Reasons, identity, and future people › Connectedness, continuity and the cause of a connection

Psychological connectedness concerns particular direct connections. Remembering an experience is one example; carrying out an earlier intention is another. Persistence of beliefs, desires or character can also contribute. The extent of these connections can vary. Someone may have many direct links with their recent past and fewer with a much earlier period.

Psychological continuity concerns overlapping chains of strong connectedness. The distinction matters when direct links fade. An adult need not remember every experience of early childhood for there to have been a chain of strongly connected stages through the intervening years. Continuity is not merely the presence of a current autobiographical memory.

Parfit calls psychological connectedness and/or continuity, with the right kind of cause, Relation R. The causal qualification prevents us from treating accidental resemblance as equivalent to the relationship at issue. He further argues for a broad view about admissible causes. The characterization of R and the defense of which causes count are distinguishable steps in his account.

These terms help make his central claim precise: identity is not what fundamentally matters in the prudential concern associated with survival. The relations captured by R can carry that importance. This does not mean that identity is never relevant to a practical question. It concerns the role identity plays in explaining why we should care about a person's future.

It would also be too quick to translate degrees of connectedness into a fixed schedule of concern. Nothing in the definition itself tells us exactly how much less to care when a direct memory is lost. An account of the psychological facts still needs an argument about their normative weight. Forgetting an episode does not by itself remove obligations or make injury unimportant.