(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

last night universaldonor and i had an argument: he claims that he has nothing to do with his self of seven years ago, and therefore he is not responsbile for anything that self might have done. i argue that a diachronically consistent personality is necessary in order to live in an ethical way, and thus statements like "i am not the same person that i was ___ years ago" can and should only be used as a metaphor for a change/growth in the person, and cannot have any power outside of the realm of a person's phenomenological self-perception. because if we follow UD's way, that way lies moral/epistemological relativism, and the reification of the "synchronic" (defined, seemingly, arbitrarily, since he could not tell me when the cutoff line is, when his old "self" stopped being him and because this archaic, deferred "other") as a modus operandi, which, to me, is really problematic. as i wrote in an email to someone a very long time ago, a fragmented identity is not a very useful concept outside of postmodern texts.

questions, comments, resposnses?

Comments

[elph8.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, I tried to follow this. I couldn't. And it's not just the big words. It's the appositives. Maybe I should go back to school.

In other news, I just finished the entire fourth season of Buffy.

I'm an official convert. Thought you might like to know....

whatev

[claudelemonde.livejournal.com]

This is comparable to the argument that, should (for example) marijuana be legalized, ought those currently in jail on pot-related offence be freed? My stance on the latter is: no, because the offence was committed i violation of then-current laws. Similarly, though universaldonor may no longer identify himself with the UD of seven years past, at the time, he was in full possession (one presumes/hopes) of his faculties & therefore in control of his actions. If a convicted (& guilty, since they're not mutually exclusive) murderer converts to Buddhism after seven years in jail, ought he to then be freed based on his new beliefs, his rebirth? No.

Even though the mere act of taking this argument seriously is pandering to what is no doubt just typical UD posturing/provocation, i think it has other applications outside this sphere that are also interesting. But, in short (i've said it once & i'll say it again): UD, you are totally full of it.

um...

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

I believe he used the argument incorrectly. "I am not the same person I was X years ago" is a fine argument to deal with expectations and how they should evolve with him.

"I am not the same person I was X years ago, and therefore am not responsible" is only correct if he changed his identity and is on the lam or in the witness protection program...

I am not the same person I was so many years ago, and while I feel that time has allowed me to come to grips with and forgive myself for my crimes and misdemeanors, I don't think it means anyone else has to as a result.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

wow, what happenned? were there pigs airborne over frozen hell? i thought you were never going to be "one of us"

Re: whatev

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

seconded! (lovingly, of course)

Re: um...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

i totally agree with your conclusion. that's the only way possible to have an ethical system that is sustainable over time.

[elph8.livejournal.com]

I don't know what happened, exactly. In the interests of fairness, I rented one of the DVDs, watched it, rented another, watched it, and before I knew it ... BAM! ... I'm "one of you."

Does this earn me Friends List priveleges?

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

I feel like this is a suspiciously simple answer, but I'm posting it anyway.

It seems to me that to claim "I have nothing to do with myself seven years ago" requires that the presently speaking subject "I" have structurally similar knowledge of 1. who he is now, and 2. who he was seven years ago, in order to make this judgement. If he did not have knowledge of who he was seven years ago, he could not differentiate this subject from the present subject in order to make the claim. So we can say that speaking "I": myself now as speaking "I": myself seven years ago. From this follows that if we understand the speaking "I" and myself now as one and the same, that the speaking "I" (ok, why am I not just saying consciousness and representation of self here?) that the speaking "I" and myself seven years ago must also be one and the same. Continuation of subject through time.

There's probably a logical slip-up in there, but it's the end of the work day, so that's my best effort.

I like this post. It was fun to think about as I sat here waiting for things to print.

[claudelemonde.livejournal.com]

i agree with that. empirically, it's only sustainable in the case of, say, my friend who was in a car accident five years ago and came to WITH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSONALITY. we hated each other before, and now we're friends. she was engaged before, a cheerleader & 'fast girl' (in the bad, Heathers sense) and then became a teacher, straight-edge, married a different guy, etc. SHE is not the same person she was--indeed, has no recollection of it. Even that connection is tentative, but it's closer to being accurate.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hm. okay. i like fairness. explain what it is you like about buffy and that will re-earn you friend privileges.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

At some point you need to be able to disavow your moral choices. For instance, when I was 10, I just wasn't a moral actor, and I will cheerfully mock any attempt to hold me accountable for things I did while a child.

At what point will I start taking responsibility for my past actions? Hard to say. High school? Probably, though I was still painfully naive then. College? Even then, although I was slightly more knowledgeable by the time I graduated.

Part of it is just that we were all total idiots and it's embarrassing to scrutinize acts of the far-enough-past.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

