments that pervade recent discussions of personal identity are correct, it follows that her account is neither helped nor hurt by its degree of success in accounting for our responses to particular real or imaginary cases. Second, assuming that her principled reasons for thinking that any coherent proposal must be revisionary are correct, it follows that her account cannot be dismissed as unsatisfactory merely on grounds that it fails to give sufficient weight to one or another of these commonsense commitments. Though I am certainly no fan of the use of far-fetched imaginary cases, Rovane’s argument here strikes me as slightly misdirected. No doubt she is correct that it is rooted in commonsense thinking that personal and animal identity (generally) coincide, and, at

2

Rovane here cites the examples of “life after death, reincarnation, other kinds of metamorphosis, and even possession” (35) mentioning also as contemporary analogues “artificial brains…, brain reprogramming, and teletransportation” (36). 2

the same time, that we can make sense of the two diverging3. But this is not enough to make our commonsense concept incoherent. For it seems that commonsense thought is entirely non-committal on questions about the modal status of the general coincidence between persons and human animals. In particular, it does not seem to be part of commonsense thought both that “a person’s life can in principle diverge from any particular human life” (35) and that a person’s life cannot, even in principle, diverge in such a way. Rather, commonsense thought seems to embody something like the following commitment: The lives of psychologically-characterized “Lockean persons” and the lives of biologically-characterized “human animals” tend to coincide; however, we can seemingly make sense of a human animal surviving without its associated Lockean person, or of a Lockean person surviving without its associated human animal, and we can envisage circumstances where we would be inclined to say in each of these sorts of cases that the original (commonsense) person has survived. If this is right, then the resulting problem for intuition-based investigation is not that we have been “caught out in believing a contradiction” (38). Rather the problem is we have conflicting inclinations, and nothing in our pre-reflective notion of personhood could tell us whether one or both of these inclinations is mistaken, since both involve extrapolation from—rather than application of—a concept that has definite employmentconditions only in core cases. In terms of Rovane’s larger dialectical point, this may seem something of a quibble. After all, the ease with which we can make sense of non-core cases suggests that there are natural ways of extending the core notion. And the spirited debate that has persisted for the last three centuries suggests that a number of these natural ways are in direct conflict with one another. Together, these facts suggest that the commonsense notion of personal identity is ill-suited even for the investigation and description of commonsense cases. And this in turn suggests that Rovane is right to insist that rigorous philosophical investigation of personal identity is bound to feel revisionary. Nonetheless, if I am correct that the commonsense conception of persons is not incoherent, but merely limited in its applications, this has implications for Rovane’s revisionary project. For it suggests that the commonsense concept requires supplementation rather than replacement—that even in our post-regimentation conceptual scheme, it would be reasonable to include within the repertoire a concept of Lockeanperson-plus-human-animal4. And this in turn suggests that substitute notions of the sort 3

Rovane seems committed only to this weaker thesis in her critical notice of Peter Unger’s Identity, Consciousness and Value (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994): 119-133), see esp. pp. 124-125. But in Bounds of Agency, she writes as if she were committed to something much stronger; she says, for instance: “We are clearly disposed both to affirm and to deny Locke’s distinction, and this disposition of ours constitutes the strongest possible evidence that we actually do believe a contradiction” (38, italics added). 4 Rovane also has positive reasons for rejecting this suggestion. On her analysis, to give pride of place to a notion of personhood that privileges psychology-plus-animality would be hypocritical, since to do so would be to deny full personhood to agents whose personality is not animal-based, on that ground alone. This raises substantive issues about personhood that I address in the final section. My point here is merely that we are not—as Rovane suggests—forced to abandon our commonsense concept on grounds of incoherence. (Thanks to Michael Della Rocca for pressing me to clarify this.) 3

