# How Your Story Holds You Together

Speaker: Marya Schechtman
Course: Personal Identity and Narrative
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/marya-schechtman-how-your-story-holds-you-together
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/marya-schechtman-how-your-story-holds-you-together/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxXCQW7KtJg

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

Standard theories of personal identity, whether psychological or biological, each face serious challenges. In this lecture, Marya Schechtman presents an alternative: the narrative approach, which she has defended in her own work. The core idea is that persons organize and experience their lives through a largely implicit self-narrative, one that operates in the background and gives meaning to what is happening in the present. Schechtman explains how this view responds to Derek Parfit's radical rejection of identity and draws on the model of living organisms to illustrate how identity can be holistic rather than reducible to a single criterion. She explores how children learn to narrate themselves, how the same moment can feel different depending on the story it belongs to, and how narrative connects us to our future selves in ways that ground both self-interest and moral responsibility. The lecture closes by acknowledging key challenges facing the narrative approach, which Schechtman promises to address in the next installment.

## Why Current Identity Theories Fall Short

We've seen that each of the major positions on personal identity, the psychological theory and the biological theory, has its attractions and also has its drawbacks and challenges. This raises the question of whether there might be an alternative to these two major positions that might capture some of the virtues of both and avoid some of their drawbacks.

## Introducing the Narrative Approach

And one approach that shows some promise in this regard, and it's the approach that I've defended in my own work, seeks to describe the identity of a person in narrative terms, using the unity of a person's life or seeing the unity of a person's life as analogous to the unity of a narrative. To understand this approach and see why it might seem promising and what difficulties it might face, it will be useful to return to a challenge to the psychological approach that was raised in the second lecture and to consider it in just a bit more depth.

And what we'll see in the end is that the narrative approach's response to some of the fundamental questions and problems requires a fairly radical rethinking of the question that we're asking, and it's a rethinking that narrative theorists seek to motivate and seem to show how it will help us move forward. But it's, of course, something that not everyone agrees with, and that's probably going to be the biggest challenge to the narrative view.

## Teletransportation and the Branch Line Case

In the second lecture, we talked about teletransportation and the branch line case. Teletransportation is the way of traveling to Mars by having your information beamed. Usually, the original body that steps into the teleporter is destroyed before the information gets beamed. In the branch line case, it doesn't.

And Parfit lays out this case in order to help us see what's a sticking point for many people in giving their support to the psychological approach. And the sticking point is that the relation of psychological continuity as it's usually described in that approach doesn't seem deep enough to capture what we really care about. So the worry that people raise is that once you look at the branch line case and you see two perspectives, that of the person on Earth and that of the person on Mars, it no longer seems like the connection between the person who steps into the transporter booth on Earth and the person who steps out on Mars is a deep enough connection to really constitute identity as we usually think about it.

Now, when I talked about this case before, I diagnosed what was going on in terms of a slide from Locke's discussion of sameness of consciousness as the thing that constitutes personal identity, that what makes me the same as some future person is that I will have the same consciousness in the future. That person will have the same consciousness as I do. To the psychological continuity theorist's notion of psychological continuity, which is not really sameness of consciousness, it's an overlapping chain of similar beliefs, values, desires, character traits, and so on.

## Sameness of Consciousness vs. Mere Similarity

And what the branch line case really seems to suggest is that what we want is sameness of consciousness and not just similarity of psychological states. The fact that there's an overlapping chain of similarity between me and someone in the future just doesn't seem to be what we want in the way that imagining that when we die, our consciousness will continue on in some deep sense seems to be what we want if we want to survive.

## Parfit's Radical Rejection of Identity

And Parfit recognizes this, and he says what we want is some further fact of identity over and above just this overlapping chain of psychological connections, but he doesn't think there is such a further fact. He's a reductionist, as we discussed in the last lecture, and so he doesn't think that it exists. This is all we get.

