Moral Realities: Continuity, Narratives, and the Normative Self

Abstract

This essay addresses personal identity and its role in sustaining moral responsibility. Against reductionist accounts, namely Derek Parfit’s, which tie identity to degrees of psychological continuity, I argue that such views weaken the foundations of responsibility and risk, rendering practices like blame, praise, and obligation incoherent. If identity dissolves with psychological change, responsibility for past wrongs becomes negotiable, undermining ethical life. To respond to this danger, I develop the idea of the normative self: an identity constituted through the integration of past actions, present commitments, and future aspirations within a coherent narrative. Unlike reductionist models, this account does not merely approximate but in fact captures how selfhood is lived and understood—both from the first-person perspective of individuals who take ownership of their lives and from the third-person perspective of communities that hold one another responsible. Descriptive or reductionist models, I argue, ultimately fail precisely because they cannot adequately explain this dual orientation. I conclude that it is only by conceiving the self as normative that our practices of accountability, recognition, and renewal make coherent sense. Methodologically, I combine analytic critique with narrative and phenomenological approaches, engaging Parfit and Bernard Williams and testing their theories against real and hypothetical cases of wrongdoing, reform, and accountability. The result is a conception of the self that secures responsibility as both backward- and forward-looking, grounding our moral realities in a structure that preserves stability while enabling transformation.