Rovane presents and argues for are not rightfully viewed as the exclusive inheritors of the wealth of associations that attach to their commonsense ancestor. It might be helpful at this point to consider, by way of analogy, the undifferentiated but not incoherent concept of “bigger” held by many three-year-olds, meaning roughly: larger in terms of age and height5. On this use, for example, grandpa is bigger (that is, older and taller) than mommy, and mommy is bigger (that is, older and taller) than sister. Since height and age are not exceptionlessly correlated, “bigger” will often fail to apply: if grandma is older but shorter than mommy, neither is bigger than the other. Still, depending on the reasons that the child has for being interested in bigness, she might have intuitions concerning grandma and mommy’s comparative bigness: Bigger people are better able to reach things on high shelves (so she might be inclined to judge that mommy is bigger); bigger people are better able to tell first-hand stories about things that happened a long time ago (so she might be inclined to judge that grandma is bigger). In making these attributions, the child would be making a mistake, of course—as the child uses the term, grandma is not bigger than mommy, and mommy is not bigger than grandma. And because the child is likely to encounter many such cases, her undifferentiated notion of “bigger” will soon replaced by two others: “taller” and “older6.” Still, there may be many contexts—with regard to her widely-spaced cousins, for instance—where it would be perfectly reasonable for the child to go on employing the old undifferentiated concept. Similar remarks, it seems to me, can be made concerning the commonsense notion of personhood. Locke’s cases and their descendents clearly reveal that the ordinary notion fails to differentiate conceptual strands whose dissimilarities we find readily apparent. And Locke’s discussion and its descendents clearly reveal that there is philosophical utility to be gotten from teasing these strands apart. At the same time, just as we have the concept of “square” in addition to the concepts of “equilateral” and “rectangular7,” and just as we have the concept of “mother” in addition to the concepts of “female who raises a child” and “female who gives birth to a child8,” so too might there be value in retaining the commonsense notion of person as Lockean-person-plus-human5

This example is structurally similar to Piaget’s example of “faster,” which children use indifferently to mean: reaches its goal more quickly and travels at a higher velocity. (For Piaget’s description of this and related cases, see Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of Movement and Speed, trans. Holloway and Mackenzie (NY: Basic Books, 1946/1970); see also Thomas Kuhn’s discussion in “A Function for Thought Experiments” (1964), reprinted in The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). A related example is discussed in Marianne Wiser and Susan Carey’s “When Heat and Temperature were One” (in Deirdre Gentner and Albert L. Stevens, eds. Mental Models (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983). That “bigger” is scalar whereas “person” is not does not affect the force of the analogy in this context. 6 Note, however, that age and height themselves begin to unravel when examined too closely. Premature babies are often treated as having two ages—one dating from conception, one from birth; frozen embryos complicate matters still further. (Back-and-forth trips at speeds close to the speed of light pose related problems.) Similar issues arise attributing height to paraplegics. Without certain general uniformities among human beings, age and height seem as narrowly applicable as undifferentiated bigness. 7 Itself decomposable into “equiangular” and “quadrilateral.” 8 Again decomposable in the face of current technology—into “egg donor” and “surrogate mother.” 4

animal, even as we engage in the sort of disambiguation and extension that Rovane suggests9. Where does this leave us with regard to Rovane’s own dialectical position? In certain respects, it leaves things unchanged. If the commonsense notion of “person” is like the three-year-old’s notion of “big,” then it will be inadequate for dealing with cases where its two constituent components obtain separately. As a result, any comprehensive account will be revisionary in recognizing that the commonsense notion of personhood conflates two independently projectable criteria, and it does so in ways that tempt us to apply it in cases where it is strictly-speaking inapplicable. What this means is that each of the disambiguated notions will capture only part of what the commonsense notion does, and that this partial-capturing will not provide grounds for accusations of inadequacy of the disambiguated notion. But it also means that claims on the part of either one to have finally spelled out what we were really after all along will ring hollow. When we disambiguate “big” into tall-big and old-big, we easily see how each fails to capture some of the features that seemed important about being big (though our intuitions may remain clouded by the extent to which they are (non-accidentally) correlated). In this sense, each of the disambiguations is “revisionary.” But we have no temptation to say that one or the other is the one true successor to the original undisambiguated concept10. With this negative argument in place, Rovane goes on to present her positive proposal. Noting that “no account of the kind ‘person’ can get off the ground without first laying down some substantive assumption about the nature of persons” (65, italics in original), Rovane devotes the third chapter to presenting and defending the view on which the remainder of her discussion will rest: “The task of settling on this initial assumption is really the task of greatest moment in the entire book. Everything will eventually turn on it” (65, italics in original). Given the importance of this move to her argument as a whole, Rovane is here even more methodologically scrupulous than usual. She begins by identifying three constraints on selecting such an assumption. First, it must be non question-begging, in the sense of being mutually acceptable to “both parties in the dispute, the animalists and the neo-Lockeans” (66, italics in original). Second, “the agreement between the two parties should be about something sufficiently nontrivial and fertile for the purpose at hand…The assumption must be so important that both parties to the dispute can agree that any adequate account of the person ought to preserve it” (66, italics in original). Third, the assumption—which will turn out to involve an appeal to persons as 9

