The Who as a Modal Category

Abstract

A standing statement of the first categorial determination of Ethical Ontology: that the who is a modal category of being. The question is what distinguishes someone from something. Two candidate answers are eliminated before any positive claim is made. Numerical identity individuates whatever it is applied to — this stone, this storm, this hour — and so cannot mark the difference: two indiscernible newborns are two, and so are the two indiscernible bands used to tell them apart, but only one of those pairs raises the question of who. A paired case then fixes what is at stake: a burned canvas is not restored by a perfect copy, and neither is someone gone restored by a substitute matched at every listable point — appearance, voice, memory, narrative continuity, social embedding — with nothing anyone can name as the item that is missing. Consciousness fares no better, since any capacity specified descriptively or functionally is repeatable, and a repeatable property cannot determine this one. What the cases disclose is then stated as a category. Ownness is the differentia: the whole obtaining obtains as someone rather than merely as something, and not as a thing to which consciousness, personhood or subjectivity is subsequently added. Non-vicariousness is the character through which that differentia differentiates: this own obtaining cannot be undergone in another's place. Because the differentia does not come in degrees, the category admits no primary case — which bears directly on the two devices by which categorial plurality has been held together since Aristotle, focality and univocity, both of which require a differentia that admits of degree. The statement prints what it does not claim, answers the objection that no criterion has been supplied, records its inheritances (Heidegger, Vattimo, Schürmann, Chiurazzi) and the neighbouring independent work it does not absorb (Tenev, Zizioulas, Lowe, Kagan), and closes with the conditions under which it would be false. Ethical Ontology, Volume I: The Modal Coincidence (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21721619) is the work of record for the full argument; this statement is the compression. Canonical web version: https://ethicalontology.org/doctrine/who-is-a-modal-category