Open AccessWho Would the Person Be after a Head Transplant? A Confucian Reflection
Author(s) -
Lin Bian,
Ruiping Fan
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the journal of medicine and philosophy/journal of medicine and philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.328
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1744-5019
pISSN - 0360-5310
DOI - 10.1093/jmp/jhab024
Subject(s) - head (geology) , reflection (computer programming) , sociology , philosophy , epistemology , medicine , environmental ethics , psychology , computer science , biology , programming language , paleontology
This essay draws on classical Confucian intellectual resources to argue that the person who emerges from a head transplant would be neither the person who provided the head, nor the person who provided the body, but a new, different person. We construct two types of argument to support this conclusion: one is based on the classical Confucian metaphysics of human life as qi activity; the other is grounded in the Confucian view of personal identity as being inseparable from one's familial relations. These Confucian ideas provide a reasonable alternative to the currently dominant view that one's personal identity "follows" one's head. Together, these arguments imply that head transplantation is ethically inappropriate.