There are, I acknowledge, dissimilarities that suggest that the case of “person” is rather more complicated than that of “square” or even “mother.” Except in certain recherché cases, we have no tendency to identify as squares things that are rectangular but not equilateral, or vice versa (though we are slightly less consistent in the case of motherhood). On the other hand, we clearly do have the analogous tendency in the case of (commonsense) persons—so much so that it is difficult to bring ourselves to see that we are making an error. This may suggest a sort of secondorder confusion: we mistake a concept with the structure A-and-B (or perhaps the structure: A-asB) for one with the structure A-or-B. I address these issues in somewhat more detail in “The Concept of Person” (unpublished manuscript). 10 I address Rovane’s positive arguments in favor of endorsing only one of these disambiguations in the final section. 5

constituting an ethical kind—must “be completely uncontroversial from an ethical point of view” (66). Rovane holds that these three constraints are simultaneously satisfied by the assumption “that persons are agents who can engage in agency-regarding relations” where this involves the capacity to engage in “the particular kind of relation which arises between agents when one agent attempts to influence another, and yet aims not to hinder its agency” (72, italics in original). This assumption, which Rovane dubs “the ethical criterion of personhood,” articulates “a necessary and sufficient condition for falling under the kind ‘person’” (72). It’s worth spending a paragraph getting intuitively clear on what Rovane’s proposed assumption comes down to. Persons, according to Rovane, are just that class of beings who are capable of engaging in and being engaged by a certain sort of influence. In particular, they are capable of engaging in and being engaged by what Rovane calls “open and pure rational influence,” where openness amounts to explicitly presenting a reason “as a reason to embrace and act for the sake of the very end for the sake of which the effort at influence was itself undertaken” (80) and purity amounts to “exploiting nothing else but the normative force of the particular reason that it presents” (79). This in turn means that persons are beings who are capable of bringing others to act and being brought to act on the basis of reasons (as opposed to non-rational causes); to engage in these sorts of relations is to acknowledge our own and others’ capacities for autonomous action. And to be capable of autonomous action is to be capable of and committed to acting on the basis of all-things-considered-reasons11. Remembering that Rovane here seeks an initial assumption “so important that it can bear the entire weight of [the] whole investigation” (67-68) that does not explicitly or tacitly depend on an assumption about the nature of persons that is objectionable to one or the other of the disputants (in this case, animalists and neo-Lockeans), we might wonder first whether the candidate she has presented is the most suitable candidate, and second whether any candidate will ultimately be able to satisfy simultaneously her first and third constraints (neutrality) along with her second (significance). Prima facie, there are a number of contenders that seem at least as plausible as Rovane’s. One might think, for instance, that what is distinctive about persons is that they are able to feel and express love or other complex emotions, or that they are able to 11

