Derek Parfit’s view of ‘personal identity’ raises questions about whether advance decisions refusing life-saving treatment should be honored in cases where a patient loses psychological continuity; it implies that these advance decisions would not be self-determining at all. Part I of this paper argues that this assessment of personal identity undermines the distinction between suicide and homicide. However, rather than accept that an unknown metaphysical ‘further fact’ underpins agential unity, one can accept Parfit’s view but offer a different account of what it implies morally: that the social and legal bases for ascribing a persisting ‘personal identity’ maintain the distinction between homicide and suicide.

Infiltrated consciousness occurs when a subject's sense of self comes to be strongly and negatively shaped by victimizing master narratives. Consider the stay-at-home dad who has internalized a harmful narrative of traditional masculinity and so feels ashamed because he is not the family's bread winner. One way master narratives infiltrate consciousness is through conditioning self-simulation by assigning a hierarchy of values to different social roles. Further, master narratives confine self-simulation by prescribing certain social roles to an individual and prohibiting others. One common suggestion for counteracting infiltrated consciousness is to transform it through membership in new communities with new master narratives. But how does such healing happen? This essay offers a response. Recent psychological research on constructivist theories of memory outlines a naturalistically plausible mechanism for self-simulation. I argue that this mechanism is implicated in transforming infiltrated consciousness. This clarifies features of our psychological architecture that make the alteration of self-concepts possible.

In 2021, the debate about the spaces in which Europe’s Muslim citizens should be permitted to wear religious veils was reanimated by the introduction of new prohibitions introduced in Switzerland and France, and the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in joined cases C-804/18 and C-341/19. This article examines the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights concerning veiling. We argue that veil bans reduce the ability of Muslim women to actualize themselves as citizens by limiting their capacity to develop their identity through autonomous action. As such, we argue, the right ultimately at stake—which should protect rights in respect of veiling—is the right to a private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and judicial and popular conceptions of veiling should be reoriented to accommodate this view. Doing so, we argue, highlights the full range of functions that veiling implicates—including religious but also secular identarian concerns and exposes how a usually expansive right has been curtailed in cases involving veiling.

The present study benefits from social identity theory to argue that employees' organizational identity interacts with their trust propensity to predict affective organizational commitment and creativity. It used random coefficient regression procedures or multilevel modeling through the generalized linear mixed models command to test its hypothesis because the data that were collected in two of the studies were the nested or dependent data. Employing longitudinal data gathered from 153 participants and their 71 direct managers at a public organization in Study 1, the present study revealed that organizational identity had stronger positive influences on organizational commitment and creativity when participants' trust propensity was high. Employing longitudinal data collected from 210 employees of 32 business organizations and from 49 direct supervisors of the employees in Study 2, the present study reassured that trust propensity moderates the relationship between organizational identity and creativity. The present study contributes to the theory that employees' personal identity accentuates the positive relationship between their social identity and workplace outcomes such that the relationship becomes stronger as employees' personal identity increases.

This article examines the emerging possibility of “brain-state transitioning,” in which one brain state is prompted through manipulating the dynamics of the active brain. The technique, still in its infancy, is intended to provide the basis for novel treatments for brain-based disorders. Although a detailed literature exists covering topics around brain-machine interfaces, where targets of brain-based activity include artificial limbs, hardware, and software, there is less concentration on the brain itself as a target for instrumental intervention. This article examines some of the science behind brain-state transitioning, before extending beyond current possibilities in order to explore philosophical and ethical questions about how transitions could be seen to impact on assessment of responsibility and personal identity. It concludes with some thoughts on how best to pursue this nascent approach while accounting for the philosophical and ethical issues.

According to conventionalist or conativist views about personal-identity, utterances of personal-identity sentences express propositions that are, in part, made true by the conative attitudes of relevant persons-stages. In this paper I introduce assessor relative conativism: the view that a personal-identity proposition can be true when evaluated at one person-stage's context and false when evaluated at another person-stage's context, because person-stages have different patterns of conative attitudes. I present several reasons to embrace assessor relative conativism over its more familiar realizer relative cousin.

Brian Leftow continues to argue that the metaphysical concept of constitution cannot be used to explicate the doctrine of the Trinity, as I have attempted to do. He also defends his own, distinctive view of the relation of Jesus to the Father. I maintain that he fails on both counts.

Many theorists have found the notion of forgiveness to be paradoxical, for it is thought that only the blameworthy can be appropriately forgiven but that the blameworthy are appropriately blamed, not forgiven. Some have appealed to the notion of repentance to resolve this tension. But others have objected that such a response is explanatorily inadequate in the sense that it merely stipulates and names a solution leaving the transformative power of repentance unexplained. Worse still, others have objected that such a response cannot succeed because no amount of repentance can render the blameworthy not blameworthy. I argue that this latter objection is based on a mistaken assumption, the acknowledgement of which has the power to resolve the paradox in a way that meets the explanatory adequacy challenge and, more generally, has significant implications with which any full theory of forgiveness must engage.

This essay develops a theory of identities, selves, and ‘the self’ that both explains the sense in which selves are narratively constituted and also explains how the self relates to a person's individual autobiographical identity and to their various social identities. I argue that identities are the contents of narratively structured representations, some of which are hosted individually and are autobiographical in form, and others of which are hosted collectively and are biographical in form. These identities, in turn, give rise to selves of various sorts—true selves, autobiographical selves, public and private selves, merely possible selves, and so on—which are the characters (or presupposed subjects) that appear in our various identities. Although the theory I develop bears some obvious affinities with the view that selves are fictional characters, the two views are in fact distinct, for reasons explained at the end.

African perspectives on personhood and personal identity and their relation to those of the West have become far more central in mainstream Western discussion than they once were. Not only are African traditional views with their emphasis on the importance of community and social relations more widely discussed, but that emphasis has also received much wider acceptance and gained more influence among Western philosophers. Despite this convergence, there is at least one striking way in which the discussions remain apart and that is on a point of method. The Western discussion makes widespread use of thought experiments. In the African discussion, they are almost entirely absent. In this article, we put forward a possible explanation for the method of thought experiment being avoided that is based on considerations stemming from John Mbiti's account of the traditional African view of time. These considerations find an echo in criticism offered of the method in the Western debate. We consider whether a response to both trains of thought can be found that can further bring the Western and African philosophical traditions into fruitful dialogue.