The Worm View and the Personite Problem: towards a Collectivist Solution

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According to the Worm View (WV), only those spacetime worms perduring as maximalaggregates of person-stages are continuant persons and thus moral agents. However, nonmaximally extended worms, personites, present all the seemingly necessary mental and physicalqualities, apart from stage-maximality, to be included into moral calculus. During a continuantperson's lifetime, it is possible to individuate a personite for every sufficiently extended timeinterval. Since they come into and go out of existence suddenly and abruptly, granting personitesa moral status turns out to be incompatible with any ethics that does not want to fall into thecategory of ethical hedonism. For these reasons, recognizing them as moral agents leads to thePersonite Problem (PP) for the WV. This proposal focuses on addressing this problematicinteraction by seeking a collectivist solution to the PP in order to defend the WV withoutresorting to ethical hedonism. In particular, this solution proposes to view continuant persons aswe-formations composed of many personites that jointly collaborate for the satisfaction of whatde facto turn out to be collective attitudes. Moreover, it aims at conceptualizing the investigationof cross-temporal flourishing in this collectivist fashion. This understanding of continuantpersons can also contribute to account for the most salient features of we-phenomena involvingcollective agents which in certain social contexts are able to act as a we.Metaphysical theories of personal identity over time are directly linked to ethics. Moral calculus,in fact, is shaped upon what we take to be the persistence conditions of persons. For thisreason, a fundamental question underlies this relationship: how should we face undesirableethical implications of a particular metaphysics of persons? Should we change our ethics or ourmetaphysics? These metaphilosophical questions can be tackled by taking the Worm View (WV)as a paradigmatic case.