And so what he says is about the branch line case, that when we fear that in teletransportation I shall not get to Mars, he says, my fear is that the abnormal cause may fail to produce this further fact, the deep continuity of consciousness. And he says, but I've argued there is no such fact. What I fear will not happen never happens. I want the person on Mars to be me in a specially intimate way in which no future person will ever be me. He says, what I fear will be missing is always missing. And he says that means that we have no good reason to fear teletransportation.

It really gives us everything we could possibly want because it gives us what we already have. So he says there's no good reason to reject teletransportation as a way of surviving, but that isn't because teletransportation, he says, is about as good as ordinary survival, by which he means what we think of as ordinary survival, but rather because ordinary survival is about as bad as being destroyed and having a replica.

And actually, he doesn't think it's all that bad. He thinks it's liberating. He says once we see that our connection to our future selves isn't this deep tunnel of consciousness or something that we thought it was, it should be liberating. He says that he personally is much less worried about the future and what it will bring for him. He doesn't fear death anymore.

And he also thinks that once we recognize how weak our connection to our future selves really is, how loose and really not important a relation personal identity, or even psychological continuity itself is, that we should refocus our ethics because we worry too much among the rights of the individual and fairness to the individual, but the individual is a very loose thing, and we should just care more, he thinks, about well-being in general and not about the well-being of individuals. We should focus less. So he draws very radical ethical and psychological conclusions from this.

The narrative view that I'm going to talk about, the narrative view that I have tried to develop, is an attempt to avoid this conclusion by rejecting the fact that our ordinary survival is as thin or as weak a relation as he says it is. So he's saying we think there's something there in our lives, it's not. And so the mere fact that you can't tell me what the difference is between teletransportation and what you have in ordinary life shows you that you've got this illusion about the depth of personal identity.

## Narrative as a Response to Parfit

And of course, Parfit is not the first person to say this. There are many great world traditions that say personal identity is an illusion and a pernicious one that just brings suffering and that we should work hard to try to rid ourselves of it. I'm not going to be able to engage that question because it's so big and so deep, and there are so many forms of the rejection of personal identity as an illusion.

So what I'm going to try to do is describe a strong relation of sameness of consciousness over time, a strong psychological continuity that's narrative in form, and that has the holism of a narrative, and explain how that can help explain and justify the importance that we put on identity, and in particular, the importance we put on identity with respect to things like moral responsibility, prudential concern, and just our general interest in being around.

## How Narratives Are Holistic

Before getting into the details of the view, I want to set the stage a little bit by giving a broad overview of the way in which narrative is holistic. The idea is that in a narrative, each part of the narrative, each event, each passage, each scene, depending on what medium you're taking this narrative in, is what it is only in virtue of its place in the whole. Events in a story, and I'm going to use narrative and story interchangeably, there are ways they can be separated, but they don't matter for our purposes. Events in a narrative do usually unfold over time, and the telling or reading or viewing of a narrative unfolds over time.

And we can pick out a passage or an event or a scene, but ultimately, picking out any little bit of a narrative, this passage of the book, this scene of the movie, this event in the story, is artificial because the character of that event depends entirely on where it is in the narrative. What it means, how we react to it, what significance we place on it can depend on whether it happens towards the beginning of the story or towards the end of the story or right in the middle. It can depend on what came before and what comes after, and we can't really understand that part except in the context of the whole, and that's the way in which in a narrative the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

And you contrast that with the real independence of the moments in the psychological continuity theory. So in the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, what you've got is an overlapping chain of connections. You take moments in a person's life. They've got well-defined beliefs, desires, values at that moment. You count up whether they're the same, how many of them are the same or different from the ones the moment before. This overlapping chain of events could go on forever and ever in principle, with no shape to it or anything.

It's just a chain of things that are hooked together, as opposed to a narrative that has a beginning and a middle and an end and a shape and a trajectory in which all the parts fit together, in which what happens at the beginning informs everything that happens afterwards. What happens afterwards can go back and change the way that we understand what happened in the beginning or what it really means. And so nothing like that is happening in psychological continuity, but it does happen in narrative, and that's what gives narrative the kind of holism that's going to be important for responding to the challenge that we get out of something like the branch line case or the challenge that Parfit raises from his reductionist perspective to tell us what a deep unity of consciousness over time could possibly look like.

