Against Parfitian Aggregation: Separateness Without Substance

Parfit’s reductionist view of personal identity has been taken to support utilitarian aggregation across persons. If persons are not deep metaphysical unities but bundles of experiences connected by psychological continuity, the separateness of persons seems less morally significant, and aggregation across persons seems no more problematic than aggregation across times within a single life. This paper argues that Parfit’s move fails. The argument proceeds in four steps that are logically cumulative: each presupposes the preceding, and together they constitute a single case. First, the first-person perspective survives metaphysical reduction: even if the self is a bundle, experiences remain perspectivally indexed in a way that the reduction does not dissolve. Second, this perspectival indexing generates a structural asymmetry between intertemporal and interpersonal aggregation that holds even when psychological connectedness weakens over time. Third, this structural asymmetry has normative force because moral justification is addressed to subjects — a commitment defended independently of Scanlonian contractualism. Fourth, agency collapse marks the limit beyond which aggregation is not merely unjustified but structurally impossible, because the subject to whom the justification would be addressed has been destroyed. The result is a defence of the separateness of persons that concedes Parfit’s metaphysics while rejecting his aggregative conclusions: separateness without substance. Keywords: separateness of persons, personal identity, reductionism, Parfit, aggregation, utilitarianism, agency, first-person perspective, justification, contractualism