Category: identity
Associated thinker(s): John Locke
Original publication or approximate period: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxvii (added in 1694)
Difficulty: Beginner
Themes: consciousness, responsibility, personhood
Related experiments: brave-officer, brain-transplant
Kind: thought experiment
Research checked: 2026-10-30
Imagine the consciousness of a prince, including awareness of his past life, appearing in the body of a cobbler whose previous conscious life has departed. The resulting individual has the cobbler’s appearance but regards the prince’s actions as his own. Locke uses the imagined transfer to distinguish remaining the same human being from remaining the same person.
Does the person follow bodily continuity or continuity of consciousness?
Locke connects personal identity with responsibility: which past actions can rightly be attributed to the present subject? The case also teaches a methodological lesson: criteria for the same body, the same organism, and the same person need not be interchangeable.
Ask which sense of “same” each participant uses. A physician might track the organism receiving care, a court might track responsibility for an earlier act, and the prince’s friend might track recognition and attachment. Their practical interests need not establish competing metaphysical truths, but they help explain why a single bodily label can obscure the argument. Locke’s conceptual distinction invites readers to state what kind of entity is supposed to persist before announcing a criterion. Otherwise an answer about bodily continuity may simply bypass a question about personal responsibility.
A Lockean reading follows consciousness to the cobbler-shaped individual. Biological accounts instead identify us with continuing human animals. Historical interpretations of Locke differ about the exact relation between consciousness, memory, substances, and moral accountability, so the view should not be reduced to one slogan.
Locke’s personal-identity chapter first appeared in the Essay’s second edition in 1694, not its original 1690 edition. The scenario is not a report of a real soul transfer. It is also misleading to attribute every contemporary memory theory directly and unqualifiedly to Locke.
Brain-transplant scenarios replace a transfer of consciousness with a physical operation. Reid’s brave officer tests whether simple direct-memory connections have the logical structure needed for identity across time.
Historical association: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxvii (added in 1694). The sources above support the scenario and its intellectual context. Where an original work was not retrieved in full, its account is mediated by the named academic reference; no claim of full primary-source verification is made. The explanation and reflection questions here are original editorial prose.