J ens J ohansson and Persons in 1984 One of Parfit’s main theses in this book is what he calls “reductionism” about personal identity According to reductionism, “the fact of a person’s identity over time just consists in the holding of certain more particular facts” (1984, 210) – such as the fact that a future individual is (uniquely) psychologically continuous with me as I am now, or that a future individual has the same body as the one I have now Non-reductionism, by contrast, asserts that personal identity over time is a “further fact”; it is something “over and above” the obtaining of such psychological or bodily continuities.11 Although Parfit seems to recognize the conceptual possibility of a non-reductionist view that merely says, for instance, that whereas personal identity holds if and only if there is (non-branching) psychological continuity, it does not consist in such continuity, he takes the main non-reductionist view to hold that personal identity over time involves the sharing of an immaterial, Cartesian soul.12 According to Parfit, though we may be largely unaware of this, large portions of our thinking about ourselves rely on non-reductionism For example, he contends, we tend to believe – or believe things that presuppose – that it can never be indeterminate whether I am identical to certain past or future individual, an assumption that, he says, is reasonable only on non-reductionism More dramatically, lots of our most fundamental beliefs about morality and prudence presuppose nonreductionism For instance, while a common complaint against utilitarianism is that it fails to “take seriously the distinction between persons” (Rawls 1971, 27), Parfit holds that reductionism reveals that that distinction does not deserve to be taken seriously Moreover, he expresses sympathy for the claim that reductionism, unlike non-reductionism, leaves prudential concern for one’s own future unjustified Since the fact that a future pain, for instance, is mine just consists in mundane facts about certain continuities, and lacks the splendor and star quality of facts about an immaterial soul, it is unreasonable for me to get worked up about it.13 It is important to distinguish the thesis that prudential concern for one’s own future is unjustified from the thesis that identity is not what justifies prudential concern (sect 5) For one thing, Parfit’s main support for the latter thesis – the fission argument – would be undermined if it were to be shown that Henry would not be justified in having prudential concern for Lefty’s (or Righty’s) experiences This would nothing to undermine the former thesis For another, even if identity is not what prudentially matters, something else may justify prudential concern – psychological continuity, for instance After all, in every ordinary case, if a person is going to have a certain future experience, then she is psychologically continuous with the future experiencer (Indeed, on the psychological-continuity view, this will hold in any possible case, ordinary or not – even the non-branching version takes psychological continuity to be necessary for personal identity over time.) In section 5 we noted Olson’s remark that if identity is not what prudentially matters, then the claim that Brown has reason for prudential concern about Brownson’s experiences fails to support the psychological-continuity view A similar point can be made here If reductionism shows that we not have 136