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Personal Identity and Moral Action

(Text as at 19/08/2007 11:34:05)

Hello Theo,

Greetings from Australia! Hope this email finds you well.

I'm researching the topic of personal identity as it relates to moral action and am hoping for some direction towards relevant books and papers.

I'm wrestling with the idea of when a person becomes "unethical", "criminal", a "liar", a "murderer" and whether these apparent aspects of identity persist. In conventional reasoning we generally regard someone that has murdered a "murderer", the act appears to become a feature of personal identity. However, when a person lies once we tend not to stick them with the identity "liar". On the face of it this seems inconsistent. Yet there are those such as swindlers that we have no problem with labelling "liar". Does this imply that there is some threshold to be exceeded? How many times would I have to lie to legitimately acquire the identity "liar". This again seems arbitrary. I know of no formulaic method for "identity assay" and I doubt such a thing exists.

Can you help clarify my confusions?

Sincerely

Peter (17^th August 2007)