Sidelle, Alan (2011) Parfit On The Normal-A Realible-Any Cause in Relation R

Parfit on 'the Normal/a Reliable/any Cause' of Relation R
Author(s): Alan Sidelle

Source: Mind , July 2011, Vol. 120, No. 479 (July 2011), pp. 735-760
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
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Parfit on 4 the Normal/a Reliable/any
Cause' of Relation R
Alan Sidelle
University of Wisconsin-Madison
asidelle@wisc. edu
In section 96 of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit offers his now familiar tripartite
distinction among candidates for 'what matters': (1) Relation R with its normal
cause; (2) R with any reliable cause; (3) R with any cause. He defends option (3).
This paper tries to show that there is important ambiguity in this distinction and in
Parfiťs defence of his position. There is something strange about Parfit's way of
dividing up the territory: I argue that those who have followed him in viewing the
choice among ( 1 )- (3) as the (or an) important question in thinking about 'what
matters' are mistaken, and that they bypass what seems to be a more important,
even crucial, set of options and considerations. I am less concerned with what he
does say than with what he ought to say, given his intuitions and arguments, and the
general framework within which he is working. And I am particularly concerned to
show that whether or not I am correct about what he is doing with his tripartite
distinction, it is a distinction with which we should not be particularly concerned
in the analysis either of what matters or of psychological continuity.
1. Introduction
In section 96 ('The Continuity of the Body') of Reasons and Persons ,

Derek Parfit offers his now familiar tripartite distinction among can-
didates for ťwhat matters' - what it is that grounds the special sorts of
concern, responsibility, the rationality of first-person emotions, and so
on, that we typically think depend upon personal identity. (I shall
henceforward use 'survives' as equivalent to 'has what matters', and
as correlative with Parfit's idea that someone who undergoes fis-
sion 'survives' in the fission offshoots.1) After dismissing the idea
This will include the grammatical forms 'A survives', 'A survives in B' and 'A survives
process p (teletransportation)', perhaps the first and last of which can be defined in terms of
the second - A survives iff there is some В in whom A survives, and A survives process p iff
there is some В existing after the process such that A survives in В. I follow standard assump-
tions in treating 'survival' as 'monolithic' - that is, that A survives in В only if (the following
is but a partial list): (а) В can be appropriately praised/blamed for A's earlier actions, (b) B's
existence means that A has not 'completely gone out of existence' (in a way that fission
products so suffice), (с) В is a proper target of A's forward-looking first-person concern,
Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

doi:10.1093/mind/fzr050 Advance Access publication 10 November 2011

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736 Alan Sideïle
that physical continuity as such is what matters, he offers these three

options:
(1) Relation R with its normal cause

(2) R with any reliable cause
(3) R with any cause (Parfit 1984, p. 283; all page references to
Parfit below are to his 1984)
Relation R is psychological connectedness and/or continuity.2 Parfit

defends (3), first arguing, against (1), that we survive teletransporta-
tion, and then, against (2), that it does not matter whether the tele-
transporter is generally reliable or not, so long as it works on a given
occasion. One important remark Parfit makes here, quoted by others
to whom we shall presently turn, is 'it is the effect that matters'
(p. 286). He says this both in defence of teletransportation (p. 286),
and in defence of unreliable teletransportation ('only the effect mat-
ters' (p. 287)).
I agree with Parfit that what matters is preserved in unreliable
teletransportation. But there is still some important ambiguity
within this distinction and argument, ambiguity which has, I believe,
played a role in some philosophers' questioning whether there is any
causal requirement on what matters at all (or more generally, whether
someone who follows Parfit this far can believe there is). I think there
is something a bit strange about Parfit's way of dividing up the terri-
tory here, and that those who have followed him in viewing the choice
among (1) - (3) as the (or anyway, an) important question in thinking
about 'what matters', are mistaken, and are bypassing what seems to
be a more important, even crucial, set of options and considerations.3
It is this that I would like to bring out and discuss here. While I shall
(d) B's good is a matter of (non-derivative) prudential, not merely moral, concern for A, and
so on. (For some of these, no doubt 'if would be appropriate as well.) I am quite sympathetic
to David Shoemaker's suggestion that this standard assumption may be mistaken, and that
perhaps different relations between В and A underlie these different concerns, which - before
Parfit - were all thought to be monolithically underlain by identity. However, in all the cases
with which we shall be concerned, all these aspects of survival will be present if any are, so
there is no need to aim at further precision.
2 Interestingly for what follows, Parfit actually says here 'R is psychological connectedness
and/or continuity with the right kind of cause ' Whether this is meant simply to generally
characterize the issue among the options, or is something that is built-in to R, and so common
ground among all the options, is our primary concern below.
3 I do not mean to overstate this - lots of philosophers have asked, for instance, whether
certain aspects of psychological continuity - memory, character, commitments - are of

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Parfit on ' the Normal/a Reliable/any Cause ' of Relation R 737
partly be engaging in interpretation of what Parfit says in Reasons and

Persons , my project is closer to that of rational reconstruction. I am
less concerned with what he does say than with what he ought to say,
given his intuitions and arguments, and the general framework within
which he is working. And I am particularly concerned to show that
whether or not I am correct about what he is doing with his tripartite
distinction, it is a distinction with which we should not be particularly
concerned, either in the analysis of what matters, or of psychological
continuity.
2. Some readings
When Parfit says that what matters is R with any cause, and that conly
the effect matters', a reader might be excused for thinking that Parfit is
endorsing the claim that a person would survive in a randomly pro-
duced artificial person who happened to be a perfect duplicate of that
person at the time he died. Such an individual would be intrinsically
just like a teletransportation product, but there would be no causal
relation at all between the states of the dying person, and this later
one. One will read Parfit this way if one thinks the 'effect' that matters
is the existence of a person who has a psychological profile sufficiently
similar4 to that of an earlier person - which, then, is taken to suffice
for the holding of R - and 'any cause' expresses the idea that it does
not matter why such a person exists. On such a reading, Parfit is
actually denying that there is any causal requirement for survival (or
for relation R).
One reason not to read Parfit in this way is that the position is so
striking that it would call for explicit discussion of 'survival through
doppelgängers', or through such 'random matches', which many
would take to be a reductio of such a view - but Parfit nowhere ex-
plicitly discusses this.5 Other philosophers have denied the causal re-
quirement, precisely endorsing the claim of survival in such random
greater, or sole importance, as well as asking whether connectedness has extra, or sole value. I
only mean in connection with the causal aspect of what matters.
4 'Similar' is not quite right, because as Shoemaker points out, the 'right sort' of relation
will actually involve change of state - if at ^ one believes it is 5 seconds until when one should
push the button, at t2 - one second later - a normal person, with proper psychological con-
nectedness to his earlier self, will no longer believe this , but instead that it is 4 seconds to push
time. See his 1984, pp. 95-6; also 1997.
5 This is itself somewhat curious anyway, since it seems eminently natural, given how far
Parfit has already gone by this point in his book, to wonder whether one would survive in such

