The relationship between memory and personal identity has long been of interest to philosophers, and it is also a theme explored to good effect in movies and science fiction. In Memento, Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) has largely lost his ability to form new memories following an attack in which he was injured and his wife raped and murdered. He hunts down the attacker by assembling clues which he either writes down or tattoos on his body before he can forget them.
In Philip K. Dick’s short story “Paycheck” (which is better than the movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck), the protagonist Jennings has agreed to work for two years on a secret project knowing that his memory of it (and of everything else that happened during those years) will be erased when the task is completed. When he awakens after the memory wipe, he learns that he had, during the course of the two years, voluntarily agreed to forego the large paycheck he had originally contracted for in exchange for an envelope full of seemingly worthless trinkets. He spends the rest of the story trying to figure out why he would have done so, and it becomes evident before long that it has something to do with the secret project’s having been a device which can see into the future.
(Readers who haven’t either seen Memento or read Dick’s story or seen the movie version are warned that major spoilers follow.)
Memento is a terrific movie and deserves the hype it has gotten. Its philosophical interest lies not only in its relevance to discussions of memory and personal identity, but also in the way it illustrates the problems of interpretation and indeterminacy raised by twentieth century philosophers like Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson. Leonard supposes that taking photographs, writing himself notes, and getting tattoos will allow him to preserve the information he acquires before he can forget it. The trouble is that he still forgets the context in light of which the photographs he took and the words he writes down or tattoos got the sense he originally had in mind. Deprived of this forgotten context, he is unable correctly to understand what the words and pictures really mean, so that neither he -- nor, really, even the viewer -- knows just how very far off track he has gotten as he pursues his attacker. We know, and eventually he knows, that he has been manipulated in ways he cannot fully fathom, but what is deliberately left unclear by the movie is the extent to which this is the case or how long it has been going on.
What is of interest for present purposes, however, is that we find out by the end of the movie that among the people who have been deliberately leading Leonard down blind alleys is Leonard himself! It turns out that, realizing at one point that he has been manipulated by others, Leonard decides to get revenge on one of those manipulators -- Teddy -- by leaving himself clues falsely implicating Teddy as the man who raped and murdered his wife. Leonard knows that he will forget that he has himself laid these false clues, and that his future self will kill Teddy, supposing that he is avenging his wife’s death when in fact he is really punishing Teddy for having manipulated him.
Now what I want to focus on is a question raised by Leonard’s planting of false clues for his later self to misinterpret. As background, keep in mind that for us Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosophers (unlike, say, for Lockeans), Leonard’s anterograde amnesia in fact raises no problems of personal identity. Leonard remains the same person over time as long as he is the same form-matter composite over time, which he is as long as he is alive and whether or not he can remember anything of his past life. Indeed, he would remain the same person even if his brain had been so damaged that he spent the rest of his life totally unconscious. (Since this is not a post about personal identity per se, I’m not going to pursue this issue further but just take for granted in what follows the A-T view. See David Oderberg’s essay “Hylemorphic Dualism” for exposition and defense of the A-T approach to personal identity.)
A second background assumption I’m going to make is the correctness of the standard Thomistic natural law view about lying. Part of that standard view is that lying is intrinsically wrong. But that doesn’t mean we always have to reveal the truth -- we can remain silent or, under some circumstances, even speak evasively using a broad mental reservation. It doesn’t rule out certain customary forms of speech that are not literally true -- joking, for example, or saying “I’m fine, how are you?” when meeting someone even though you are feeling miserable -- because the standard view is that given the nuances of linguistic usage, these don’t count as lies. Nor, on the standard view, does deception always involve lying, and neither is deception itself always and intrinsically wrong (though of course it often is wrong given the circumstances). For you might know and intend that someone be deceived when you use evasive language that isn’t strictly untrue and thus not a lie. But directly and unambiguously communicating some meaning that is contrary to what you really think would be a lie. And while outright lying is not necessarily seriously wrong -- probably most lies are not -- it is still at least mildly wrong. (Here too I’m not going to pursue this set of issues further at present, because the post is not about lying per se; and I have in any event discussed the ethics of lying many times and at considerable depth in previous posts, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Please do not waste time raising questions or objections concerning this issue in the combox unless you’ve read those posts, because I’ve probably answered your question or objection in one of them.)
Now, coming back to Memento, let’s ask: Was Leonard lying when he arranged misleading clues for his later self? Obviously he was deceivinghimself and -- given that his aim was to bring about a murder -- doing so immorally. But was he doing so by means of a lie in the strict sense? Can you literally lie to yourself? One Thomistic natural law theorist, Austin Fagothey, thinks not. Discussing the conditions under which a sign of some sort (whether linguistic, a gesture, or whatever) counts as a lie, Fagothey writes that “the sign must be made to another person, for speech is communication between minds. It is impossible to lie to oneself…” (Right and Reason, Second edition, pp. 309-10).
To understand Fagothey’s point here it is crucial to reemphasize that not all deception involves lying. Again, if I speak evasively I may deceive you without lying. For example, if I tell the proverbial murderer who comes to the door looking for you that “He is not inside this house” -- suppose you are actually hiding in my backyard -- and he goes away thinking that you are nowhere around, I have deceived him but I have not lied. Similarly, if I don’t let myself dwell on certain unpleasant truths, knowing that I am likely to forget them if I keep my mind off of them long enough, there is a sense in which I have deceived myself. Fagothey isn’t denying that that is possible. His point is that that is different from lying. What he has in mind by “lying” is the sort of thing I would be doing if I told the murderer flatly: “He is nowhere in the vicinity, neither in the house, nor in the backyard, nor the garage, nor anywhere else nearby as far as I know. Nor, Mr. Murderer, am I in any way speaking evasively or using any sort of mental reservation. You can take my word for it.” If I said that while knowing full well that you were in the backyard, I would be lying. (Never mind for now about the morality of it -- the point is that it would be a lie, whether justifiable or not.) Fagothey is saying that it is impossible to lie to yourself in thatstrict sense.
