On Identity: Personal and Political
Philosophers talk alot about "personal identity" (sometimes “self identity”). This is different from what some non-philosophers mean when they speak of personal identity, which is likely closer to what we now colloquially call “political identity.”
The question that philosophers address when discussing “personal identity” is how you can remain you over time. We all change as we grow; sometimes we even say we are different from who we were at some prior point in our life. Given how much we change, how can we say we are the same person from one time to another?
If you think you have an immortal soul, you likely think it is unchangeable. That leaves you with an answer to the question of personal identity: the thing that keeps you identical with who you were in the past is your soul. On that view, you do not have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body. You also have a number of contingent attributes—you are tall or short, male or female, black or white, Christian or Muslim (or…), gay or straight, etc. Your soul doesn't change; you change as you (the soul) gains and loses attachments to the various contingent things life brings your way. You gain education, skills, beliefs; they are all contingently attached to you. The same is true of the other attributes I mentioned.
If you don’t believe in an unchangeable soul, you need a different way to answer the philosopher’s question of personal identity. One very reasonable answer is “the closest continuer”—i.e., though you change over time, the person at time T2 that is closest to what you were at prior time T1, is the same as that person—is you. So, while there could be someone very much like me who is a medical doctor, such a person isn’t me because there is a person who more closely continues who I was in the past, including being someone who can’t stand the slight of blood and guts. A person very much like me but a plumber (or a historian perhaps) could be a closer continuer. The person I am, a philosopher, is closer still. Indeed, the closest. That person is me.
I have no settled view about how best to answer the question of personal identity. There are more views than what I explain above. What I am interested in is contemporary talk of "political identity" (sometimes "moral identity"). We talk of people identifying as gay, straight, Christian, Jewish, Republican, Democrat, vegetarian, etc. The idea is that each of these characteristics—each, I think, contingent in that we might be essentially the same person without them as we are with them—determines our political views. (Or: accepting one as your identity entails accepting a bunch of beliefs that you are supposed to have with that identity.) If you are gay or vegetarian, for example, you must be liberal. Your political identity, it seems suggested, is part of your personal identity. This seems to me quite mistaken. (And unfortunate in many cases where it appears true.)
Does your political identity count as (part of) your personal identity? If you identify as a vegetarian, for example, is that a necessary component of your personal identity such that if you give up on vegetarianism and start eating meat, you become an entirely new person (and the person who was a vegetarian no longer exists)? I think the answer to that question is clear: no. Giving up on vegetarianism does not mean you fail to be the person you were. Being a vegetarian is not part of your personal identity. It is not essential to what you are and you don’t have to live your life (or vote) the way other vegetarians (supposedly) do.
This should be obvious. After all, we don’t say that those who become vegetarians when they leave their parents’ homes or go away to college become new people (and that who they were before is now dead and gone). If that’s right—as I think it is—we can’t say those that give up vegetarianism become new people either. In both cases, what we (should) say is that being a vegetarian or a meat eater is a contingent and changeable fact of the individual. The same is true of people who identify themselves with their cultural, religious, or racial, heritage. These may be part of your political identity but are not necessary for your personal identity.
None of this is to say that being vegetarian, a member of particular cultural group, an adherent of a certain religion, having a specific sexual preference, or any combination of these things, is unimportant. They can be tremendously important, but none should be as important to you as your necessary features. For example, we are necessarily rational animals; if we lose our rationality, we are in fact dead and gone even if the body we had is kept alive. Being rational is more important than being a vegetarian, being a US citizen, an American, a Christian, etc. What else is essential to you? I don’t know.
The features of our political identities are important to us. Even if they are ultimately contingent, they are often of deep significance to us. We have other contingent factors—the length of your hair, for example—that are so much more contingent (so much easier to give up, change, etc)—that we normally think of those in our political identity as mattering in a way that make them seem necessary to our being.
The big question: given that these features that make up (or are) our political identities are hugely important to us, how much weight does political identity deserve in moral and political debates? I can’t fully address that here but I can address a narrower version of the question: should political identity get as much weight in policy making as personal identity? I think the answer is obvious: no.
Having a personal identity is being a person. Policy making must recognize the value of persons. A government that fails to recognize the value of each person in its jurisdiction is a bad government.
The clearest duty of any government is to protect individual persons in its jurisdiction. That means protecting them as persons not as the persons they contingently take themselves to be. So, for example, if the earth gets to a point that there are no animals left to be eaten, no government would have the responsibility to protect meat-eaters as meat-eaters. It would still have a duty to protect them as persons. Similarly, though, the state has no obligation to help vegetarians refrain from eating meat. Or to help heterosexuals remain heterosexual (imagine some change in the environment results in 90% of people somehow becoming homosexual). Or to help Pastafarians continue worshipping the FSM, their deity. Etc.
We should stop expecting or wanting government to protect our political identity. We should stop using our political identity to decide what policies we favor. We ought to favor policies that are good for all persons, regardless of their political identity. Regardless of our political identity.