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738 Alan Sidelle
duplicates, and have explicitly taken Parfit as their main target.6 At

any rate, I mention this reading not to seriously entertain it as an
interpretation, but as a foil for thinking about how the space is to be
carved up here.
If such 'random duplication' cases do not fall within Parfiťs 'R with
any cause' condition, then 'the effect' must not simply be that a cer-
tain person has certain states that are relevantly like those of a person
at an earlier time. I will be considering two readings of what 'the effect'
might be, and so, what cause it is for which Parfit is offering this set of
options, and advocating 'any cause'. On one reading, the 'effect' is that
relation R holds between a later person and an earlier one. Parfit intro-
duces his candidates to elucidate the Psychological Criterion for per-
sonal identity, the third condition for which is that 'this continuity has
the right kind of cause', and he goes on to propose the following: 'On
the narrow version, this must be the normal cause. On the Wide ver-
sion, this could be any reliable cause. On the Widest version, the cause
could be any cause' (p. 207). So the effect is the obtaining of continu-
ity - or more generally, relation R - and this has causality built into
it, which makes it the case that R does not hold between our doppel-
gängers and our earlier selves.7 So far, so good: everyone is taking R to
be a relation with causal requirements, and that is why no one adopts
the first reading proposed above. However, 'relation R with the
normal/a reliable/any cause' is still not entirely lucid. Read straightfor-
wardly, the question these three causal options would then concern is:
Why is it that psychological connectedness/continuity holds between
two persons P2 and Pj? - in other words: What is the cause of the
obtaining of this causal relation? Aside from its oddness itself, asking
this question seems to be posing a challenge to the view that R is what
matters. If R is what matters, it is trivial that it does not matter why it
obtains. And so 'R with any cause' is just equivalent to 'R' - but 'R'
just looks like the familiar, neo-Lockean view, once we decide identity
per se is not required, and it is at any rate the familiar, psychological
view about identity , prior to Parfit. So there would be something odd
random duplicates - but I suppose his book is long enough and explores sufficiently many
issues and nuances as it is.
6 See, for instance, Kolak and Martin 1987 and Elliot 1991.
7 Further textual evidence - if it is needed - that relation R ('the effect') requires causal
relations comes in Parfiťs concession, in his 'Branch-Line case', that there is no psychological
connectedness between the person 'on the branch line' and the duplicate created by the
teletransporter (p. 289).

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and misleading about endorsing 'R with any cause' if that just meant
the same as 'R' - at any rate, one might think it would be worth saying
that, however 'extreme' this might look, it simply is the traditional
account (aside, of course, from pointing out that the relation is not
logically one-to-one, but denying that the 'extra' needed to make it
one-to-one has any bearing on survival). But this is not to say that it is
not how Parfit ought to be read. I will return to this reading later.
The other reading may be brought out by turning to Kolak and
Martin, who argue against Parfit, claiming that what matters has no
causal requirements at all. They do so by arguing that (a) Parfit is
committed to the claim that we survive in a case they describe (cMOC
Match' - see below) and (b) there is no relevant difference between
this case and a further case they offer ('Random Match'), in which
there is no causal relation between the states of the earlier and later
selves.8'9 So let us look at their case, which they call the 'MOC Match
Example' (Kolak and Martin 1987, p. 343). 'MOC' stands for 'math-
ematical object-configurations', which are, 'in the form of mathemat-
ical equations', complete information about every cell in some (actual
or possible) body, which can then be used to create bodies in accord-
ance with these instructions. (The MOCs, though, are just the 'infor-
mation', not the bodies.) We imagine a supercomputer which can
generate completely random MOCs, which are not modelled on any
particular existing people, and it can also 'scan' an existing individual
and make an MOC modelled on it. Now, suppose some particular
individual is so scanned (they choose Robert Nozick), and then the
computer starts randomly generating MOCs. As it does so, it checks to
see whether each MOC matches Nozick's MOC. If it does (call this
Matching blueprint 'MOCM'), then it creates a flesh-and-blood indi-
vidual in accordance with MOCM (simultaneously destroying the ori-
ginal Nozick)10 which will be cell-for-cell identical to Nozick at the
time he was scanned - and, of course, equally identical to a product
of deliberate teletransportation, where the teletransporter works rather
8 I do not mean to say this is their only argument, although most of their considerations
have a similar structure (as do Elliot's, but he does not start with an (a) case which meets our
purposes here).
9 Some prefer 'person-stage' to 'self in such formulations. I do not mean to grind any
axes in my choice, but prefer it since 'person-stage', to my ear, conjures up a four-dimensional
framework, and that is something on which I wish to stay neutral.
10 The destruction of the original is not really essential, in my view, but it simplifies the
discussion, avoiding worries arising from the simultaneous existence of the 'replica' and the
original which might make some think the replica cannot survive the original. See my 2002.

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740 Alan Sidelle
like this machine, except that the individual is created from Nozick's
MOC, instead of the randomly created МОСм which happens to be
just like Nozick's. Kolak and Martin claim that (a) Parfit can have no
grounds for denying that Nozick survives in this new individual, and
(b) there is then no basis for denying that Nozick would survive even
if he had never been scanned, so that no MOC was ever made from
him, but instead he simply died and the computer, quite independ-
ently, created a person from the completely randomly generated
MOCM. (They call this the 'Random Match' case.) The reasoning
for (b), roughly, is that the causal connection between the states of
early-Nozick and the person created out of МОСм in the MOC match
case was so weak as to not be of any real significance. So, its absence in
the Random Match case (and, consequently, the absence of any casual
connection) cannot really make a difference.
Why do Kolak and Martin think that if one accepts that one sur-
vives in ordinary teletransportation, one is also committed to thinking
that one survives in the product of one's MOC match? 'The only
relevant difference is in the nature of the causal connection between
person-stages ... But it is hard to imagine that anyone who thought
that personal identity was preserved in the Beaming Example [i.e.
teletransportation] would feel confident that it wasn't also preserved
in the MOC Match Example . . . Remember Parfit's argument that it is
the effect that matters, not its cause' (Kolak and Martin 1987, p. 343).
While not conclusive, this sounds very like the idea that Parfit is
committed to the claim that any causal relationship that obtains be-
tween a person's states at f,, and a person's at t2, so long as the states
bear the right intrinsic qualitative relation to each other (sameness of
belief; experience/memory-like presentation with (something like) E
as the content;11 desire/intention ... ), gives us a psychological connec-
tion. This, then, gives us another potential reading of 'relation R with
its normal/a reliable/any cause' - these modify the causal relation
between the earlier and later states, and, we might say, concern the
causal relation in relation R, rather than of relation R. On this reading,
'with any cause' does not (directly) commit us to survival in a random
duplicate, because there is no causal relation between the states of the
11 I say 'something like', since on most views of content, a doppelgänger or random du-
plicate's 'memory state' of, as it were, seeing Barack Obama, will not have Obama as part of its
content (this is especially so for my doppelgänger whose state was caused by seeing someone
where he lives who looks just like Obama). So, if we are not going to beg any questions, we
cannot right off the bat require common wide content. Similar remarks will presumably apply
for all contentful states.

