Personal Identity

Personal identity is the question of what makes a person at one time the same person as someone at another. Locke answered in terms of consciousness and memory; neo-Lockean theories in terms of overlapping chains of psychological connection; animalists such as Olson in terms of the persistence of a living organism. Parfit argued from cases of fission, in which one person’s psychology continues in two later people, that identity is not what matters in survival: what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can hold in degrees and need not be one-one.

The puzzle cases were once thought experiments. Systems that can be copied, forked, rolled back and merged make some of them ordinary engineering operations, though whether anything in such a system is a candidate for being a person is a separate, prior and open question.

A different question shares the vocabulary, and running the two together causes confusion. Administrative identity is not what makes someone the same person over time but what makes her identifiable to an institution: a name in a register, a number, a fingerprint. In my work on Aadhaar the labourer’s metaphysical identity is never in doubt, and nor is her legal personhood. What fails is her operative standing as an entitlement-bearer, which the system has tied to her biometric substrate. When her fingerprint no longer reads, she is the same person, and the system no longer recognises her as the person to whom the ration is owed (see constitutive dependence).

The point is that institutions now produce identities of this second kind, and can withdraw them through operations internal to themselves. Scott’s account of state legibility describes how states came to make people readable in this way. The metaphysical question may lack a determinate answer; the administrative one is settled, at the point of transaction, by whether a criterion reads. What is owed when it fails to read is a question of justice rather than metaphysics.