In his fascinating article entitled "The Self and the Future", Bernard Williams presents two alternate ways of looking at what happens when two bodies are "switched", or become associated with different character and memories, and the subsequently difficult implications this has on questions concerning personal identity. Although the two cases are meant to be exactly the same, insofar as we end up with two situations that are indistinguishable, we are given convincing reasons for thinking in one case that identity should be determined by mental criteria and in the other that it should be decided by bodily criteria. In this paper, I will give a brief synopsis of both hypothetical situations and then show why the second misleads us in making us think that we should fear future pain that will be experienced by our present body when our personality and memories have been transferred to another body, and when another’s personality and memories have been transferred to what is now our body. More specifically, I will show why fear of future pain despite drastic change in psychological states is irrational. Finally, I will attempt an explanation of why such fears are plausible despite their irrationality.

In the first half of his article, Williams presents a situation in which two people, A and B, switch bodies. The personality and character traits hitherto associated with A become associated with the body of B, and vice versa. He then asks, on purely egotistical grounds, whether A would want the person who ends up with his body to receive the monetary reward or would he prefer that body to be tortured and have the B bodied person receive the money. Williams then gives a number of reasons, all of which seem reasonable, to believe the latter, and takes this as an effective means of assessing the continued personal identity of A in B’s body and vice versa. I will not go into those reasons here but shall refer to this as the "intuitive" answer to the problem, the answer that remains once we have shown the faultiness of the second approach.

Williams presents an alternate way of viewing the same operation which is meant to make us question the validity of the intuitive answer. Instead of directly imagining the switch and seeing it from a vantage point where A and B’s experiences are given equal weight and importance, we are asked to see the experiment solely from A’s point of view; and instead of directly imagining the switch, we are given a number of steps, each of which gradually approaches the original experiment, and only the last of which exactly resembles it. In each of the following steps, A is told that his body will be subjected to physical torture the next day. A’s natural reaction is fear.

In the first step, A is told that before being tortured he will be given an operation which causes total amnesia, in which case he will not remember either being told that he was to be tortured or anything else that happened to him before the operation. It is quite understandable that A’s fears will not be alleviated by this added misfortune. Next, we are asked to imagine the same operation, with the added provision that A will undergo certain changes in character before the torture. Again, we can see that this added change should not alleviate A’s fear. As we shall see, whether this step is valid depends on how drastic these changes in character are.

Third, we imagine A is given a new set of memories as well as a new personality. These are not based on a real person, but are entirely fictitious. Williams gives a number of arguments of why, based on the fact that we would fear torture in the first two cases, we have no rational ground for no longer being afraid in this case. However, although we can easily imagine someone actually being afraid in such a case, I think we can present a powerful case for why one ought not to be. If we can do this, we will then see why in the fourth and fifth steps, where the new character traits are based on another person, the fear of torture remains ungrounded; and, finally, in the sixth step, where A’s personality is transferred to B’s body, we can see why A’s fears and concerns should be directed toward the fate of that new body, just as the intuitive answer in the first approach to the problem predicts.

Williams admits that he chose fear of physical pain as his example because it is "minimally dependent on character or belief" (Page 188, second paragraph) However, this minimal dependence seems incidental, not necessary, and this will provide us with an initial reason to doubt his claims about A’s fear. We can at least imagine a person who not only is unafraid of pain, but actually enjoys it. The fact that this attitude is unimaginable by most people should help us see why A’s fear would be ungrounded, even if it were understandable, if he underwent a complete change in character. For imagine if A is told that his personality before the torture would change in such a way as to make him enjoy pain. Imagine further that this type of personality is inconceivable to A. In such a case, A’s feelings about torture may be so strong that he would find it psychologically impossible not to fear it, despite continual assurance that he would enjoy the torture. If pressed further, A might sooner admit that he can have no feelings one way or the other about what was to happen to his body, since his character traits before the operation are so opposed to what he is told they will be afterwards. In other words, A may be forced to make the difficult admission that he would cease to exist after the operation, if the type of human being that would continue after the operation would be one completely alien to him.

Williams addresses this issue, but I don’t think his answers are support the rationalization of this fear. Instead they provide further proof for their irrationality. He cites the problem of someone who is asked to choose whether he would accept a state of "contented madness or vegetableness" (page 189, lines 7-8). The fact that most people would not accept this fate, says Williams, shows that our fears and concerns are not only a function of the state we will be in after such a change, but also of the change itself. So for Williams, this shows that fear can persist despite drastic psychological changes for more than one reason. In other words, if a man fears being placed in this vegetative state, it is because he fears the change itself, not the state he will be in after the change, which would not be unpleasant. And this fear, for Williams, should not alleviate the fear of that which will follow the change if it did happen to be unpleasant (i.e. torture). So Williams would have to say that the man’s fear of becoming someone who enjoyed pain would just add to his fear of the torture.

To sum up, Williams has argued first that "no amount of change in my character or my beliefs would seem to affect substantially the nastiness of tortures applied to me" (page 188, 2nd paragraph), and, second, that if we try to explain this fear in terms of the change in character itself, we are merely adding a separate reason for fear, not explaining away the first (page 189). But the fact that we are even capable of the second type of fear (of being put into the vegetative state) should show us why the first type of fear (of the torture) is irrational, for it shows that our fears are based solely on our present belief systems and not at all on either our belief system after the change or, more significantly, on our continued existence after the change. In other words, fear of future states does not necessarily imply our continued existence in those states.

Thus, A’s fear of torture despite fundamental changes in character and memory is due more to the difficulty of accepting an end to one’s existence than it is to the fear of pain itself. The fear is just as irrational, and may be just as real, as the fear of not continuing to exist after one’s death. And rather than accept such anhilation, someone in A’s situation is prone to project his fears to a different person. Williams makes this projection easy by choosing a universal emotion like fear of pain and having the continued existence of the same body. But the final, definitive proof that the fear is irrational lies in the fact that it would immedeately subside if A was told that after his change in character, his previous character and memories would be placed in another body. If the fear were rational, this external fact, explained by Williams in his sixth step, would have no effect on A’s fears.

In conclusion, as soon as there is a complete change in character and memory the fear of torture no longer has any foundation, nor does it definitiveley imply a continued personal existence, but is instead based on both the universal fear of pain and the ease with which we attribute continued identity to our bodies if the only other choice is what for many is completely inconceivable: non-existence.