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Parfit on ť the Normal/a Reliable/any Cause ' of Relation R 741
original and the duplicate - but so long as there is some causal rela-
tion, then we have connectedness and (if the degree is sufficient)
survival.12
This attribution is made more explicitly by Jeff McMahan (2002).
Discussing quasi-memory, and the requirement that 'the person's ap-
parent memory is causally dependent, in the right sort of way, on [the]
past experience', he says: 'For many adherents of the theory, the right
sort of cause can be any cause' (p. 59). Context makes it clear that he
would number Parfit among these many. And like Kolak and Martin,
McMahan argues that Parfit's belief that we survive in teletransporta-
tion commits him to the claim that one would survive in a causally
unrelated duplicate (pp. 60-1) - though for McMahan, this is in-
tended as a reductio of the claim that there is survival in teletranspor-
tation, rather than a reason to abandon causal requirements, as it is
treated by Kolak and Martin.
Thus, we have the following ideas: (1) if one accepts that teletran-
sportation is, as they say, ca way to travel', then one has no grounds for
any sort of causal requirement on survival at all, and should say that
we also survive in random duplicates; (2) in Parfit's options of what
matters - namely, relation R with its normal cause, a reliable cause, or
any cause - one should read cwith' as meaning ťin the specification of
relation R itself', that is, in the articulation of the nature of the causal
relationship that must hold between the earlier and later states in
order for relation R to hold; and consequently (3) when Parfit opts
for 'relation R with any cause', he is saying that so long as there is some
causal relation between A's earlier states and B's later states (again,
supposing they have the right sort of qualitative relation), there is,
then, a psychological connection between A and B.
I suspect that (2) and (3) represent a common understanding of
Parfit, and frame recent discussion of the question of what 'the right
sort' of causal relation is that is needed for psychological connected-
ness, or more generally for survival. I will now argue that while there is
some textual support for this reading, there is also reason for resisting
it, both as an interpretation of Parfit, and more importantly as a way
of investigating this question. A side benefit of this discussion will be a
reply to (1). (See section 6 below.)
12 This is not quite to say that Kolak and Martin read Parfit this way - they say he is
committed to survival in the MOC case because, they think, simply looking at the case,
without further argument, it is not relevantly different from the case of ordinary teletranspor-
tation. However, as we will see, if Parfit is not so read, he has a fairly straightforward way of
driving a wedge between the cases.

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742 Alan Sidelle
Before moving on, it is worth noticing that on this reading, it is

hard to say quite what cthe effect' is, when Parfit says 'It is the effect
that matters'. It cannot just be, as we have seen, the existence of a
future person with the relevant qualitative states, nor the obtaining of
the states themselves. Nor, though, does it seem to be psychological
continuity. Perhaps it is the obtaining of a person with states that are
of the right qualitative sort, which states stand in some causal relation
to the earlier states. But then, (a) someone who does not already think
there are no constraints on 4 the right sort of cause' should not be
expected to agree that this effect is 'the effect that matters', and (b) the
account is not an account of what causes 'the effect' - it is an account
of the effect itself. These issues will resurface later.
3. Psychological connectedness and 'the right sort' of cause

It will help to frame things if we remind ourselves of the notion of
psychological connectedness,13 and the question about it which, on
this interpretation, Parfit means to address. Psychological connected-
ness (and continuity) is a progeny of Locke's use of memory to try to
define personal identity. Philosophers with Lockean (i.e. psychologic-
al) sympathies, in the later part of the twentieth century, came in
general to prefer analyses in terms of psychological connectedness
(and continuity) to those in terms of memory, and this for two
main reasons. First, some were persuaded that a person could survive
even radical amnesia, so long as enough of her other psychological
features were intact, such as character, emotional sensibility, behav-
ioural dispositions, and such. Second, and both more importantly
and more relevant to our present concerns, memory came independ-
ently to seem just one sort of psychological connection among others.
This became particularly vivid as attempts were made, on behalf of
memory theories, to avoid Butler's famous worry that it is circular to
try to define identity in terms of memory, since, the objection goes,
memory is itself defined in terms of identity. The most influential
line of reply emphasized that memory is a causal notion; it is not
enough for В to have a memory impression as of event E, and for
E to actually have occurred - even if we stipulate that В herself was
a witness to E. B's earlier witnessing of E has to have caused the
later memory-impression, and further, has to have caused it in
13 While continuity is under analysis too, the causal issue concerns the direct psychological
connections which define connectedness.

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the right way.14 With this causal condition in place, we can then drop
the requirement that В was witness to E, and simply require that
someone's witnessing E caused, in the right sort of way, B's memory
impression. Whether we use this to define memory itself, and deny
that memory presupposes identity, or to instead define 'quasi-
memory' (and thence identity in terms of quasi- memory), circularity
is averted, so long as 'the right sort of way' is not itself specified in
terms of identity.15 Now for us, the important point is not that circu-
larity is avoided, but that the important work 'binding' the earlier and
later selves is done by causation , and it came to seem to many Lockean
sympathizers that the causal relation holding between memories and
earlier experiences does no more for one's overall continuity as a
person than other causal relations which obtain between states at dif-
ferent times, such as the retention of belief or desire, or the relation
between an earlier desire and a later intention to act. Thus, we find
ourselves with the broader 'psychological continuity' account.16
My point in rehearsing this is to remind ourselves that the question
'What is the right sort of cause?' in the specification of psychological
connectedness is but a generalized version of the same but older ques-
tion asked about memory in particular. For, as with many causal
analyses, it seemed to many that (a) there is a causal requirement,
but (b) not just any causal relation would do. At the same time - and
again, as with many other causal analyses - there has not been a great
deal of work done on this exact specification. And so, to return to
Parfit, on the current interpretation, he is offering us a way of thinking
about this question, and indeed suggesting an extremely liberal
answer. Indeed, an answer which denies (b).
As I noted at the end of the last section, there is some textual
support for this. When Parfit describes the Narrow Psychological
14 See Deutscher and Martin 1966, though they motivate this quite independently of, and
do not apply it to, the worry about circularity.
15 John Perry sticks with 'memory' in his 1975; the now more common 'q-' or
'quasi-memory' variant is associated with Shoemaker (1970; 1984, Sects 4 and 5) and Parfit
(1971, Sect. 3; 1984, Sect. 80).
16 Whether all this really is properly seen as a development of Locke's actual view is a
matter of some debate, but not really pertinent to the current discussion, which I think
uncontroversially captures a central strain of the development of the widely accepted psycho-
logical continuity view. For dissent, see Kolak 2008, Sect. 1.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
744 Alan Sideïle
Criterion, he illustrates it with memory:

Thus, I remember having an experience only if
(1) I seem to remember having an experience,

(2) I did have this experience,
and
(3) my apparent memory is causally dependent, in the normal

way, on this past experience, (p. 207)
It looks like 'the normal way' is standing in for 'the right sort of way',
and Parfit says that (3) is needed to rule out a case in which a climber
seems to recall what he said before a given accident, but this was
entirely caused by his fellow climber's telling him what he had said.
And Parfit goes on, then, to say 'The two Wide Psychological Criteria
appeal to a wider sense of "memory", which allows either any reliable
cause, or any cause' (p. 208) - which sounds like one gets these views
by substituting 'a reliable' or 'any' for 'the normal' in the above
Narrow Psychological Criterion as applied to memory. However,
there are reasons to doubt that this is really what Parfit means to
propose.
4. Why 'the right sort of cause' cannot be any cause

