The Responses That Matter

We are all familiar with judgements about the persistence of people. Furthermore, we tend to structure certain attitudes and practices around such judgements because we think that personal identity matters for the relevant practical concerns. Response-dependence views try to accommodate that personal identity matters by letting relevant attitudes and practices determine the personal identity relation for a particular person. This paper argues that genuine response-dependence views are not well positioned to accommodate the connection between personal identity and what matters. Rather, if we accept such a connection, this supports normative-facts-first views, according to which relevant normative facts determine personal identity.