## Organisms as a Model for Holistic Identity

And just in case it's helpful, another example of the kind of holism that I'm talking about here is exactly the kind of holism we see in an organism. So a heart is a thing. You could measure it, you could weigh it and so things, so on. You can say something about it as a thing, you can detach it from a body, but if there were no organisms with circulatory systems, it would be a whole different thing. It would be a meaningless thing. You can't see the meaning of a heart. You can't see the purpose of a heart. You can't see the specific significance of a heart outside of the context of an organism that has a circulatory system, that needs oxygen brought to various parts of its body, and so on.

So an organism is holistic in this way that all of the functional parts of it can only be understood in the context of the whole, and so that's another kind of holism that's akin to this. So this shows at the most general level why we might think that narrative would be a useful tool for developing an account of personal identity that makes identity a deeper relation than the traditional psychological continuity theory. But we need to say a lot more to turn this broad thought into an actual account of personal identity.

## How Does Self-Narration Create a Person?

How does this narrative thing work in actual life of people? How does it constitute an identity for people? In broadest outline, most versions of the narrative view of personal identity, and the one that I'm gonna defend here, claim that the identity of a person over time is constituted through that person's own autobiographical narrative. The claim is that by fashioning the events and experiences in one's own history into a narrative, one actually makes oneself into an enduring individual person.

Now, from that succinct description of what the view says, a lot of questions are likely to arise. For instance, how does telling a story generate an entity and keep it going over time? And if the person is created by the narrative, who's doing the narrating that conjures the person into existence? How does self-constitution work at all, is really the question here. Doesn't there have to be some entity there to do the narrating, to do the constituting, and isn't that the person, and doesn't it preexist this narrative?

Also, you might wonder, does this view really hold that whatever story a person tells about herself is true just because it's the story she tells? Can a person tell any narrative they want about themselves, and then since it constitutes their identity, magically their saying it or telling it about themselves makes it true? That seems rather implausible. These are all reasonable questions, and answering them is gonna require further explanation of exactly what the narrative view says.

I'm gonna respond to the questions about how self-constitution works in this lecture. And in the next lecture, I'll come back to the final question about can we just make ourselves whoever we wanna be. This is, I think, what people worry most about with the idea of a narrative view of self, is that somehow my story of who I am is automatically the truth of who I am. So that will be the topic of the next lecture. But I'll begin by just trying to give a sense of what I mean by saying that people constitute themselves through their self-narrative.

## Self-Constitution: Persons as Living Organisms

To begin with, the sense in which persons are self-constituting on this view is pretty much like the sense in which organisms are self-constituting, although people don't find it so paradoxical about organisms. Animals are constantly engaged in all living things, really, are constantly engaged in activities that maintain them as organisms. They're constantly having to do things to maintain their integrity as organisms, even the most simple single-celled organisms. Metabolic activity is essential. And it's not just that organisms do this. It's not just a thing they do. It's the defining characteristic of an organism that it does that.

An organism is a self-maintaining kind of entity. It keeps making itself over and over again by bringing in nutrients and so on, and excreting waste. So that's a form of self-constitution, and it's not paradoxical, and that's the sort of self-constitution that we're talking about in the narrative view. But according to the narrative view, it's not about the organism, it's about the person. It just says that what a person is, among other things, is a subject of experience and inherently a self-narrator.

In something like the way that organisms are inherently self-maintainers by constantly getting the matter they need in the right place to keep them going and maintain their integrity as an organism, as a physical object, I say persons are constantly taking in the experiences they have and their actions and events in the world, and weaving them into a narrative that maintains them as integrated subjects and agents in the world and maintains them as a deep, holistic person throughout their entire narrative.