I find the idea of 'any cause' as an answer to cWhat is the right sort of
cause?' incredible as a serious candidate for the analysis of connect-
edness, and (partly for this reason) at least not entirely plausible as an
interpretation of Parfit. Again, we will focus on memory.17 (However,
the very same reasoning should apply to this as a proposed answer for
any sort of connection, or connectedness generally.) Practically the
very same considerations which motivate a causal requirement on
memory in the first place also motivate the claim that not just any
causal relation will do. The causal requirement comes from thinking
of cases such as:
The Fishbone :
At time P chokes on a fishbone. For whatever reason, by time i2,
P has completely forgotten about it - there is not so much as a brain trace
17 Of course, for most, it will be 'q-memory', and other q/quasi-states that will be involved
in the analysis of R, but the differences between these and their non-quasified counterparts
only concern the requirement of identity between the subject of the earlier and later states; the
causal requirements will be the same.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
of that event. At tv P gets whacked on the head, generating a (seeming)

memory-appearance that 'matches' P's earlier, but completely forgotten,
experience of choking on a fishbone.
Plainly, P's state at ř3 is not a memory; he does not remember choking

on the fishbone. If asked to articulate why this seems so obvious, we
would soon say something like: 'the earlier experience played no role
in generating the c'memory"-state', or perhaps 'the generation and
occurrence of the seeming memory at t3 could have been just as it
was, without there having been any earlier choking experience. It was
just a random coincidence'. Now, we modify the case so that there is
some obscure causal connection -
Mr X:
Sometime after tx but before í2, P tells Mr X about his choking on a

fishbone. Again, P then completely forgets about choking. At t3, Mr X
sees P eating fish. Remembering P's tale, and because he is hysterical,
Mr X whacks P on the head to stop him eating the fish, for fear that he
will choke. This blow, completely randomly, generates our 'matching'
(seeming) memory- appearance.
I cannot imagine anyone who thinks that memory requires a causal

connection between an experience and the memory-appearance of it,
on the basis of a case like The Fishbone , who would not also think that
in Mr X, P does not remember choking. Even if the articulations are
not exactly the same - the earlier experience played some role, and
Mr X would not have hit P, to generate the apparent memory, if P had
not had the earlier experience - surely, their spirit still obtains. The
connection between the experience and the seeming memory is still
completely random .
Thus, it seems to me that 'any cause' is just a non-starter as an
account of what 'the right sort of cause' is in memory, or relation R
generally. I can understand someone who thinks that no causal rela-
tion is needed or matters - but if some causal relation is needed, as
The Fishbone suggests, it cannot be just any causal relation. And no
philosopher moved by cases like The Fishbone could fail to be aware, as
well, of cases like Mr X.
This also counts, by a principle of charity, against attributing such a
position to Parfit. This is further supported by the fact that in endor-
sing 'any cause', Parfit does not acknowledge that he is accepting as
memories, or 'as good as' memories, the seeming-memories (which
seem to clearly not be memories) in the sort of crazy cases, like Mr Xy
which originally motivated the 'right sort of cause' clause. His above

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746 Alan Sidelle
remarks do suggest that he may be willing to count his memory-

appearances concerning what he said before his climbing accident as
memories, or 'as good as' memories, when they are caused by prompt-
ing from his climbing partner. But there is quite a bit of difference
between that case, and the case of Mr X. While many would be very
reluctant to follow Parfit about the mountain climbing case, one could
at least see a possibly relevant counterfactual dependence of 'memory'
upon experience in that case which is quite lacking from cases like
Mr X . So the evidence here is, at the least, not decisive.
Another important reason not to attribute this position to Parfit is
that it is not supported by the principal argument he gives in support
of 'relation R with any cause'. As noted earlier, Parfit's main argument
for this is that, once we have granted that one survives in the product
of a reliable teletransporter, then it should not matter if the teletran-
sporter is not reliable, so long as it works this time. That is it - he
concludes, ' what fundamentally matters is relation R , with any cause '
(p. 287). A moment's reflection will make clear that there is all
the difference in the world between the unreliable teletransporter,
and the Mr X case. There is no reason to infer, from the claim that
one's unreliably produced teletransportation products remember, or
quasi-remember, one's experiences, that P remembers his unfortunate
fishbone experience. Once again, one could simply attribute an ex-
tremely bad inference to Parfit. Or one could rather conclude that
'relation R, with any cause' does not mean 'the obtaining of any sort of
causal relation between earlier and later states that are appropriately
qualitatively related'.
A closer look at what Parfit says about the unreliable transporter
will help elucidate a couple of points. Just to be clear, let us look
directly at it:
Suppose that Teletransportation worked perfectly in a few cases, but in
most cases was a complete failure. In a few cases, the person on Mars
would be a perfect Replica of me. But in most cases, he would be totally
unlike me. If these were the facts, it would clearly be rational to pay the
larger fare of a space-ship journey. But this is irrelevant. We should ask,
'In the few cases, where my Replica will be fully R-related to me, would it
matter that R did not have a reliable cause?'
I believe that the answer must again be No. (pp. 286-7)
Notice that by the teletransporter working, Parfit means that there is a

Replica who is R-related to me . It seems clear that the causal processes
by which the unreliable teletransporter generates these replicas are just
the same ones we find in the reliable teletransporter, in much the way

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Parfit on ' the Normal/a Reliable/any Cause 9 of Relation R 747
that an unreliable starter - when it works - starts a car by the same

processes as a reliable starter. The difference, in both cases, has noth-
ing to do with the nature of the process, but just with whether the
process occurs (when the teletransporter fails, different processes take
place). What does this tell us? First, Parfit cannot be using this ex-
ample to test what sort of causal relation is required for R-relatedness.
He takes it for granted that we have R-relatedness here, and so what-
ever causal requirements there are for R-relatedness - for connected-
ness - are assumed to be met. He is asking the further question of
whether it makes a difference that the machine produces this causal
relation only sporadically. This further supports the claim that what
Parfit is arguing for here is not a specification of cthe right sort of
cause' that must hold between earlier and later states for connected-
ness. Second, as an almost direct corollary, Parfit is simply not address-
ing the issue of what this right sort of cause must be. At least, he is not
doing so here , where the argument occurs. His uses of 'R-relatedness',
'connectedness', and so on simply build in that the right sort of causal
relation, whatever it is, obtains.
Third, this all supports our earlier interpretation, according to
which Parfit is asking not £What causal relations are needed for rela-
tion R to hold?' but ť Given that relation R holds, are there any con-
straints on why it holds?' The 'normal cause' of relation R is the
normal reason why our later states are (usually) appropriately causally
related (whatever that is) to our earlier states. Here , it is clear why 'any
cause' is a real candidate answer, in a way that we saw it is not for
ťWhat is the right sort of causal relation required for connected-
ness?' - for 'any cause' simply expresses the view that we would or-
dinarily express by saying: it is relation R that matters. While the very
motivations for causal constraints on memory and connectedness re-
quire that not just any old causal relation will do, there is nothing in
the basic motivation for the view that relation R is what matters that
says anything about requirements for why it holds. However, for this
very reason, we are now confronted with the question of why Parfit
would ask this rather strange-looking question. Looking at this will
also help address the seeming support we noted at the end of the
previous section for our reading of Parfit - the reading that now, at
least, appears somewhat doubtful.
Before turning to this, it is worth emphasizing one important philo-
sophical consequence of our discussion thus far. In seeing why we
should not take Parfit to be defending 'any cause' as an account of
'the right sort of cause' in the specification of relation R, we have also

