IB Philosophy: Core Theme - Being Human

What does it mean to be you? Are your choices truly free, or are they the inevitable product of prior causes? Does human life have an essential purpose, or must we create our own? These are not abstract musings but foundational questions that shape our ethics, our laws, and our understanding of ourselves. In the IB Philosophy Core Theme of Being Human, you will engage directly with these profound inquiries, developing the critical tools to analyze philosophical arguments about personal identity, free will, and the very nature of human existence.

The Problem of Personal Identity: What Makes You, You?

The question of personal identity asks what constitutes the persistence of a single person over time. Are you the same person you were ten years ago? What principle connects your past self to your present self? This puzzle branches into several major theories, each with significant implications.

First, we encounter the mind-body problem. This is the philosophical dilemma concerning the relationship between mental phenomena (thoughts, consciousness) and physical phenomena (the brain, the body). Dualism, famously argued by René Descartes, posits that the mind and body are two fundamentally different substances. For Descartes, the essential self is the thinking mind (res cogitans), which is distinct from the physical body (res extensa). This view suggests personal identity is tied to an immaterial soul. In contrast, physicalism (or materialism) argues that everything, including mental states, is ultimately physical. From this perspective, you are identical to your body and brain. Your personal identity is contingent on the continuity of your biological organism or specific brain processes.

If a purely physical account seems insufficient, one may turn to psychological criteria. Memory theory, most associated with John Locke, claims that personal identity consists in psychological connectedness via memory. You are the same person as a past individual if you can remember experiencing that individual’s conscious experiences. However, this theory faces the "brave officer" objection: a general may remember his deeds as an officer, and the officer may remember his childhood, but the general may not remember the childhood. This breaks the transitive chain of memory, suggesting the general and the child are not the same person—a counterintuitive result.

A more robust psychological approach is the psychological continuity theory, which broadens the criteria to include overlapping chains of memories, desires, beliefs, and personality traits. This view, advanced by philosophers like Derek Parfit, can accommodate memory gaps and gradual change. Parfit’s famous thought experiments, such as teleportation that copies your psychological pattern, lead him to a radical conclusion: personal identity may not be what matters. What matters is Relation R—psychological connectedness and continuity, which can exist to varying degrees. This shifts the focus from a determinate "self" to the quality of connections that sustain a life.

Free Will and Determinism: Are We the Authors of Our Actions?

Closely tied to identity is the question of agency. Do we possess free will—the genuine ability to have chosen otherwise? Or are all events, including human decisions, determined by prior causes? This debate sets libertarianism (not the political doctrine), hard determinism, and compatibilism against each other.

Libertarianism argues that free will exists and is incompatible with determinism. It posits that some human actions are uncaused causes, originating from the agent themselves. This view often relies on an intuition of moral responsibility: to justly praise or blame someone, they must have been truly free to choose. Critics ask how an uncaused event could be a rational choice rather than a random occurrence.

Hard determinism asserts that determinism is true (every event has a sufficient cause) and therefore free will is an illusion. If every decision is the product of genetic makeup and environmental conditioning, then the sense of choosing is merely a biochemical epiphenomenon. This poses a severe challenge to concepts of moral and legal responsibility.

Compatibilism, a dominant view in modern philosophy, seeks a middle path. It redefines free will as the ability to act according to one’s own desires and motivations without external constraint, even if those desires are themselves causally determined. For a compatibilist like Harry Frankfurt, you act freely if your actions align with your "second-order volitions" (your desires about what desires to have). This preserves a meaningful, if nuanced, sense of responsibility within a scientifically informed worldview.

Existentialist Perspectives: Existence Precedes Essence

Moving from analytic to continental philosophy, existentialism offers a dramatic account of being human. Its central tenet, articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, is that for humans, existence precedes essence. This means there is no pre-defined human nature or purpose (essence) that we are born to fulfill. We exist first, and through our free choices and actions, we define our own essence. This absolute freedom is not liberating but the source of profound angst or anxiety, as we are "condemned to be free" and bear the crushing weight of responsibility for our self-creation.

This perspective radically emphasizes authenticity—living in accordance with your own freely chosen values, acknowledging your freedom and responsibility. Its opposite is bad faith (mauvaise foi), the self-deception where we flee from this freedom by pretending we are determined by roles, circumstances, or a fixed nature (e.g., "I had no choice, it's my job"). Existentialism thus presents a stark vision: to be human is to be a conscious project, perpetually incomplete and tasked with inventing meaning in a universe that offers none intrinsically.

Philosophical Anthropology: Competing Accounts of the Human

Finally, we must evaluate broader philosophical accounts of what it means to be human. These are not mutually exclusive but offer different lenses.

• The Rational Animal (Aristotle): This classical view defines humans by our distinctive capacity for reason (logos). Our purpose (telos) is to live a life of virtue and rational flourishing (eudaimonia). This provides an objective basis for ethics but may undervalue emotion, creativity, or sociality.
• The Symbolic Animal (Ernst Cassirer): Humans are defined by our ability to create and use symbols—language, art, myth, science. Our reality is mediated through these symbolic forms. This account highlights culture as constitutive of human experience.
• The Embodied and Social Being (Feminist & Phenomenological Views): These critiques argue that traditional philosophy over-emphasizes detached reason. They stress that human existence is fundamentally embodied—our consciousness is shaped by our lived bodily experience—and relational—our identity is formed through interactions with others. To be human is to be in a network of care, recognition, and interdependence.

Critical Perspectives

Engaging critically with these theories is essential. A common pitfall is conflating different types of identity questions. The criteria for moral responsibility (needed for law) may differ from the criteria for metaphysical identity over time. For instance, compatibilism may work well for legal frameworks but feel unsatisfying for deep questions of ultimate self-origination.

Another critical point is the risk of reductionism. A purely physicalist account of personal identity might struggle to explain the qualitative, first-person experience of consciousness—the so-called "hard problem." Similarly, dismissing existentialism as overly individualistic misses its profound insights into the human condition of freedom, even if it underplays our embeddedness in social and biological contexts.

Furthermore, many theories exhibit a cultural bias. The hyper-individualistic focus of some Western philosophies (like Locke’s memory theory) may not align with more communitarian conceptions of self found in other traditions. A robust philosophical anthropology must consider this diversity.

Summary

• Personal identity is analyzed through physical continuity (the mind-body problem), psychological connectedness (memory theory), or broader psychological continuity. Thinkers like Parfit challenge whether a strict, all-or-nothing identity is what truly matters.
• The free will debate involves libertarianism (free will requires indeterminism), hard determinism (no free will), and compatibilism (free will is compatible with determinism if we act according to our unimpeded desires).
• Existentialism, notably Sartre’s, argues that humans have no pre-given essence. We define ourselves through free choices, a responsibility that leads to angst. Living authentically requires rejecting bad faith.
• Competing philosophical anthropologies define humans as rational, symbolic, or embodied and social beings. A complete understanding likely requires synthesizing insights from multiple accounts, acknowledging both our capacity for reason and our fundamentally relational nature.