## Self-Narration Is Mostly Implicit

Now, it's critical to understand this view, to recognize that it isn't the claim that we are always self-consciously self-narrating. We aren't. We aren't sitting there all the time trying to very self-consciously write or tell the story of our lives. We're not all autobiographers in that sense. We don't have to ever articulate the entire story of our lives, according to this view, to ourselves or to anyone else. It's not like we have the whole thing from start to finish. We're in the middle of it, so we couldn't have the whole thing from start to finish, and it's always changing, but also it's just too long, and there's no reason most of the time to tell the whole story.

So that's not the claim. The idea is instead that persons organize and experience their ongoing lives through a largely implicit self-narrative, one that operates for the most part in the background and contextualizes what's happening in the present. So what does that mean? Well, to see what it means, just think of engaging with a narrative or a story and reading a novel, watching a movie. Take a fictional narrative. What is it like to engage with a story?

Well, how you understand what's happening in the passage you're reading now depends upon what you read before, and also what you anticipate is gonna happen in the future. And how you're thinking about what happened before is being informed by what's happening now. That's how you follow a story. You don't have to retell the whole story to yourself every time to know how to read this passage. It's there. It's in the background. It's operating, and it's contextualizing what you see so that you just automatically take it that way.

And the idea is that this is what we do in our lives as well. We're implicitly tracking the story of our lives, and it affects how we experience every moment, and each moment that we experience would be different if it were in a different story. So here's just a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind, very familiar phenomena.

## Same Moment, Different Story, Different Experience

Suppose you get off a plane and you're walking down a jetway. There's some very basic event there. We all know what a jetway is and what it's like to walk down it. But this is going to be a completely different experience if you're getting off the plane to go to a job interview you're really nervous about, or you're getting off the plane to go to your best friend's wedding, which was a long time coming, or you just found out you're adopted and you're getting off the plane to go meet your birth parents for the first time, or you're getting off the plane to go to the funeral of a loved one, or to go on the vacation of a lifetime, or to go and face something that you really don't want to face.

These are all different experiences. You could be seeing exactly the same jetway, exactly the same people, but what that moment is for you is not just what's happening at that moment. It's what's happening at that moment in the context of everything else that's going on, what happened before, what it means for the future, what you're expecting.

Similarly, walking up to the door of a house is going to be a really different experience if it's the house you live in and have lived in for the past 20 years and you're just coming home and you're really glad to be there, or if it's the home you used to inhabit but you lost it in the divorce or had to sign it over to cover your gambling debts, or if it's the door of your very first home that was obtained after decades of digging yourself out of poverty. These are going to be different experiences even if it's the same door in the same house.

We contextualize our experience like this all the time unthinkingly. And of course, not everything that we do is fraught like that. It's not all a dramatic moment in some kind of story. A lot of it is just mundane. But even the mundane things are always contextualized.

Things don't come to us just as the sights and sounds they are. It's something familiar. It's the place I always get coffee in the morning. It's the place I've been meaning to try coffee. It's crowded today on the subway and it isn't always crowded. All of these things come to us interpreted in that way.

## We Can Access Our Narratives When Asked

It's also important to note that although self-narratives are largely implicit and their effects are largely automatic, we shouldn't be thinking of self-narration as what's come to be called a subpersonal process. That is some automatic neural process that we have no access to and no control over. Light hits our retina and then our visual cortex does stuff and fashions it into objects. That's all subpersonal. We don't know that's going on. We just see objects. And we couldn't articulate what's going on unless we went and studied neuroscience. And then it would be third personally that we knew it.

But for our narratives, we can usually articulate them locally and without much thought or hesitation. And we actually do this all the time. When we respond to questions like, what brings you to New York? Or what do you do for a living? Or do you have any kids? Or how did you come to live in Iowa? Or why are you always so angry? We don't have to answer these questions when people ask them. Might be none of their business. But usually we have a pretty good idea what the answer to such questions are. And for some of them, like whether you have kids and what you do for a living and where you live, you would better know it or something is really wrong. It's just there always doing its work.

And so most of the time we can articulate our narratives. Sometimes we can't. There are times when it's difficult. So someone might ask me, for instance, how did you get interested in philosophy? Well, I have some thoughts about that. I'm not sure I can say exactly. Or what do you want to do next? If you're going to retire, what are you going to do next? Well, you might not know. These are times where we have to pause and think.