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
748 Alan Sidelle
seen that no one should be taking that answer seriously, whether or not
it is Parfiťs. This further suggests (we will consider this more below)
that in so far as one is investigating what the right sort of causal
relation is, it will be a bad idea to think of the competing theories
as 'the normal one', 'any reliable one', or 'any cause', and this holds
whether or not I am right about what Parfit is trying to do.
5. Understanding 'the cause of relation R'

So - what is Parfit doing, on the reading I have preferred for him?
On this reading, his options concern the cause of the holding of relation
R . Not the cause that figures in the account of relation R, which we
have just dismissed, but the cause of the fact that relation R holds
between the earlier states of Pj and the later states of P2. As noted
earlier, there is something a bit odd about this question: we are basic-
ally to assume that R holds - and so, for instance, that P2 remembers,
or quasi-remembers, P/s experiences, can carry out P/s intentions,
and so on - but we now want to know why P2's states are caused in
the right sort of way by P^s states: in effect, we want the cause of the
cause, which seems curious. It seems particularly curious in the con-
sideration of 'what matters' in survival - one would think (as we will
return to below) that the hard work there is to be done in specifying
the relevant causal relation in relation R. But maybe we can get more
of a sense about why Parfit thinks this is an important question to ask
by looking at how he pursues it.
As we know, Parfit more or less equates the 'normal cause' option
with the view that the transitions between mental states must be
carried out by the standard sorts of brain processes; 'physical continu-
ity is part of R's normal cause' (p. 284). And the case which contrasts
with this is teletransportation, in which he says that relation R holds,
but lacks its normal cause (p. 285). This gives us at least a little grip: we
have two different sorts of cases in which relation R holds - in which
later states are 'appropriately' caused by earlier states. Normally, say,
when a person has an experience, this causes certain brain states to
'encode' the information, and perhaps the character of the experience,
so that it can later be retrieved. Since, presumably, the later states then
count as standing in the right sort of causal relation to the earlier, they
count as memories. In teletransportation, the later states are caused
(directly) by states of the teletransporter. By hypothesis, there is still
the right sort of causal relation between these later states and those

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Parfit on 'the Normal/a Reliable/any Cause 9 of Relation R 749
of the original. So in both cases we have relation R. But the reason

why the later states are 'appropriately caused by' the earlier states is
different in the two cases. Or perhaps it seems more accurate to say
that the specific causal processes which are processes of the right sort
are different. It seems less like a 'cause of a cause' than a specific causal
relation or process which instantiates a more generally specified sort
of relation - but in such cases, it is perfectly appropriate to say that
the more specific cause 'explains why' the more general cause obtains.
Such is done regularly in using a physical cause to explain the obtain-
ing of a more functionally specified causal relation.
Now, the 'normal cause' view runs into something of a level of
abstraction problem - why is the normal cause 'physical (brain) con-
tinuity' rather than 'this specific sort of energy transfer', say? If one
were proposing 'the normal cause' as the right cause in relation R, this
would be an issue (see the final paragraph of section 6 below).
However, given the question it is meant to address, it is not so im-
portant here. Let us backtrack a second. By this point, Parfit thinks he
has shown (a) that psychological accounts of identity are the most
plausible, and (b) that identity is not what matters in survival, due
to fission. It is thus most natural to think that what matters is what
we already had in our account of identity - psychological continuity
(and connectedness) - shorn of the elements that are in the account
merely to satisfy the logical requirements of identity. So, we would
expect relation R to be the obvious candidate. But Parfit is concerned
about people who are still tied to physical conditions. Indeed, Parfit
says, 'It might be suggested that what matters is both R and physical
continuity. But this is the same as answer (2) [Relation R with its
normal cause], since physical continuity is part of R's normal cause'
(p. 283). One supposes that he chooses the 'normal cause' formulation
as opposed to the 'with physical continuity' formulation because he is
supposing that this would be the best reason for thinking that physical
continuity matters. So there is a specific target here: precisely people
who think that physical continuity of some sort is required for sur-
vival. Since Parfit does not think this has any plausibility - and since
he is going to say that there are no constraints on why R obtains - it
does not matter how we resolve the level-of-abstraction problems.
There are not, as with the 'right sort of cause' in R issue, some definite
intuitions that determine a pretty clear question to be asked which
might impose constraints on what acceptable answers might be.
There is, instead, just a specific view that Parfit wants to challenge.
Why, then, does he include 'reliable cause' as an option, as well? I am

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
750 Alan Sidelle
guessing that this is just an option that seems to arise dialectically: if

we think that what might motivate a physical criterion is that our
brain transitions constitute the 'normal' way connectedness is realized,
then if we then come to think teletransportation is a cmode of travel', it
would not be entirely unnatural to think that this is because, while it is
a different way of realizing the right sort of causal relation, it is still
reliable. And indeed, Parfit gives this position such a cursory dismissal,
there seem no grounds for thinking it has any more serious motiv-
ation; additionally, perhaps he thought that if he simply moved
directly to 'any cause', readers would naturally think cWhy jump all
the way there - perhaps something intermediate could be more
plausible?' But that would not be motivated by any direct brief on
behalf of reliable causes, but just a general philosophical caution.
Lastly, considering 'reliable cause' allows Parfit to distinguish the
question of what does matter from more epistemic concerns, in pro-
spect, about whether what matters will be present in some future
person (pp. 286-7).
All that said, however, I think that if this is what Parfit means to
address with his tripartite distinction, then he has misread his target.
Those who have followed Parfit in his argument up to this point, but
who believe that one must have some, or enough, of the same brain in
order to survive (and who also grant that 'mere' brain continuity is
unimportant: it has to be subserving mental activity), will typically,
I believe, think that the sorts of brain processes involved in ordinary
psychological-connectedness-instantiating transitions are required for
the right sort of cause in psychological connectedness. That is, the
issue between them and Parfit is the issue I have argued that Parfit
should not be seen as enjoining.
And whether or not I am right that Parfit should not be so read,
certainly his 'normal/reliable/any' arguments can have no force against
such opponents. For as we have seen, his arguments there presuppose
that relation R is present in cases like teletransportation. It is certainly
(to my mind) appropriate to ask, of someone who grants that tele-
transportation products are psychologically connected to us, why it
matters whether its cause is normal or reliable. After all, as we have
noted, the whole history of motivation for psychological views focuses
on this R-relation as the important one, so it is fine to say 'it is the
effect that matters' - if the effect is relation R. But one who is doubt-
ful whether the causal transitions involved in teletransportation are of
the right sort is immune to 'only the effect matters', if, as we have said,
the 'effect' is the holding of relation R. They will doubt that this effect

