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This chapter and the next two concern the ways that the functions of morality, human nature, and the particular circumstances of a group at a given time all work together to impose constraints of varying levels of generality on what constitutes an adequate morality for that group. Drawing from the Chinese Confucian and Western communitarian traditions and their conceptions of human nature as social, this chapter explains why personal values must be present in all adequate moralities. A conception of practical identities is presented, along with the necessary conditions for such identities to possess the properties of effective agency (constituted by abilities to formulate reasonably clear priorities among one’s moral ends, and to plan and perform actions that have a reasonable chance of realizing those ends, given all the conditions beyond one’s control). Drawing from an array of studies in psychology, this chapter argues that effective moral agency requires special relationships that are shaped and guided by special moral duties.

This chapter is an exploration of moral identity, as both a psychological and a philosophical concept. It begins with the phenomenon of an identity crisis, employing Mr. Stevens, the butler from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, as an illustration. The chapter develops an account of moral identity that seeks to be consistent with psychological conceptions while also generating the normative authority and regulative efficacy necessary for moral identity to function as a moral ideal. The chapter argues that person’s moral identity is not separable from her other practical identities and standpoints, and that it derives its content from her efforts to work out how to live well within the normative structures of those other identities. It also argues that an individual’s moral identity is intertwined with her social context in ways that shape the content of that identity and her ability to live in accordance with it.

This chapter argues that a person can owe second-personal duties to herself at a moment, rather than merely across time. At a single moment, a person occupies multiple perspectives, associated with different practical identities. The good associated with one of her practical identities can conflict with the good associated with another practical identity, and her ends adopted from the standpoint of one identity can conflict with her ends adopted by another. Because of this, a person can make demands on herself from the perspective of one practical identity to another, pertaining to the protection of her wellbeing and ends, just as she might make demands on another person. Such demands can generate second-personal duties, which require that a person treat herself a particular way in the present. Since some duties owed to the self cannot be waived due to their relationship to the individual’s identity, the waivability objection is answered.

Consider two commonly cited requirements of love. The first is that we should love people for who they are. The second is that loving people should involve concern for their well-being. But what happens when an aspect of someone’s identity conflicts with her well-being? In examining this question, this chapter develops an account of loving someone in spite of something. Although there are cases where loving in spite of is merited, it argues that we generally do wrong to love people in spite of who they are, even where it appears that some aspect of their identity is in tension with their well-being. These issues are discussed with respect to disability and bodily difference in particular.

A major strand of personal identity theory has moved away from the metaphysical question of re-identification across time and towards a practical approach to personal identity. This movement has also included a ‘narrative turn’ that has also been echoed in Kierkegaard Studies. The narrative approach does add something distinctive to the psychological continuity approach, but it has also been subject to important objections. This chapter considers narrativist readings of Kierkegaard and argues that even if Kierkegaard sees persons as narratively constituted, this cannot be the whole story about personal identity for Kierkegaard. What Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms call a ‘naked’ self, a self that knows itself as more than just its practical identity, reopens the gap between the diachronic ‘person’ and the present-tense ‘self’—a gap with important implications for how we discuss personal identity.

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.

A central issue in Hamlet is Hamlet’s attempt to live his life as his—his efforts at discerning a course of action that amounts to “leading” a life, rather than just suffering it. Shakespeare’s play addresses Hamlet’s difficulty in doing this, from two sides. First, Hamlet is framed by the breakdown of the social bonds on which the protagonists depend for the meaning and worth of their lives together. The play shows these bonds to be dissolvable. Second, Hamlet’s predicament does not leave us with a desperate nihilism. On the contrary, the play shows how the meaning of a life as individually lived is best gauged by the way it “bears up” under the collapse of traditional, inherited ways of life. Hamlet is what the testing of a new, radically uncertain practical identity looks like. He cultivates an abiding uncertainty about who he might become, as a mode of self-realization.

Chapter 12 explores radical personal change and its relationship to well-being, welfare, or prudential value. Many theorists of welfare are committed to what is here called the future-based reasons view (FBR), which holds (1) that the best prudential choice in a situation is determined by which possible future has the greatest net welfare value for the subject and (2) what determines facts about future welfare are facts about the subject and the world at that future time. Although some cases of radical change are intuitively prudentially good, many cases of really radical change are not. Yet FBR has trouble explaining this. Many people instinctively reach for the notion of identity to solve this problem—arguing that really radical change cannot be good because it alters who someone is. Yet, as the chapter argues, there are reasons to doubt that appeals to identity are appropriate. The chapter ends with the suggestion that prudential facts may explain why and when retaining identity matters, rather than the other way around, and points to a possible way forward for a theorist of welfare committed to FBR.

This chapter defends the traditional view that what is unique about humans is rationality, a form of cognition involving normative self-government. Rational beings are conscious of the grounds or potential reasons for our beliefs and actions, able to evaluate those reasons, and capable of being moved accordingly. The chapter explains how rationality is distinguished from intelligence, and how this difference makes human action different from animal action. It traces the connection between being rational in this sense and having a normative or evaluative conception of the self, a practical identity, and argues that animals do not conceive of themselves normatively. Finally, it relates these distinctive properties of human beings to Feuerbach and Marx’s idea that human beings are characterized by “species-being,” a kind of identification with our species as such, and also to the special forms of knowledge and action involved in science and ethics.