Personal Identity and the Meaning of Commitment
The Case of Marriage
As this post is published, I should be a freshly married man. I haven’t been considering the possibility of marrying for most of my life – I was just not seeing the point. But perspectives change, and people too. As we say in French, “il n’y a que les imbéciles qui ne changent pas d’avis.”[1] And so I’ve changed my mind, and I’m quite happy about that. Marriage is not only a formal procedure generating legal rights and obligations. It is foremost a symbolic commitment where you’re making promises to your spouse. As someone who has been impressed by Derek Parfit’s reductionist account of personal identity, I could not avoid asking myself what the real meaning of the promises I was putting on paper while writing my vows is.
In Reasons and Persons, Parfit discussed a case, suggesting that the ability to make promises is affected by the view according to which personal identity “is not what matters.” Here is the case discussed by Parfit:[2]
The Nineteenth Century Russian. In several years, a young Russian will inherit vast estates. Because he has socialist ideals, he intends, now, to give the land to the peasants. But he knows that in time his ideals may fade. To guard against this possibility, he does two things. He first signs a legal document, which will automatically give away the land, and which can be revoked only with his wife’s consent. He then says to his wife, ‘promise me that, if I ever change my mind, and ask you to revoke this document, you will not consent.’ He adds, ‘I regard my ideals as essential to me. If I lose these ideals, I want you to think that I cease to exist. I may want you to regard your husband then, not as me, the man who asks you for this promise, but only as his corrupted later self. Promise me that you would not do what he asks.
In cases such as this one, there are two distinct questions. First, to whom the promise is made. Second, by whom is the promise made. Parfit argues that there is an asymmetry here. Regarding the former question, the implication of reductionism can be avoided by simply formulating the promise as follows: “I promise you and your future selves that…” With promises of this form, the fact that – according to Parfit’s account – the person who received the promise is no longer the same person in the future is irrelevant. The trick doesn’t work in the latter question. If the promise-maker says “I promise that I and my future selves will…”, what they are doing is basically to commit that someone else will do something. But is this commitment meaningful?
Let’s return to the case of marriage. The situation is different because here, the promise-maker is not making a commitment from which they can be released by the future selves of the person who receives the promise (except of course if the marriage ends). This strips the situation from one of the most interesting aspects discussed by Parfit, i.e., if the wife thinks she cannot be released from her commitment to the young Russian, that’s because she thinks that the “old” Russian is not the same person as his past self. However, if Parfit is right, then when you’re promising something to your spouse, you must think that your commitment is toward your spouse’s present and future selves. As Parfit notes, there is nothing fancy about this – I can promise someone that I will help other people. But note the implication: you’re committing to someone that you don’t really know. This may be what gives marriage its distinctive value as it reflects a high level of trust, if not faith (and this may also explain why some persons consider marriage meaningless).
This leads to the second question. Who is making the commitment? Parfit does not discuss it in detail but notes the obvious: if his reductionist account is true, then it seems that the very ability to commit, or the strength of a commitment, is weakened. In Parfit’s case, is the wife really committed to her promise made decades before? If Parfit’s account is correct, she may be but only proportionally to the degree of “psychological connectedness” between her present and past selves. So, when one is making promises to their spouse, it must mean that the promise-maker is counting on the fact that, even if it weakens with time, psychological connectedness will preserve what they think is the most valuable in them in the spouse’s eyes. And, to the extent that the spouse believes the promise is meaningful, they also must assume that psychological connectedness will preserve what makes her wife or husband so special. The very practice of promise-making and thus of marriage is impossible otherwise.
What are these deep, essential attributes that must be preserved by psychological connectedness as time passes by? There may be no universal and systematic answer but surely traits of character and core values are often part of the mix. Parfit may be right, personal identity is not what matters. But character and values definitely do!
[1] Only fools never change their mind.
[2] Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 327.