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
is present. And again, if 'the effect' is not relation R, but simply some-
one of the right psychological sort, or someone of that sort who stands
in some causal relation to the original, then Parfit is subject to more
familiar difficulties: opponents may claim this is not the effect that
matters.18
Parfit does have one other argument against the normal cause
requirement we should look at. This is his analogy with seeing.
Parfit imagines people with artificial eyes who, through these devices,
come to have visual experiences of the sort, and in the circumstances,
that ordinary sighted people do. Whether or not they would count as
seeing, Parfit insists (no doubt correctly) that it would be just as good
as seeing (p. 208). He returns to this later: 'Suppose that these eyes
would give to those people visual sensations just like those involved in
normal sight, and that these sensations would provide true beliefs
about what can be seen. This would surely be as good as normal
sight' (p. 285). For this to defeat the normal cause requirement, or
support teletransportation, what we 'get' ('the effect') from teletran -
sportation, as compared to ordinary survival, must be analogous to
what we get from the artificial eyes, as compared to ordinary seeing.
The candidates for what we get seem to be: (a) a relevantly qualita-
tively similar future person; (b) a relevantly qualitatively similar
person whose states are in some causal relation or other to our earlier
states; or (c) someone who is psychologically connected to us. On the
sight side, (a) would be analogous to simply having visual experiences
which matched, even if only accidentally, objects in the environment.
This would amount to rejecting any causal requirement on either
seeing or surviving, and cannot be expected to be convincing in
either case. The analogue of (b) would be having experiences which
matched the objects in the environment, as the result of some causal
18 A possible alternative opponent might claim that what matters is 'having the same
consciousness', and that this is not to be analysed in terms of psychological continuity, but
must ultimately simply be understood in physical terms. McMahan seems to advocate such a
view, motivated in large part by the conviction that Alzheimer's patients, and others with
serious day-to-day connectedness gaps, none the less have reason to be concerned about their
futures (or more neutrally, about the futures of those who will be physically continuous with
them). See McMahan 2002, Ch. 1, Sects 4 and 5. I am not so clear whether someone with this
view can really think that teletransportation products remember, or quasi -remember, the
earlier experiences; if not, they should not admit that relation R obtains, as with the opponents
noted in the text (though perhaps for different reasons). This is implicitly acknowledged by
McMahan, in his distinction between psychological connections and what he calls ' real psy-
chological connection(s)' (p. 63).

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
752 Alan Sidelle
relation, however wayward and seemingly irrelevant to the nature of

the percept, with the object matched. Such a view would be subject to
analogues of Mr X, and could hardly ground the idea that this was just
as good as seeing. If nothing else, such 'seeing' could not be a source
of knowledge - if your seeing a snake makes you run and fall over
and accidentally poke me in the eye, causing a matching snake-like
visual percept in me, I hardly know (or see) that there is a snake on the
path. So, on the analogues of (a) and (b), Parfit could not plausibly
claim that what we get from the artificial eyes is 'as good as seeing',
and so we should not think that his claim is meant to support tele-
transportation, or undermine the normal cause requirement, simply
because teletransportation gives us (a) or (b). Rather, teletransporta-
tion has to give us - as Parfit says it does - someone who is psycho-
logically connected to us, as the artificial eyes give us knowledge about
the objects in our environment via visual experience that is structur-
ally determined by structural features of the object (roughly speaking).
But if we are supposed to accept teletransportation, and reject the
normal cause requirement, because teletransportation products
are 'as good as' the products of artificial eyes, we need to already
believe that teletransportation gives us products who are psychologic-
ally connected to us. Only then can Parfit say 'It's the effect that
matters', and we are back to our reflections of the previous two
paragraphs.
But perhaps it is simpler. Parfit just thinks it intuitively clear that
what matters is preserved in teletransportation, that relation R ob-
tains, and so any view that says otherwise - whether it be a normal
cause requirement in or of psychological connectedness - must be
mistaken. And maybe the artificial eyes analogy is just to encourage
us to think that what we have from the teletransporter is as good as
what we have from artificial eyes. But it looks rather more like the
argument is: since what we have from teletransportation is as good
as ordinary survival (just as what we have from artificial eyes is as
good as ordinary sight), so we should not care about the cause of this
relation. It is not that the relation between the object and our visual
experience does not matter - that has to be of a certain sort. Rather
the point is that it can be of this sort even without normal eyes, and so
we should not care about the difference. Similarly, it is not that the
relation between earlier and later states does not matter. Rather, it can
be of this sort even without the normal brain processes. For the ana-
logy , we have to already believe the relation is of the right sort. So as an
argument, it works much better as an argument against 'the normal

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
cause of psychological continuity', than against a normal cause re-

quirement in psychological continuity.
Finally, we should briefly revisit the earlier passage where Parfit
comes closest to explicitly advocating cany cause' as ťthe right sort
of cause in psychological continuity5 (which we noticed at the end
of Sect. 3). Most of my case has been built around the difficulty of
taking this seriously philosophically, and on the fact that Parfiťs
arguments seem rather baldly unsuccessful if taken to be arguments
for 'any cause', and against 'normal cause' on such a reading, while
both the options themselves, and the arguments for them, look rather
more plausible on the 'causes of psychological continuity' reading.
It also fits better, I have claimed, with Parfit's urging of 'it's the
effect that matters'. Nonetheless, it really does look like, in that earlier
passage, Parfit means the narrow and wide readings - and so, the
normal/reliable/any options - to apply to the causal relations obtain-
ing between the earlier and later states in the accounts of memory and
psychological connectedness. What should I say?
Roughly speaking, I think there are two options, neither entirely
satisfactory. On one reading, we should take all of these considerations
and read them back into Parfit's earlier formulation, and just claim he
really is concerned, even there, with the cause of relation R: he is, as in
later passages, already building in the idea that the causal relation
between the states is of an appropriate sort, and is concerned with
how that sort is realized . This would, perhaps, fit with Parfit's example
of a non- right cause' (memory impression coming from someone else
witnessing the event of your experience) being much less extreme
than something like Mr X. But we should have to admit that if this
is so, Parfit is much less clear than he could be. The other option is
to allow that Parfit is there concerned with what is the right cause in
the analysis of connectedness - but that he is also concerned,
throughout his discussion, with the cause of connectedness, as indi-
cated by his arguments and other formulations, and especially by his
taking for granted that teletransportation preserves R-relatedness. On
this reading, Parfit is sometimes concerned with the one, and some-
times the other, and perhaps even in his own mind does not clearly
distinguish them. But the bulk of the discussion is best understood
on the 'cause of connectedness' reading. Both of these readings, un-
fortunately, involve attributing some unclarity or confusion to
Parfit - but less, I think, than the pure 'right sort of cause in con-
nectedness' reading.