An extremely important aside: Rovane is explicitly committed to the view that the class of persons includes beings who can engage in such relations, not merely beings who do engage in such relations. (She writes, for example, that “persons are agents who can engage in agencyregarding relations” (72, italics modified) or that “something qualifies as a member of the kind person just in case it has the ability to engage in agency-regarding relations” (5, italics modified)). But she offers only limited guidance as to what the “can” amounts to: Does any sufficiently complicated physical system “have the ability to engage in agency-regarding relations,” or is something additional required—for instance, that the system actually have mental states, or that it belong to a class of beings who generally do engage in such relations, or that it have certain sorts of dispositions or desires to engage in such relations, or…? What sorts of changes would be required for a being to gain or lose the capacity to engage in such relations (see passing remarks on this at 104fn9, and 247-8)? These are not just finicky questions: Given that the condition in question is intended to articulate “a necessary and sufficient condition for falling under the kind ‘person’” (72) on the basis of which Rovane hopes to provide answers to questions of transtemporal identity conditions, it makes a great deal of difference what the capacity in question amounts to. 6

understand and control the world around them, or that they are able to anticipate and feel certain sorts of pleasure and pain, or that they are suitable subjects for moral praise and blame. Or—perhaps more controversially—one might think that they are beings who give birth to featherless bipedinous progeny, or that they are beings who are candidates for salvation through God’s grace, or that they are beings who are able to appreciate jokes12. My own view is that there is no single weight-bearing feature that reveals what the concept of person really amounts to—though there is enough overlap to keep (most of us) talking about the same thing. But even leaving aside that ecumenical possibility, Rovane’s choice of agency seems, on the face of it, somewhat tendentious. Why, one feels obliged to ask, does she latch onto that, given the list of alternatives just enumerated? Rovane offers a characteristically sensitive defense of her decision. She points out that “any account of personhood…should deliver a theoretically comprehensive vision of the person as an appropriate subject for study within the three distinct theoretical enterprises of metaphysics, science, and ethics” (66), and she goes on to argue that neither metaphysics nor science can provide an answer that is both neutral and significant (6670). As a result, she concludes, the appropriate venue for investigation is ethics, and within ethics, the most significant theory-neutral capacity is the capacity for agency. Many readers, I think, will initially resist her analysis—I myself was one such. But on reflection, it has become clear to me that Rovane is onto something extremely deep and interesting ,and that to the extent that her argument fails to convince, it is a consequence of presentation rather than substance. Let me explain. On Rovane’s view, what distinguishes persons from other sorts of beings is a capacity to give and understand reasons, and to act on their basis. One of the most important corollaries of this—though one that Rovane deliberately passes over—is that persons on Rovane’s view turn out to be exactly those beings who have a capacity that permits them to act freely, in the familiar Kantian sense of being responsive to considerations that are not merely causal considerations13. Once one recognizes the ways in which Rovane’s proposed assumption results in a class of persons roughly extensionally equivalent to those identified by Kant as members of a possible kingdom of ends, the choice of capacity for agency comes to feel (to me at least) a good deal less arbitrary. Rovane’s reluctance to discuss this parallel stems, I suspect, from her admirable desire to develop a position with as few controversial commitments as possible14. But in this case the reluctance strikes me as misplaced: part of the reason that Rovane’s book is so philosophically rich and resonant is that it is deeply and interestingly neo-Kantian (and neo-Davidsonian) in its recognition of the importance of reason-based action in distinguishing persons from other sorts of entities15. Rovane’s tendency to play down 12

Thanks to Dean Zimmerman for this (self-referential?) final example. Rovane is candid about this omission, justifying her decision near the end of the book where she writes: “the topic of autonomy or freedom…has been conspicuous by its absence throughout this book…there are simply too many diverse conceptions of autonomy and freedom” (236). 14 Rovane touches very briefly on these issues at 109-111. 15 Of course, Kant and Davidson are not alone in stressing the significance of human freedom, but Rovane’s discussion draws most closely from these traditions. See, for instance, Davidson, “Mental Events” where Kant’s influence is explicitly mentioned (e.g. at 207, 209, 225); cf. also 13

