Topics Identity

Question It's absurd to say "If I were him I would have behaved differently" right? I mean, if you were him you would BE him, all his atoms and neurons and flesh, etcetera, and you would have the same thoughts, desires, impulses, everything. (Unless there's some transference of my Cartesian Ego or soul or something that can rise above the fact that I'm simply just him now, but at this point that seems ridiculous unless there's a god, although I know some dualists might disagree). We so often speak as if we can judge other people's actions by just inserting ourselves into "their shoes", but can we really do that and make any sense? Thanks a lot!

Accepted:
March 31, 2012

Comments

You're right to detect absurdity in the literally construed antecedent "If I were him." (It's also ungrammatical: "If I were he.") There's good reason to think that statements of identity and distinctness (i.e., non-identity) are noncontingent: they never just happen to be true. So, given that you're not identical to him, you couldn't have been identical to him, regardless of the existence of God or a Cartesian ego. In that case, "If I were he" is an impossible antecedent, which (on the standard semantics for conditionals) makes the entire conditional "If I were he, then p" trivially true no matter what statement p is: "If I were he, I wouldn't be he" comes out true, for example.

But that's all metaphysics and semantics. As you say, the real point of statements beginning "If I were him [or he, or you]" is to offer advice or to pass judgment on someone's actions. It assumes that you can imagine being in his circumstances in all the relevant respects and that the relevant respects needn't include every detail of his circumstances: some details of his circumstances (such as his exact mass to the nearest gram) aren't relevant to whether his actions in those circumstances count as wise or foolish. Our default position seems to be that a detail of his circumstances doesn't bear on the wisdom or foolishness of his actions unless there's reason to think that it does.