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754 Alan Sidelle
6. Putting 'the right sort of cause* to work:

teletransportation and a causal requirement
Before concluding, I would like to return to a suggestion I made
earlier (p. 741). We motivated our inquiry, and our reading of
Parfit, in part through the challenges posed to him by those who
think that given his advocacy of 'any cause', and his acceptance of
the view that one would survive teletransportation, that he is in no
position to really have a causal requirement on relation R or survival
at all And I suggested that we would be in a better position to see how
Parfit (or any of us sharing Parfiťs views here) might reply by showing
that Parfiťs advocacy of 'any cause' is not advocacy of any cause in
R. So let me try to make good on this; it might also, if only in a sketchy
way, offer some methodological direction for the better investigation
of the question, which we now know to be still unanswered, 'What is
the right sort of cause in relation R?'
While not at all decisive, our investigation points in the following
natural direction for a response to this challenge. Those who think
teletransportation is a method of travel think that the causal relations
that hold between the mental states of the original, and those of the
replica, are of an appropriate sort.19 Appropriate - for instance - for
the claim that the replica (at least) quasi-remembers the original's
experiences. Very few, if any, such people think that P remembers
choking on a fishbone in the Mr X case. They are thus not at
all involved in a complete liberalization of what 'the right sort' of
causal relation is. Parfit can thus appeal to constraints on ťthe right
sort of cause' within relation R - his acceptance of 'any cause' does
not entail that he must accept, as cases of survival, just any case in
which there is some causal relation between earlier and later states.
With respect to Kolak and Martin, this allows two possible moves. The
first is to claim that the causal relation in their MOC match example is
not of the right sort, while the second is to allow that it is of the right
sort, but that this still allows for substantial (or anyway, non-empty)
causal constraints that need to obtain for survival. They want us to
think that as we move from teletransportation, to the MOC case, to
the Random Match case, there are no relevant differences. But a sense
of what differences are relevant is best attained by looking at pairs of
seemingly clear, importantly similar cases. So, for instance, anyone
19 Well - aside from those who base their judgement entirely upon the qualitative rela-
tionship between the states of the original and the products. But this is ruled out in the next
sentence but one.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
who thinks P in Mr X does not remember choking on the fishbone is

also likely to think that one's doppelgänger or random match product
does not remember choking on the fishbone either. And just as it
seems appropriate to say, of P, that 'his memory-impression is not
caused in the right way by his (earlier choking) experience' - even
without having a theory of what the right cause is - so one expects the
same judgement about one's random match products. These are the
data with which to undertake investigation of the analysis of 'right
cause' - it will be something that is present in ordinary remembering,
but absent not only in the Random Match case, but also in the Mr X
case. Of course, such judgements can be put under pressure, as Kolak
and Martin attempt to do, by constructing intermediate cases where
'there does not seem to be a relevant difference' in the purportedly
relevant (here, causal) respect. And so perhaps there can be an overall
tension between this judgement and one's original judgements. But
one will first have at least to look at candidate differences, and to do
so, one need not only look at cases involving full-scale (purported)
continuity in all psychological respects - one can start with sugges-
tions that come from the more humdrum memory cases. For instance,
in Mr X, the content and character of P's later memory-appearance
has nothing to do with the content and character of his earlier experi-
ence. The former depends, instead, entirely upon the effects on his
brain of the whack he got to the head. This independence of the later
states from the content and character of our earlier states will be true
of the states of our doppelgängers as well - and, more generally, in
the Random Match case (where the body is made which just happens
to match Nozick's, but no earlier scan of him was ever done), there
will not even be a relation of counterfactual dependence between the
states of the randomly produced MOC products and Nozick's earlier
states. These ideas might be used to drive a wedge between the prod-
ucts in the MOC match case and those in the Random Match case,
since the states of the former do have some counterfactual dependence
upon the states of the earlier people (this is an instance of the second
sort of reply referred to above). Or they might also be used to forge
a relevant difference between teletransportation and the MOC
match case, as the sort of dependence of the later states on the earlier
looks rather different in the two cases (this would be the first sort of
reply).
Kolak and Martin can be expected to ask why we should care about
counterfactual dependence, or the nature of the causal relations.
Additionally, they consider this suggestion about a relevant difference

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
756 Alan Sidelle
between teletransportation and the MOC match case: '[T] hough it

resembles you, by hypothesis, it does not arise out of you' (p. 343).
Curiously, their reply is simply, 'The causal connection is "weaker"
in the MOC match example. But it's hard to imagine that anyone who
thought that personal identity was preserved in the Beaming Example
would feel confidence that it wasn't also preserved in the MOC match
example . . . Remember Parfit's argument that it is the effect that mat-
ters, not its cause' (p. 343). What is curious is that we have a candidate
relevant difference - 'it does not arise out of you', which, it seems
hard to deny, has real force, both theoretically and intuitively - and
rather than address it directly, they repeat that there just does not
seem to be any basis for judging the cases differently. My point here
is not that one can clearly judge the cases differently - I agree that it is
hard to feel confident, especially if one is being asked just to look at the
cases, and not to attempt to construct a broader theory, that the MOC
match does not generate survivors, if one thinks the teletransporter
does. Rather, my points are (a) there is no reason to approach the
cases in such a vacuum - other simple cases, like memory cases and
Fishbone and Mr X, provide us with reason to think there is some sort
of causal constraint, and they make certain sorts of causal relations
seem relevant, such as 'the later states arising out of the earlier ones';
and (b) they might well provide enough confidence that somewhere in
the transition from teletransportation to random duplication, one hits
upon a relevant causal difference. It seems like the reason Kolak and
Martin doubt this is because they are looking at 'the effect' not as 'the
obtaining of relation R', but as 'the existence of a person with the
relevant sort of qualitative similarity'. I am not insisting that such a
view is mistaken - but I do think that they are not taking seriously
enough the deep motivations for thinking of memory, and its pro-
genitor, psychological connectedness, as inherently causal notions,
and the underlying idea that it is these causal relations, rather than
(simply) the qualitative ones, which both unify a person through time,
and which underlie our intuitions about survival. (Here is a related
intuition: if A dies, but (completely independently generated) random
match В shows up, feeling terrible guilt about 'his' treatment of a
former friend (which treatment A really did perpetrate), would it
not be appropriate to tell В not to worry, since he never did such a
thing? It would certainly be appropriate if A had never existed. But it is
less obvious (at least to me) that such a reply would be appropriate to
my guilt-ridden teletransporter product.) It seems perfectly appropri-
ate to use those earlier intuitions as a basis for developing potential

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
causal constraints, and if asked why these constraints matter, it seems

