The Identity Problem in Buddhist Ethics: An Examination of Buddhist and Parfitian Conceptions of the Subject

46. What kind of rebirth?......Page 118
47. What might amount to rebirth?......Page 119
BookmarkTitle:......Page 129
52. Where the argument stands......Page 131
  It is fortunate for the present argument that, in pressing his positive assertions, Wiggins deals explicitly with Locke and the impetus deriving from Locke, and also with the fresh opening offered by Shoemaker. His treatment of Locke is by way of a straightforward vindication of Butler’s well-known subversion of his account of the person. Butler claims that Locke presupposes what he takes himself to establish. Wiggins takes this riposte as settling the question, and as narrowing the field of choice to a soul account of the person and a human-being account. He elaborates on this, with a demonstration how his two sortal concepts are related. ‘Person’ is a narrower categorisation than ‘human-being’ but inseparable from it; ‘ a person is … a subject of interpretation, a being that both interprets and is interpreted’. 467 This enables him to make use of some of Locke’s material. As immature human-beings, we learn how to adjust to experience and to inter-act and co-operate with others. In so doing, ‘what stereotype of personhood do we have to catch on to, clearly if not distinctly, and learn to elaborate?’ This process of person-construction finds, suggests Wiggins, its last and soldering stage in experiential memory: ‘… when people do or suffer something, this [the faculty of memory] will express itself on their minds, extend their information, colour their experience and influence their future responses’. 468 Admirers of Locke may be to a degree propitiated, supposes Wiggins, by the resemblance of this account to Locke’s own, already quoted: ‘A person is a thinking, intelligent being ….’......Page 214
Conclusions......Page 233