Do I recognise you? (05.11.24)

Here’s a moral quandary.

In 2014, Douglas Perry was accused of three counts of murder in the USA. Yet when it came to court, it wasn’t Douglas who was tried but Donna. Donna was the person Douglas became after a sex change fifteen years previously.

Donna denied all responsibility. When asked why the murders had stopped, she said, ‘Douglas didn’t stop, Donna stopped it... I’m not going to admit I killed anybody, I didn’t. Donna has killed nobody.”

Why is this a moral issue? Well, you can’t be guilty of a crime you didn’t commit. If Donna isn’t Douglas, then Donna is innocent.

We call this the problem of personal identity. Douglas and Donna is an extreme example of something we all experience: that we change over time, both internally and externally. We look different and our attitudes have changed. On what basis, then, can we say we are the same person?

The prosecution argued for DNA. Since Donna and Douglas had the same DNA, they were the same person. But this is problematic. For two things to be the ‘same’, they must share every property in common, but dreams and hopes are very different to DNA.

We can play all kinds of philosophical games to help us here.

Imagine an evil scientist transplants your brain into another body. You wake up in the morning, go to the mirror and suffer a monumental identity crisis! Is that you, or isn’t it?

Most people say that it is. They know themselves subjectively; all that’s happened is they’ve acquired a new body. So, Donna really is Douglas despite the sex change.

Yet Donna argues that she doesn’t know Douglas. Her body as well as her subjectivity have changed. Just as I’m very different to my eleven-year-old-self, so Donna is very different to Douglas: she doesn’t like to murder, for one thing.  So, is there anything linking Douglas and Donna?

Possibly, yes; their memory.

Many famous philosophers locate personal identity in our memory of our former selves. True, we can’t remember every moment of our lives but if we think of ourselves as an interconnected chain of mental states that stretches back into the past, then if you remember being five (one link in the chain) and the five-year-old remembers being a toddler (another link in the chain) than you are the same person as the toddler even if you don’t remember being that person.

This takes us back to Douglas and Donna.

If Donna remembers being Douglas, then the court was justified in treating them as the same person. But if Donna has had a catastrophic brain injury so that all her memories have been wiped out (the chain has broken), then it’s hard to see how she can be the same person as Douglas. If she has no memory of what he did, how can she be guilty of those actions?

Some of you will worry about this conclusion but if you do, you need to tell me what makes Douglas and Donna the same if the memory-chain has snapped. If you say, ‘the soul’ then I’d agree if the soul exists. But there is no evidence that it does, or evidence which a religious and non-religious person can agree upon. That being the case, it’s probably best to rely on memory.