equally appropriate to say: because they are elements of memory, and
psychological connectedness, which matter. Though, as noted, we also
have a more theoretical reason.
But it could be urged that my defence of Parfit here - or, more
generally, of those who think one survives in the products of teletran-
sportation, but nonetheless wish to maintain a causal requirement on
relation R and survival - illegitimately supposes that the 'relevant
differences' between cases of memory and 'coincidental memory
illusion' are to be found between teletransportation and random du-
plication, rather than somewhere 'to the left', as it were (speaking
diagrammatically), of teletransportation. And there is something to
this - I have simply been taking the vantage point of one who, like
Parfit, thinks teletransportation is clearly a mode of travel, while
random duplication is not. But my bigger point here is not to
defend this, but to return to my earlier philosophical point about
the framing of the question . The couple of ideas I threw out about
how one might try to find a relevant difference between teletranspor-
tation and entirely causally unrelated duplication are possible starting
points for answering the question of what is the right sort of causal
relation. It seems obvious that, in trying to answer this question, one
looks at clear cases of memory, and at cases of what may be called
'pseudo-memories' (cases which clearly are not cases of memory,
though they share important relevant features with memories, such
as content, visual appearance, or phenomenological feel), and then
one searches for relevant differences. As we saw earlier, 'any cause'
just looks like a non-starter. The view that really we do not need any
causal relation is much to be preferred, whatever its other deficiencies,
since it has at least a coherent motivation.20 Now, even if 'any' does
not seem plausible, might 'normal' cause or 'any reliable cause' be
better candidates?
Maybe, but I doubt it, and even if they were , they would have to be
seen as two candidates among quite a few more, that are much more
fine-grained. Does it seem remotely plausible to diagnose the Mr X
case by saying 'Well, the later state does not have the normal cause?'
That could at best be a gesture in a certain direction , I would think.
A placeholder, perhaps, for further investigation. More importantly,
20 Roughly, a focus entirely upon the subjective perspective of the later person, and its
qualitative relation to the earlier, and the thought that this is what is really driving our
intuitions in cases like teletransportation.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
758 Alan Sideïle
as noted in the previous section, it is extremely vague. In normal cases

of, say, experiences causing memory-impressions, there are presum-
ably all sorts of causal processes at different levels going on. Some are
purely physical, some are neurobiological, some are psychological.
Suppose that in human cases of memory formation, there is always
some magnetic force involved. Is this then required for memory on the
'normal cause' view? If some mutations occur, and the same infor-
mation is transferred and produces the same sort of state transform-
ations, but it is done with electricity, is that not OK? Or is the proper
level one that is more concerned with information ? Or neuronal struc-
ture? Does it matter if someone is taking memory-supplementing
pills? When the 'normal cause' view is presented - first by Parfit,
and later by others - it is generally just as the idea that the transitions
all have to take place within a single brain . And this (that the transi-
tions must take place within a single brain) is a perfectly good candi-
date for what is required for 'the right cause' - but it seems directly
motivated by our cases. There seems to be nothing gained - and,
indeed, considerable obscurity added - by getting at it in terms of
'normalcy'. And as we have also seen, other candidates include: 'Later
states having the character they do because the earlier states have the
character they did', or, to go back to Deutscher and Martin, '[One's]
past experience of the thing represented is operative in producing the
state (or the succession of states) in him which is finally operative in
producing the representation in the circumstances in which he is
prompted' (p. 185). Obviously, I am not trying to answer, or even
really address, the question of 'What is the right sort of cause in the
specification of relation R?' I just want to emphasize that it is a ques-
tion that is not really profitably addressed by the normal cause/any
reliable cause/any cause options - nor, once more, is there reason to
think that Parfit himself is trying to answer it.
7. Conclusion
To return, then, to where we left our interpretation of Parfit, we found

two readings. On the account I have favoured, Parfit is offering views
about the cause of relation R, which relation is already taken to have
'the right sort of cause' built into it, and of which no analysis is being
offered. This, I think, makes the most sense of the specific claims Parfit
makes, the arguments he offers, and what he does not say by way
of acknowledgment of rejection of familiar views and intuitions.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
On this reading, Parfit has a range of options for explaining why

we would survive teletransportation, but not random duplication.
Unfortunately, on this view, he does not really properly address the
opponents he seems concerned with - if his opponents are those who
think brain continuity is required for 'what matters'. To address those
opponents, he really does need to more directly address the issue of
what the right sort of cause is in the analysis of psychological con-
tinuity. On the other reading, he is addressing this issue - but not
very well, and in a rather strange way. 'Normal/reliable/any' cause is
just a very coarse, and not very natural, way of carving up the range of
options, with 'any' having no plausibility at all, and 'normal' not
obviously offering any specific constraints. I think it is more import-
ant to be clear on this - that we have not been given a satisfactory
answer to the question of what the right sort of cause is in psycho-
logical continuity, nor even a proper framework for thinking about it -
than on whether or not Parfit is actually attempting to address and
answer this question.21
References
Deutscher, Max and C. B. Martin 1966: 'Remembering'. Philosophical

Review , 75, pp. 161-97.
Elliot, Robert 1991: 'Personal Identity and Causal Continuity'.
Philosophical Quarterly , 41, pp. 55-75.
Kolak, Daniel and Raymond Martin 1987: 'Personal Identity
and Causality: Becoming Unglued'. American Philosophical
Quarterly , 24, pp. 339-47-
Kolak, Daniel 2008: 'Room for a View: On the Metaphysical Subject
of Personal Identity'. Synthese , 162, pp. 341-72.
McMahan, Jeff 2002: The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of
Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, Derek 1971: 'Personal Identity'. Philosophical Review , 80,
PP. 3-30.
Perry, John 1975a: 'Personal Identity, Memor

of Circularity'. In Perry 1975b, pp. 135-55.
21 Many thanks to Daniel Kolak, Pete Nichols, Dennis Stampe, the Editor of this journal,
and two anonymous referees for their helpful feedback and support. The referees have
subsequently been identified to me as Ray Martin and Eric Olson.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC
760 Alan Sidelle
Press.
Shoemaker, David 2007: 'Personal Identity and P

Mind, ii6, pp. 317-57-
Shoemaker, Sydney 1970: 'Persons and their Pasts'
sophical Quarterly, 7, pp. 269-85.
pp. 283-304.
Shoemaker, Sydney and Richard Swinburne 1984: Personal Identity.
New York: Blackwell.
Sidelle, Alan 2002: 'Some Episodes in the Sameness of Conscious-
ness'. Philosophical Topics, 30, pp. 269-93.

132.174.250.76 on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:59:45 UTC

Sidelle, Alan (2011) Parfit On The Normal-A Realible-Any Cause in Relation R

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Parfit on 'the Normal/a Reliable/any Cause' of Relation R

Author(s): Alan Sidelle

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41494377

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In section 96 ('The Continuity of the Body') of Reasons and Persons ,

Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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that physical continuity as such is what matters, he offers these three

(1) Relation R with its normal cause

Relation R is psychological connectedness and/or continuity.2 Parfit

Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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partly be engaging in interpretation of what Parfit says in Reasons and

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duplicates, and have explicitly taken Parfit as their main target.6 At

Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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Before moving on, it is worth noticing that on this reading, it is

3. Psychological connectedness and 'the right sort' of cause

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Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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Criterion, he illustrates it with memory:

(1) I seem to remember having an experience,

(3) my apparent memory is causally dependent, in the normal

4. Why 'the right sort of cause' cannot be any cause

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of that event. At tv P gets whacked on the head, generating a (seeming)

Plainly, P's state at ř3 is not a memory; he does not remember choking

Sometime after tx but before í2, P tells Mr X about his choking on a

I cannot imagine anyone who thinks that memory requires a causal

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remarks do suggest that he may be willing to count his memory-

Notice that by the teletransporter working, Parfit means that there is a

Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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that an unreliable starter - when it works - starts a car by the same

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5. Understanding 'the cause of relation R'

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of the original. So in both cases we have relation R. But the reason

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guessing that this is just an option that seems to arise dialectically: if

Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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relation, however wayward and seemingly irrelevant to the nature of

Mind, Vol. 120 . 479 . July 2011 © Sidelle 2011

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