And they're precisely the kinds of times when we talk about someone having an identity crisis or if it's not quite to the level of an identity crisis. These are the periods where people have to think, what do I want? What do I feel? What do I experience? And so we can begin to see how the identity crisis sense of identity is coming in here. And one of the things that the narrative view is going to try to do is see how we can use that to make a deep connection that really could work as something like a metaphysical account of personal identity.

## Extended Consciousness Through Narrative

Because we're self-narrators, what happened in the past and what's anticipated in the future plays a role in determining the character and significance of what's happening now. And that means that in a very real and direct way, past and future psychological and other events are folded into and part of what's happening right now. They're part of my present in a very real and direct way because they're affecting what I'm seeing and experiencing and feeling right now. So to this extent, the narrative view does describe a deeper kind of unity of consciousness over time or diachronic unity of consciousness than we find in the psychological continuity theory.

It's not that we can see if we can trace overlapping chains of connection back to when I was 10. But the trauma of my 10th birthday might now be affecting how every birthday or every celebration is for me. Or the joy of my 10th birthday may make me feel celebratory in all kinds of cases. That's happening right now. And it's a bit of my 10-year-old self being present now.

So the idea is that to the extent that we're self-narrators, what we have first and foremost is a really extended continuity of consciousness. That my perspective now isn't just a perspective on what's happening now. Of course, I'm aware of what's happening now and I can distinguish it from what happened in the past and future. But I'm looking at what's happening now not just through the lens of an individual right here now that wasn't here a second ago or won't be there in the future. I'm looking at what's happening now from the perspective of an extended being, an extended subject living a life.

And I'm experiencing now through the role it plays in that ongoing life and the effects it's gonna have on that ongoing life and how it's a culmination of things in the past of the ongoing life. And all of this is giving me an extended sense of self and a deep unity of consciousness over time, or so I want to argue.

Now, this may still seem puzzling. In what sense is this really generating unity of consciousness over time? Doesn't it just mean I'm remembering things and anticipating things? How is it really like reaching my consciousness out to the past and future? Surely I can only experience the present. Or at least this is what someone in the philosophy of personal identity, who holds a psychological account of identity that's reductionist, is likely to say. But I think we can get a more concrete sense of how this works by recruiting help from some work in developmental and personality psychology.

## How Children Learn to Narrate Themselves

Because narrative views of self and identity have been popular in this domain as well as in philosophy. And psychologists who offer such views provide an extremely helpful description of how a self-narrative affects conscious experience and cognitive abilities and the whole architecture of the subject. And in particular, how being a self-narrator affects and expands our sense of self and gives us a sense of self in time.

According to the narrative approach that is offered in developmental psychology, some of the figures here are Robin Fivush, Kate McLean, Katherine Nelson, Dan McAdams are some of the psychologists who have done a lot of this work. Self-narration is something we're taught to do from earliest childhood. Fivush and Nelson in particular have undertaken studies of the way that children are scaffolded into the practice of self-narration and the effects that this practice has on our self-experience.

I'm going to give a summary of their findings. There's a lot of rich detail in the work that I'm going to have to skip over. But here is the basic idea. Self-narration for them is a skill that begins to emerge in the preschool years, and it develops over a lifetime. It continues to develop. We keep refining it. And it's a skill that requires a great deal of scaffolding and support in the beginning to get it going.

And this support usually comes in the form of social reminiscing, especially with caregivers. They're usually studying mothers who are mostly doing this, but obviously other caregivers do as well, who regularly prompt children to narrate the events of their day, bringing their disparate moments of experience together into a story, in the beginning very short and very simple stories, but stories that emphasize a certain kind of cause and effect, that emphasize the role of emotions and affect, that bring social norms into play and help pull together these things that happened into a story.