7

these sorts of historical reverberations may lead readers to mislocate their points of disagreement with her, to their own detriment, as there is much that is profound and appealing in her core insight when viewed in this light. As Rovane observes, the most striking implication of her view is the degree to which it distinguishes persons from human animals. While standard neo-Lockean views allow for divergence between persons and human animals in such cases as those involving fetuses (animal without person), possession (same animal, different person), reincarnation (same person, different animal), and their modern analogues (brain zaps, brain transplants, teletransportation, and the like), Rovane’s position introduces an entirely new category of animal-person divergence. For, as Rovane argues in the fourth and fifth chapters of her book (pp. 127-208), there is no reason to think (and, indeed, there is good reason not to think) that the commitment to achieving overall rational unity need be restricted to human-sized entities. So if Rovane is correct that “the condition of personal identity” can be “equate[ed] with…commitment to achieving overall rational unity” (8, italics omitted), then it follows that human persons and human animals need not coincide in a one-one fashion. In particular, if there could be groups of human animals who are committed to achieving overall rational unity, then there could be groups of human animals who together form a single person (Rovane calls these “group persons”). And if the intentional episodes within a single human being could be organized into distinct streams structured by relations of rational unity, then there could be numerous persons (such as the “alters” of Multiple Personality Disorder) who together exist within a single human being (Rovane calls these “multiple persons”). While other writers have recognized one or the other of these possibilities, Rovane notes, “what is novel about [The Bounds of Agency] is that it affirms both possibilities together, and, moreover, it appeals to exactly the same ethical and metaphysical considerations in each case…The result is a much more radical rejection of the human organism in grounding personal identity than has ever been entertained in any previous discussion of the cases of group or multiple personhood” (8). Rovane is quite up-front about the consequences of such a picture, and she fully recognizes that her general commitments imply that group and multiple persons, if they exist, are persons in the fullest sense of the term, with all of the associations that this implies. So, she writes, if there turned out to be multiple and group persons, then “prima facie, we ought to accord to them whatever treatment and consideration our ethical views dictate we ought to accord to persons generally” (245)—presumably things like noninterference with and even support for their continued existence, respect for the pursuit of their legitimate projects, equal treatment with regard to fundamental rights and goods, and so on. So prima facie, causing a multiple or group person to come into or go out of existence would be as morally praiseworthy or reprehensible as creating or destroying an ordinary-sized person. And prima facie, just as it is perceived as unjust to discriminate Davidson “Actions, Reasons and Causes,” “Agency” and “Freedom to Act” (all collected in Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 repr. 1985). For Kant, see especially The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals as well as The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason. For direct application of some of these themes to issues of personal identity, see Christine Korsgaard, “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit” (Philosophy and Public Affairs 28:2 (1989)). 8

among persons on the basis of bodily features such as size or constitution, so too would it be unjust to discriminate among persons on the basis of bodily features such as multiple or partial occupancy. Rovane hastens to point out that the prima facie commitment to equal treatment of group and multiple persons in no way implies that we couldn’t justifiably accord them different treatment. But, Rovane stresses, if we find ourselves wanting to build into our ethical views the possibility of according group and multiple persons different treatment from that accorded to human-sized persons, we will need to do so on anti-egalitarian grounds explicitly committed to the idea that “differential treatment among persons could…be justified” (246). That is, we might well realize on reflection that our ethical commitments to equal treatment of and consideration for persons rest not on personhood per se, but on a personhood under particular circumstances, such as sole occupancy of a single animal body, or access to a single locus of subjectivity. But if so, we should acknowledge such a view for what it is16. There is no question that Rovane needs to countenance such a possibility. But the result of this, I think, is to bring out a certain tension in her overall view. If animal- or subjectivity-based anti-egalitarianism turns out to be what we endorse on reflection, it must be because we think the sorts of differences these features reflect are morally relevant differences17. If, to take a concrete example, we discover that we believe on reflection that it is (in general) morally wrong to cause a person to go out of existence if that person is the sole “occupant” of a particular human animal, but that it is (in general) at worst morally neutral to cause a person to go out of existence if that person is merely one of many such occupants, we may learn that what we hold as morally significant is not that each point of view be protected, but that each animal have an associated point of view. Likewise, if we discover that, on reflection, we have attitudes concerning the proper treatment of non-human animals that mirror our attitudes concerning the proper treatment of human ones, we may discover that many of our moral commitments to treat other conscious beings with dignity are based not on a desire to respect their Rovanean personhood, but rather on a desire to give due weight to their neo-Lockean capacities for memory and anticipation, or even their animal-based capacities to feel pleasure and pain. And if we discover that, on reflection, we care less about a being’s ability to “arrive at and act upon all-things-considered judgments in a rationally optimal manner” (130) than we do about its ability to feel and express love and concern for others, we may discover that we care less about whether the being with whom we are interacting is a Rovanean person, than we do about what kinds of emotional capacities it has. Rovane might well agree with all that I have been saying so far; she might agree that we need not feel moral obligations towards things only insofar as they are persons, and that insofar as things are

