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Social Unity and the Identity of Persons
Author(s) -
Copp David
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of political philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1467-9760
pISSN - 0963-8016
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9760.00157
Subject(s) - copp , citation , identity (music) , state (computer science) , media studies , political science , sociology , art , law , computer science , aesthetics , heme , biochemistry , chemistry , heme oxygenase , algorithm , enzyme
A PERSON’S citizenship, gender, and ethnicity can be part of her ‘‘identity,’’ as can her language, her religion, life projects, ethical commitments, and the like. This idea of ‘‘identity’’ is important both to moral and to political philosophy, but it has not been given an adequate philosophical explication. Indeed, it might be that there is not a single idea of ‘‘identity,’’ but that instead there is a family of ideas that have not been well distinguished from one another. My goal in this paper is to explicate an idea of ‘‘identity’’ and to illustrate its usefulness in political philosophy. I believe the idea I will introduce is important to a proper understanding of the bases of social unity, both the unity that is forged by shared commitments and friendships, and the political unity of multinational and multicultural states. The metaphysics of ‘‘personal identity’’ is not at issue in this context. It is a familiar fact that people continue to exist as time passes, despite the many physical and psychological changes that they undergo. The metaphysical problem of personal identity is to explain what is necessarily involved in the continued existence of a person over time. A proposed solution to this problem is a proposal about the nature of the metaphysical glue that joins the various stages in a person’s life into a single life.1 But whatever view we take about the nature of this metaphysical glue, there is the quite different issue in moral psychology that is my topic here. The idea is that some facts about a person are central to her personality, her character, or her view of herself, such that understanding what these facts are is crucial in some important way to understanding her. I will propose an account of this idea of identity in terms of self-esteem. I do not claim that my account is a fully accurate analysis of a clear pre-theoretical concept, but I do claim that it captures important central features of our thinking about the issues in moral psychology that I will be addressing. In addition, I claim that the account is theoretically useful in a wide variety of contexts. In this paper I will focus on issues in political theory. I will suggest that the concept of identity as I explicate it—self-esteem identity—can help to explain the phenomena of nationalism and patriotism and the difficult problem of social unity faced by multinational states.2