Vague Persons

Abstract

This chapter defends certain recent kinds of accounts of personal identity that I call non-traditionalist. These non-traditionalist accounts aim to make sense of resilient disagreements between disputants by appealing to certain features of language, the world, or our knowledge thereof, more familiarly found in the literature on vagueness. Recently, however, it has been argued that when we reflect on the nature of persons at, and across, time, we see that problems arise for two of the three standard accounts of vagueness, namely, for both semanticism and epistemicism. Though not intended as such, these arguments would, if successful, be equally powerful objections to many non-traditionalist accounts of personal identity. This chapter argues that these objections fail, both as objections to the standard accounts of vagueness and, therefore, as objections to non-traditionalist accounts of personal identity. Instead, it argues that non-traditionalist views are live contenders in the debate over personal identity and their consideration is suggestive of new ways of thinking about diachronic prudence. In particular, they offer independent support to the idea that the distribution of utility of person-stages, and not merely the sum of the utility of person-stages, matters to wellbeing.