dc.description.abstract | As an agent has moral responsibility for his actions, personal identity is an important basis to determine the attribution of moral responsibility. Traditionally, personal identity is mainly determined based on an individual′s memory or psychological connection. However, neuroscience and technology have developed to a stage that could change a person′s memory, and it generates a problem that whether one has to bear the moral responsibility for actions before one’s memory was changed. Parfit criticized the two main reductionist criteria of personal identity of the Western philosophical tradition, namely the psychological and physical criterion. He regards them unable to respond to the challenge of neuroscience especially the one to many relationship made possible by recent scientific technology. Parfit thinks that what is important in attribution of moral responsibility is what he called "relation R", that is, whether there are enough psychological continuity between the earlier and the later agents The more the greater moral responsibility. Relation R does not focus on the continuity of a person. Parfit could be said to nullify the traditional concept of personal identity. However, relation R still relies on individual’s memory or psychological connection to determent whether relation R is established, it would not be able to determine the attribution of moral responsibility. Korsgaard points out that even if in the brain fission case, the unity of agency still can provide identification to whom the responsibility of the action should be attributed. However, both conceptions are limited to traditional Western philosophy which presupposes responsibility is tied purely to the individual’s internal psychological connection. This paper adapts Leibniz’ proposal of “the concurring testimony of other people" for the identification of a person and develops an ethical relation E in response to the problem of personal identity. I borrow the Confucian idea of intimate family relationship in reconstruction since for Confucian a person’s identity is closely shared with one’s family members with whom one grows up since born. The most important one is the relationship between family members and friends, and in Chinese tradition, it is called ethical relation, as it conveys something permanent in our personal identity. Hence, besides memory, ethical relation E could provide a way for the identification of a person through his or her intimate relations with others and could avoid the interference of neurotechnologies. In fact, relation E provides longitudinal and co-temporal social elements and thus a criterion with both subjective and objective aspects for the true identity of a person. Finally, I apply this criterion to solve some of the thorny questions of attribution of moral responsibilities of related neuroethical and bioethical issues to show its theoretical effectiveness.
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