well, the problem is, it's hard to quantify these sorts of arguments, that's why, in a sense, it is easier to defend one of the two extreme positions. because then you start getting into those weird breakdowns like at what age do you become self/aware, responsible for your actions. there are psychological ways to go about that--like, mental development, internalization of superego, development of theory of mind, etc. but that's obviously very culturally bound/determined and arbitrary at best. some theories don't really account for age, like that ladder of morality deliniated by the sociologist whose name i am blinking on right now, with 6 rungs, ranging from the lowest, where the sole deterrent is fear of punishment, and the top one where people are always driven by moral absolutes. then there is the legal approach, the whole "when can one be tried as an adult?" kind of thing. which is not that helpful. but there is a general vague point/area of time in adolescence where a person stops being a child and develops as an adult, morally/ethically--i guess the point at which childhood socialization is phased out by more ongoing synchronic socialization of the everyday (but the mores and social rules should be absorbed by then). so while i would concede that despite Freud's assertions, a child can be radically different from the adult, at some point that does not fly anymore. because that offers a range of enabling excuses for shitty behavior, like "arrested development," "peter pan syndrome" and others, which i believe have more to do with entitlement and being spoiled than actual failre to develop that's somehow endemic to the individual. and theoretically you could have a sliding scale forever--like, in your forties you could be like "oh, i was stupid and in my 20s"--the vantage point always changes because everyone gets older, like what you say, about high school and college; and to a 70-year old his 30-year old self may seem full of youthful folly. so that's a slippery slope, ethically speaking. sure, it's embarassing to think of ourselves doing stupid shit in the past, but relegating the responsibility for that to this artificially created "other" persona is just an easy way out. i could say i am not the same person i was 5 minutes ago. i am still responsible for what i did 5 minutes ago. basically, i think there is a socially deliniated (more or less) age at which people have to accept responsibility for their actions (somewhere between 13 and 16) and after that (and possibly before that, albeit with qualifiers), their moral choice have to be treated as a continuum, not a series of synchronic events. a person is a sum of their actions adn experiences, both phenomenologically and certainly in terms of who they are/what they mean to other people. so you can't disavow moral choices from the past as belonging to a different person. again; that's just a metaphor and should not be abused.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

i read through this carefully several times; i don't think there is a logical slip-up here per se, and i agree with what you say, although that's probably not how i would choose to argue this point; the problem is, that the speaking "I" is always rooted/produced in the present moment, and the speaking "I" of 7 years ago, is just another representation. i think the main way your argument could be subverted, though, is by saying that speaking self in the present is not necessarily equivalent to "self" in the present and then could be deconstructed on the grounds of "essentializing" the self, can "self" really exist separately from the performative, a.k.a. "speaking" self, is that like a Kantian "pure" self, etc, etc.

Re:

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Kohlberg is the guy you're reaching for. Libertarianism is one of the big flaws in Kohlberg's schema: according to him, it's a rapid degeneration, dropping I-don't-know-how-many rungs on the ladder; makes no sense if it's a steady universal development.

YOur analysuis sounds right.

crime and punishment

[(Anonymous)]

this is a long discussion, and the (LJ) hand having written, moves on.

-mjm

Re: crime and punishment

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

no offense, but that is a zombie comment!

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry responding to an old post, but this is a very interesting question.

First of all, you seem much more concerned about the implications of -- what do we call it? -- 'segmented accountability ' will do as opposed to how legitimately it matches up to our experience. Which is fine -- more than fine, it's essential -- but I don't think one can rule out what otherwise appears to be a legitimate type of self-understanding simply because we don't like what it might be used for when placed in the wrong minds.

A person is not simply a collection of their experiences and actions; they are also the mechanism by which they appropriate and undertake those actions -- an 'identity'. A person is not just a single body that happens to have a continuous memory. They are also the processes, ways of acting, values, beliefs, and ways of thinking with which they interact with the world, and these can change, although perhaps not as easily or as quickly as some would like to believe they can. But you can nevertheless give a person 30 years and they will have, for all practical purposes, both a different body and a different mind. Perhaps even their older memories have been lost. Does it make sense -- except maybe for legal expediency -- to insist that they will in all cases be the same person? I don't think so, and the differences can easily surpass the scope of the metaphorical.

There are also implications to be considered for denying a 'segmented accountability' schema -- what does it say about hope or the capacity for change, for example? Or forgiveness? Or progress? What does it imply about how we evaluate others? What do we expect from humanity when we deny the capacity for radical change? What would you rather hear from someone you've confronted about a long-past grievance -- "I'm sorry" or "That person no longer exists"; the latter requires a different way of thinking and acting. The former is meaningless to me.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

"progress" and "forgiveness" both imply a point of origin against which they are measured; the "that person does not exist" argument negates both of those concepts because it denies the contextual framework they both need to signify anything.

do i know you?

[(Anonymous)]

It doesn't deny a signifier. I can say that John F. Kennedy no longer exists, but the name still signifies him, just as I can still refer to something when I say "Baby Anonymous" and yet not be that thing in any meaningful sense, not even in memory.

Any understanding of progress is going to have to involve some mechanism for recognizing change and difference between a person at one stage in their life and a person at a later stage; it seems difficult or impossible to do that if we're also to insist that they're the same person. The only thing that seems to link the different stages together is a singular perception of time, of pure experience, sans thought patterns, temperament, memories, physical characteristics, etc. Does it make sense to call that a person?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

i did not say that it denied a signifier, i said it obliterated the context. in the absense of a context, the signifier becomes a simulacrum. for me, a statement like "i am a new person" would be meaningless, because it would have nothing to say about the person who hurt me, for example, except, on a meta-level, an abdication of responsibility. whereas "i am sorry" would be a redefinition of that same person vis-a-vis me and the discourse between us.

are you the same person who posted as "~n" today in the post above? i like to keep track of my respondants.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it would say a lot about the person who hurt you -- namely that beyond a recognition of error there has been some sort of change in practice, and that a future does not exist in which it will be repeated. Whereas I think "I'm sorry" simply amounts to "I feel bad about it". Worse than that, it seems like that's the only thing that's expected from the person. Anyone can feel bad about fucking up, anyone can feel guilt, but guilt doesn't do anything.

(no, I haven't commented anywhere else here. Nor do I know you. I'm 100% pure random anonymous/anomalous LJ blip.)