Obviously there is something to what he is saying. Imagine me talking, not to the murderer, but to myself -- while looking in the mirror, say, trying to appear sincere -- saying “Your friend isn’t really in the backyard, Ed. Honest!” It’s ridiculous to think this would count even as an attempt at lying. I would know, in the very act of “communicating” the meaning that is contrary to what I really think, that it is contrary to what I really think. This seems a bit like trying to get yourself to think that you are not really thinking -- a self-defeating exercise. At most my little monologue while looking in the mirror might count as a kind of joke. (That’s an interesting question -- can you literally jokewith yourself even if you can’t lie to yourself? Maybe so, though perhaps this really just amounts to thinking about jokes or other funny things.)
So, should we conclude that Leonard was not lying to himself -- even though he was of course deceiving himself -- when he laid those clues for his later self to misinterpret?
A Lockean who takes continuity of consciousness to be definitive of personal identity might argue as follows. Given Leonard’s condition, there is no significant psychological continuity between the “Leonard” who decides to deceive his future “self” and the later “Leonard” who is deceived. So (the argument might go) they are really different persons. And in that case “Leonard” really has lied to “himself”; or rather, the earlier “Leonard” has really told a lie to the later “Leonard” precisely because they are notthe same person. This would be a way of arguing that the scenario involves genuine lying, consistent with Fagothey’s view that it is impossible to lie to oneself. For there are, on this view, really twoselves in question, not one. As I’ve indicated, though, from an A-T point of view the Lockean is just wrong and there is only one person here, in which case this would not be a way of showing that there is genuine lying (again, as opposed to self-deception) involved.
And yet there really does seem to be something like actual lying going on in the scenario in question. Leonard writes down Teddy’s license plate number as if it were a clue, knowing that his future self will falsely suppose it to be that of his wife’s killer. In his internal monologue, he even describes what he is doing as “lying” to himself. He is, in effect, deliberately “communicating” what he knows to be the falsehood that Teddy is the killer to a mind, albeit to his own future mind. We can even imagine him leaving a note for himself that says flatly “Note to self: Teddy is the killer!” (though he doesn’t actually go that far, wanting to leave at least a little in the way of further investigation for his future self to carry out).
I am inclined to think, then, that this may in fact be a case of lying, Fagothey’s remarks notwithstanding. What Fagothey should say is that you can’t lie to yourself in ordinary circumstances precisely because in ordinary circumstances the “recipient” of the message (namely you) cannot even in principle take what you say for truth. And the recipient’s being able at least in principle to take what you say for truth seems a necessary condition for lying. (That’s why you cannot in principle lie to a stone, a plant, or an earthworm, since they cannot even entertain propositions at all, let alone regard them as true.) In unusual cases, though, such as those involving anterograde amnesia like Leonard’s, lying to yourself seems possible insofar as the “recipient” of the message (your future self) can in principle take it to be true.
If lying in the strict sense is always at least mildly wrong (as the standard Thomistic view holds) then it would be wrong to lie to yourself the way Leonard does, even if you are lying for a good end (unlike Leonard, who lies to himself for a bad end). But what about what Jennings does to his future self in “Paycheck”? Here there is no lying involved, but Jennings does do something that would at least in ordinary circumstances be wrong if done to another. If you had contracted for a large paycheck and someone rigged things so that instead of getting it you got a bag of trinkets, I think it would in most cases be wrong for him to do so even if the trinkets will benefit you (as they end up benefiting Jennings, in ways his post-memory-loss self doesn’t foresee, in the story).
Now, in the movie version, the trinkets end up not only benefiting Jennings, but saving his own life and the lives of millions of other people. It would not be wrong, given the nature of property rights, for one person to deprive another of his contracted paycheck and give him the trinkets instead if that was what was at stake. But suppose that what was at stake was something far less dramatic. Suppose that by replacing the paycheck with the trinkets without your consent, I could guarantee that you would be better off in some significant way that nevertheless fell far short of being a matter of life and death. (Perhaps this would, in ways you are unable at present to see, enable you to get a better job, or make a friend you wouldn’t otherwise have met.) Would it be morally permissible for me to do it?
It depends. If you were one of my young children, it seems clear that there are cases where I could, for your own good, legitimately override some contract you had made. (Suppose you had agreed to mow a neighbor’s lawn for five dollars and I arrange to have a bag of trinkets delivered to you instead, knowing that one of them is a valuable baseball card that will fetch you $50.) But if you were a perfect stranger, it seems equally clear that I could not legitimately do this. What we are describing here is a kind of paternalistic intervention, and that is appropriate only where someone has something like paternal authority over another.
Now, obviously we are in something like a paternalistic relationship to our future selves. We have not only the right but the duty to do what is in our future best interests. Hence what Jennings does to his future self, though initially unpleasant -- Affleck’s stunned and angry reaction on opening the envelope of trinkets (when what he expected was $92 million) is one of the better scenes in an otherwise disappointing movie -- is perfectly morally legitimate.