Thesis advisor: Richard M. Kearney / This dissertation exposes the significance of ‘self-disruption’ in ethical development (the process of understanding how to flourish), especially as incited through conversation. By ‘self-disruption’, I mean the experience of being torn away from self-concern (which is a self-reflective enterprise) by something other. ‘Self-concern’ here refers to one’s attachment to one’s projects and plans—including the future self that one seeks to produce (qua preservation of its current identity). This study engages the history of ethical thinking, but it is not antiquarian. To make my case, I primarily rely on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical metaphysics and critically interpret and draw from insights within 1) Kant’s account of the moral self, 2) Aristotle’s account of the virtuous soul, and 3) the teleological account of the self that we find in contemporary virtue ethics. My claim is that what is latent in each of these accounts is the pivotal role of having one’s attention arrested by ‘the other’, and that fostering this phenomenon belongs to the work of moral philosophy understood as moral cultivation. This research homes in on key discussions within Anglo-American ethics, particularly those that stem from the reevaluation of the nature and task of moral philosophy in the 20th-century. I am skeptical as to whether the resulting Aristotelian virtue ethics is as radical as its advocates claim, and I challenge its reliance on narrative coherence. I do not seek to deny the narrative dimensions of self-understanding, but I do want to underscore the ethical importance of welcoming their disruption. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

In this thesis, I argue that the interdependence between personal identity and practical concerns is overstated. In paradigmatic places where philosophers and common sense suggest that personal identity constrains how we should reason and care, or vice versa, the two spheres are in fact neutral to each other. I defend this claim by considering four specific cases. First, a rough characterization of the distinction between the complex and the simple view is that the former takes personal identity to consist in other relations, whereas the latter does not. I argue that the extreme claim according to which the complex view fails to give reasons for future-directed concern can be resisted. We maintain forward-looking attitudes and projects not because someone will be us, but because we relate to future selves in other, more important ways. Second, I argue that intuitions in a range of popular imaginary cases are contaminated by practical concerns whose relevance for personal identity is far from straightforward. Third, I argue that on a closer look, the complex versus simple distinction is confused. It thus cannot be what grounds differences in judgements on what matters. Debates about personal identity should be framed in terms of better understood notions. Finally, I argue that it is not a constraint on rational transformative choice that decision-maker and transforming individual are identical. Moreover, whether we are deciding for ourselves or for others - the importance of informed consent for transformative treatments is not diminished by the decision-maker's failure to projectively imagine the outcomes.