16

In the introduction, Rovane writes: “What is being claimed as objectionable is not any particular way of treating other persons, such as showing disregard for their agency; what is objectionable is failing to acknowledge that however one chooses to treat other persons, whether it be with regard for their agency or without, one will have made a choice of ethical significance” (7). 17 It would be possible, I suppose, to justify such anti-egalitarian treatment on practical or even aesthetic grounds. But I doubt that such purported justifications would withstand honest scrutiny by those committed to reaching reflective equilibrium concerning their ethical judgments. 9

persons, we need not feel moral obligations towards them. But I worry that this may be in some tension with her general methodological stance. Recall that Rovane’s goal is to provide a revisionary account of personhood without changing the subject altogether. Her strategy throughout is to identify fixed points to which all disputants should subscribe, and to trace their implications in ways that would then bring out what our (tacit?) commitments have been all along. Rovane suggests that one such fixed-point is that persons are exactly those beings with the capacity to engage in agency-regarding relations. These in turn are exactly those beings with a commitment to achieving overall rational unity, who, in turn, are exactly those beings with a commitment to arriving at and acting upon all-things-considered judgments in a rationally optimal manner. Rovane contends that these are the beings who belong to the distinctive kind “person” that has been of concern to philosophers at least since Locke. But I am not sure she is right about this. One of the things the discussion in the last paragraph seems to show is that the class of things we take to be morally distinctive—in the sense that we feel a moral obligation to treat them in particular ways—may both under- and outrun the class of Rovanean persons18. And there is no doubt that the class of Rovanean persons fails to coincide with the class of beings identified as persons by animalists, or even other neo-Lockeans. Just how much of a problem is this? Rovane is explicit at the outset about the revisionary nature of her project, and about her reasons for thinking any consistent characterization of the concept “person” will require abandoning one or more of the platitudes that we ordinarily accept. With this I have no quarrel (modulo the issues I raise in my discussion of “big” above). But I do worry that, despite her ingenious arguments to the contrary, what Rovane’s revisionary conclusions end up showing is that the concept of agent just isn’t the concept of person— though Rovane has brought out important and non-obvious ways in which they overlap. I am, however, far from certain that any other consistent characterization will do any better at capturing the commonsense concept; if so, then my own commitment to achieving overall rational unity would presumably incline me to accept Rovane’s suggestion. In any case, it seems clear that Rovane has successfully shifted the burden of proof, and raised the standards for accomplishment. All parties to the debate would benefit from tracing the implications of their own views in such rigor and detail.

18

It’s a somewhat more difficult question whether, following on Locke’s idea that person is a “Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit,” Rovanean persons coincide with the class of beings we hold to be morally culpable. Indeed, the issue comes to the fore in Locke’s very next words, where he points out that such a term “belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery” (2.27.26). The problem, of course, is that beings “capable of…Happiness and Misery” (moral patients) may not be “Agents capable of a Law” (moral agents)—and perhaps vice versa as well. The questions of ethical pluralism that this raises lie clearly beyond the scope of this critical notice. 10