So for instance, at bedtime with a preschooler, a very young preschooler, that may have been a day that they went to the park, the child might say park, or something even to get it started. They might not. But the caregiver will say something like this, suppose the child doesn't say anything. Where did we go today? Yeah, that's right, to the park. And who did we see there? We saw your friend Jason. You had fun playing with Jason, didn't you? That was really great. And then what happened? That's right. You wanted to go on the big swing. And I told you you were too little, but that after your next birthday, you can go on the big girl swing. That's going to be exciting. And your birthday is coming up pretty soon. Then what happened? I said it was time to go home and take a nap. And you got angry and threw wood chips. And what did I say? I said if you did that, we wouldn't come back tomorrow. So you said sorry. And we went home and you had a snack and some juice. And then we played in the afternoon and now it's bedtime.

So just that kind of thing happens constantly with little kids as they're going to bed. But think of everything that's packed into taking these vague memories of going to the park and being on the swings and seeing people that are all disconnected and putting them even into such a simple narrative. There are routines. We go to the park. We take a nap. We have a snack. We have bedtime, and so on. There are social relations, friends, and so on. There are emotions. You're happy that you see your friend. You're mad when I say we have to go home. You were sad you couldn't go on the swing.

There's looking forward to the next birthday, but you're going to have a birthday and you're going to be a big girl and then you will go on the swings. There's norms and consequences. If you throw wood chips, you're maybe going to have to stay home tomorrow and you can't go to the park. There's apology as the remedy for that kind of conflict and so on. So a lot is being taught to the child and helping them turn this into that kind of short story.

## Building a Personal Timeline Through Stories

And so because of this, according to Robin Fiveish, over time these interactions provide children with, she says, the skills for creating more coherent and connected narratives that lead to the construction of a personal timeline. The child starts saying, "Oh, I'm existing over time." I used to be a little girl, and I couldn't even go on the baby swings, but now I'm a big girl, and I can go on the baby swings, but I'm gonna even grow bigger and be able to go on the big swings, and so on. Tomorrow we'll go to the park. We went yesterday, and we'll go again tomorrow.

So this, according to Fiveish, generates a sense of oneself persisting through time with, she says, a new awareness of self and past and future experiences and the contrast of that self to others' narratives of their past and future experiences. And then, according to Katherine Nelson, her collaborator and mentor, this self-narration leads to a new level of consciousness with a new sense of self situated in time and in multiple social realities. So these early narratives thus contain not only the unfolding of events, but they start to give the child an ongoing sense of themself as a persisting character, someone who was there in the past, someone who's gonna be there in the future, and someone whose past, present, and future are tied together in certain important ways. And they're given templates for understanding how they're tied together, and this gives them a sense of self and time and continuity that actually, according to this research, changes the duration of their consciousness.

They can experience events, and hold together thoughts of events of longer duration. They begin to understand the distinction between self and other in a new way and so understand themselves as subjective beings distinct from other subjective beings. So a lot of development of the experiential nature of engaging the world gets set by these narratives.

As children get older, they start to narrate more spontaneously. The stories they tell cover events of longer duration. Their narratives become much more complex. They include subroutines like, say, eating breakfast as a part of the longer narrative of getting ready for preschool. They refer more to the child's own inner states and how those hang together and their motivations and how their motivations are connected to their actions.

They draw more connections between actions and consequences. They talk more about speculation about the motivations of others and why they think others might have acted as they did. And as they approach adolescence, children start developing whole life narratives in a more serious way. They start realizing, hey, I have a life. I have to figure out what to do with it. This is where I've been. I have to figure out where I'm going. And in that way, they get a more robust experience of themselves as beings extended over time. And this comes from the activity of self-narration, or so the argument goes.

## Why Your Future Matters: Narrative and Self-Interest

So the worry, again, about Parfit and about the thinness of the psychological continuity theory he gives us, and the worry he acknowledges, is that the relation of psychological continuity that he defines isn't strong enough or isn't of the right sort, it isn't the right kind of relation to explain why I should be held responsible for my actions and not for the actions of others, or why I should take a special kind of interest for my own future that's different from the kind of interest I take in the future of others, even if it's not different in degree, even if I care just as much about others. And Parfit acknowledges, yeah, psychological continuity probably doesn't necessarily give us a strong enough relation to explain that, which is maybe why we should change our ethical practices. And that's the approach that Parfit takes.

