Moral debt and identity change
IdentityComments
The idea that the original actor is gone doesn't hold up when there are actual victims waiting for payment. You can change your values all you want, but the person you cheated still has a hole in their bank account.
It reminds me of how we view cell regeneration... most of our cells replace themselves every seven years... are we physically the same person we were a decade ago?
This tension is actually what makes a sincere apology so powerful. It shows that the current version of the person recognizes the harm caused by their past self and wants to make it right.
the law treats the legal person as a constant regardless of the psyche.
If we separate the legal person from the psychological one, we might create a loophole where people claim a personality shift to avoid accountability. How would we actually prove a fundamental change occurred?
We already accept this with childhood mistakes. We don't hold adults accountable for the crimes of their ten year old selves because the brain literally rewires.
We usually only apply that logic to kids, though. It gets a lot harder to sell when the rewiring happens at forty.
Does this logic apply to the physical consequences of an action, like a permanent injury caused to another person, or just to the moral guilt?