It’s not that identity is centred around morality. It’s that morality necessitates the concept of identity

An interesting piece; The self is moral by Nina Strohminger.

Her question is "What makes us, us?" She addresses and dismisses a common argument that a person is the sum of their memories. She then advances the argument that our individual identity is bound up with our moral capacities which is in turn bound up with how we behave. She then takes the argument in a novel direction.

Why does our identity detector place so much emphasis on moral capacities? These aren’t our most distinctive features. Our faces, our fingertips, our quirks, our autobiographies: any of these would be a more reliable way of telling who’s who. Somewhat paradoxically, identity has less to do with what makes us different from other people than with our shared humanity. Consider the reason we keep track of individuals in the first place. Most animals don’t have an identity detector. Those that share our zeal for individual identification have one thing in common: they live in societies, where they must co‑operate to survive. Evolutionary biologists point out that the ability to keep track of individuals is required for reciprocal altruism and punishment to emerge. If someone breaks the rules, or helps you out of a bind, you need to be able to remember who did this in order return the favour later. Without the ability to distinguish among the members of a group, an organism cannot recognise who has co‑operated and who has defected, who has shared and who has been stingey.

Nor can you have formal moral systems without identity. The 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid observed that the fundaments of justice – rights, duty, responsibility – would be impossible without the ability to ascribe stable identity to persons. If nothing connects a person from one moment to the next, then the person who acts today cannot be held responsible by the person who has replaced him tomorrow. Our identity detector works in overdrive when reasoning about crimes of passion, crimes under the influence, crimes of insanity: for if the person was beside himself or out of his mind when he committed his crime, how can we identify who has committed the act, and hold him responsible for it?

Moral features are the chief dimension by which we judge, sort and choose social partners. For men and women alike, the single most sought-after trait in a long-term romantic partner is kindness – beating out beauty, wealth, health, shared interests, even intelligence. And while we often think of our friends as the people who are uniquely matched to our shared personality, moral character plays the largest role in determining whether you like someone or not (what social psychologists call impression formation), and predicts the success and longevity of these bonds. Virtues are mentioned with more frequency in obituaries than achievements, abilities or talents. This is even the case for obituaries of notable luminaries, people who are being written about because of their accomplishments, not their moral fibre.

The identity detector is designed to pick up on moral features because this is the most important type of information we can have about another person. So we’ve been thinking about the problem precisely backwards. It’s not that identity is centred around morality. It’s that morality necessitates the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison d’être. If we had no scruples, we’d have precious little need for identities. Humans, with their engorged and highly complex socio-moral systems, have accordingly inflated egos.

I am taken with the argument. Unexplored is the issue that moral capabilities are usually interpreted through behaviors, i.e. we infer moral capabilities based on the evidence advanced through behaviors. No matter what someone says they believe, we look to what they actually do in order to measure their moral capabilities (revealed preference in economic terms).

There are a number of interesting correlates.

For example, I suspect that there is some connection between defining people based on their moral capabilities and the Fundamental Attribution Error. The Fundamental Attribution Error is a measurable and common psychological bias in which we attribute a person's actions to their moral intentions and not to their circumstances. The flipside of the Fundamental Attribution Error is that as individuals, we commonly overweight our particular circumstances to explain our actions.

A car is driving recklessly down the highway, speeding, changing lanes, honking, flashing lights; clearly in a hurry to get someplace. If we are one of the cars on the highway, the driver is a reckless, inconsiderate, self-centered danger. If we are the driver of the car it is because our wife is in the backseat going into labor. In the first instance, we fail to seek alternate explanations for the reckless driving and impute moral failure. In the second, we use the circumstances as the first order of defence for reckless driving.

Identity as moral capability I suspect also ties in to the intricacy of children reading.

We impute great importance to the goodness and suitability of books which our children read. Why? I suspect in part it has to do with our desire that the books reflect the moral structures of ourselves. We seek not only biological replication but moral replication as well. Hence the heat when advocates, librarians and teachers seek to foist books on to the reading public which are not morally compatible with that public.