And so what I'm trying to argue is that when you get a self-narrative of this kind, your relation of the past, present, and future, the way you experience the past and the present, the way that the anticipation of the future affects the present does give us a strong enough relation. We do have a unity of consciousness that's strong enough to explain why these judgments occur within a single life, within the life of a single person. Because our first personal perspective, as I said before, is not just that of the present self. It's not just who I am now, where I am now. That's not the only perspective I have. If I learn to narrate this way, and if I find myself in a social world of people who are narrating this way, my perspective on my life is going to be my perspective on the life as a whole as well, and that will have all sorts of consequences right now.

So for instance, just to give a few examples of what this could look like, and I'll use a fictional example here, but we can certainly think of examples from real life, Gatsby will never come from old money. It doesn't matter how rich he gets. It doesn't matter who he hangs out with. It doesn't matter how great the parties he throws. He will never come from old money. He will always be James Gatt of North Dakota who took on this other persona. Now, what his life is like now is very different from what it was like when he was James Gatt in North Dakota. But the fact that that's who he was, as opposed to being someone who always came from money, makes all the difference in the world to what his experience is at the moment. The present is thick with the past and the future.

And that's certainly how it is in our life. Our past bad deeds can haunt us because we're thinking of our lives as a whole and what it means that we did that and what it could mean for the future that we did that. Or on a happier note, if you have great triumphs, people often say they can't take that away from you. So you won the state championship when you led your team to victory in the state championship. They can't take that away from you. What does it mean they can't take that away from you? It means for your whole life, whatever else happens to you, and no matter how many failures you have, it is part of who you are over your whole life that you had this terrific success, and that's part of the whole story, and that's part of how you experience the present.

I think that this is also what's going on when people have bucket lists. The thought is not just, well, this is a thing I want to do because there are lots of things we want to do, and we could just go do them. The idea is at the end, when the story is over, I want my life to be a life that contained these experiences within it. So it's about how we think about our lives as a whole and what we want our lives as a whole to be like. So I think that this feature shows how narrative views can help explain and justify the practical judgments and attitudes that we associate with identity.

## Moral Responsibility as Part of Your Story

Think, for instance, about prudential self-interest. From the perspective of the extended self, my well-being depends upon the whole of my life, what ups and downs it includes, how much pain and pleasure, but also on its overall trajectory. A rags to riches story is different from a riches to rags story, and a story where riches or success are won by grueling work is different from one where they're just handed to one, and we feel that throughout the life and not just at one moment or another in the life.

Going back to the examples I gave, like getting off the plane and so on, the way that our narrative figures in, it's one thing to be sort of hungry and cold in your garret when you're the person who's creating a great work of art, or you're a grad student and you're eating your ramen and you know that this is leading you somewhere or something. You think of it as part of your journey to somewhere. It's another thing if that's where you ended up after you lost all your money through a gambling addiction and you don't see any way out. These are just different experiences, and they're not confined to what's going on at the moment.

So prudential concern, it's not just that in the future, if I do this bad thing now or this risky thing now, there will be some consequence that I won't like. You know already that there is going to be a consequence that you don't like, and that's already tainting the pleasure of the moment. Or if you're anticipating something like Lady Macbeth when she's waiting to become queen and says, "I feel the future in the instant." "I'm so excited now. I can already taste it." But that's because we have this extended sense of consciousness and so on.

And it's also true with moral responsibility. And I think what's nice about the narrative view is it can help give us so much more of a realistic picture of moral responsibility and how we assess it than something that just says either you're the person who did it and you're responsible for it or you're not and you're not. It can tell you more about how and to what degree you're responsible. There are so many examples that one can think of, of politicians or other prominent people who are beloved and then some horrible thing comes out about their past and some horrible way they were. It's important that the fact that they change doesn't make us say they're not responsible for that thing.

So suppose the person has sincerely changed. They're not just pretending to change. They've sincerely changed. They did some bad thing in the past. They would never do it now. They disavow it now. But they have to recognize that they did it, and they have to own it. We want them to own it. If they just said, "Oh, I don't do that anymore. That's not me," we wouldn't think that they had really gotten it. So they have to understand it's them.

But it also matters whether they've really changed or not. When we want to assess moral responsibility for some past action, we want to know not just did it occur in your life, but how did it occur in your life? Did you have some sort of deficient upbringing where you couldn't have known better, or did you know perfectly well what you were doing was wrong? What did you do afterwards? Did you apologize? Were you sorry? Did you feel guilty? Did you try to hide it? Did you come clean about it? All of these things are part of the story.

So what we're asking about when we're asking about moral responsibility is how is this past action integrated into the life of this person? What's the story of it occurring in the first place and getting to here? But it does have a place in the story. It's something you can't get rid of. It's something you have to answer for now, even if you've changed, even if you disavow it, and that's because it's part of the narrative.

And so I think that it also helps to explain why we're responsible for past actions. To steal a line from Faulkner, the past is never dead. It's not even past. That past is still with us. We have to carry it with us. Doesn't mean we have to be bound to it in a way that we can't ever make it good. It doesn't have to be that we're racked with guilt. It just means we have to understand its place in our life and what we want to do about it.

So really, this is just a more complex version of the lesson that the child learned, the lesson that you have to accept what you did in the past and apologize for it and try to make it good. It's just the grown-up version of what the child learned when they learned they had to say sorry after they threw wood chips or they wouldn't be able to go to the park the next day.

## Death as the End of Your Story

So that's moral responsibility and prudential concern. And finally, if we think of death as the end of our story, if what it means to fail to survive, if we don't survive past some event, that means our story's over, there's no more to tell, there's no future to anticipate. This explains the emotions associated with it.

Parfit says, when I realized that all it meant that I would die is that there would be no person in the future who was connected to me by an overlapping chain of psychological likeness, I realized dying wasn't so bad. If the only relation to someone in the future is this overlapping chain, then perhaps that's the attitude you would take. But if you think of it as the end of the story, that's something different altogether.

So this is just a brief overview of how narrative theorists argue that the narrative approach can avoid Parfit's conclusion that there's no kind of psychological connection within the life of a person that would warrant the significance we attach to identity.

If we think of identity as constituted by narrative and we think about the holism of narrative and the way in which all of the parts affect one another all the time, that's a much deeper psychological connection. But as always, of course, the narrative approach has challenges of its own. One of them is related to the question I left unanswered earlier. Do we really want to say that whatever story a person tells about themselves is by definition true just because they said it? That doesn't sound right. So the narrative approach has to either show why it's not committed to that conclusion, or if it is committed, why it's more palatable than it at first seems.

## Challenges Facing the Narrative Approach

And there are plenty of other objections and challenges that can be raised about the narrative approach. One is some of the same connections that were raised against the psychological approach. Couldn't a narrative fission? What happens in fission when the narrative seems to continue into other people? What happens to the sameness of consciousness there? So the narrative theorist is going to have to say something about that.

And finally, the narrative theorist is going to have to reckon with the biological continuity theorist, and in particular, Olson's challenges, because what Olson would presumably say about the narrative view, and in fact, what he has said to me about the narrative view is, well, that's all really nice. That's a great, fine, that's maybe a better way of talking about what a person is or what we care about in personal identity than the psychological continuity theory, but it's still just a face hurdle of a human being. You've been talking about what happens in a human life. You've given this developmental psychology approach where the child first doesn't have it and then develops it and then maybe could lose it through dementia, let's say, and wouldn't be able to continue the narrative. So it seems to have all the same problems that the biological theorist raises for the psychological continuity theory, and those would have to be spoken to as well.

So I will try to speak to these worries in the next lecture. I'm going to begin by talking about the first worry about the accuracy of the narrative and the sense that we can be whoever we want to be just by making it up. And when I do that, I'll develop the view a little bit further and add some more details, and that will in turn give us a way to address the others, and then I'll sum us up.