Editing Derek Parfit (section)

===Criticism of personal identity view===
Fellow reductionist [[Mark Johnston (philosopher)|Mark Johnston]] of Princeton rejects Parfit's constitutive notion of identity with what he calls an "Argument from Above".<ref>{{cite web|author=Johnston, Mark |title=Human Concerns Without Superlative Selves |series=Dancy |year=1997 |url=http://wxy.seu.edu.cn/humanities/sociology/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100825/20100825022102409.pdf#page=271 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120323141220/http://wxy.seu.edu.cn/humanities/sociology/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100825/20100825022102409.pdf |archive-date=23 March 2012 |df=dmy }}</ref> Johnston maintains, "Even if the lower-level facts [that make up identity] do not in themselves matter, the higher-level fact may matter. If it does, the lower-level facts will have derived significance. They will matter, not in themselves, but because they constitute the higher level fact."<ref>{{cite web|author=Parfit, Derek|title=The Unimportance of Identity|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1995|url=http://www.stafforini.com/txt/parfit_-_unimportance_of_identity.pdf|access-date=4 May 2011|archive-date=13 September 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160913003425/http://www.stafforini.com/txt/parfit_-_unimportance_of_identity.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref>

In this, Johnston moves to preserve the significance of personhood. Parfit's explanation is that it is not personhood itself that matters, but rather the facts in which personhood consists that provide it with significance. To illustrate this difference between himself and Johnston, Parfit used an illustration of a brain-damaged patient who becomes irreversibly unconscious. The patient is certainly still alive even though that fact is separate from the fact that his heart is still beating and other organs are still functioning. But the fact that the patient is alive is not an independent or separately obtaining fact. The patient's being alive, even though irreversibly unconscious, simply consists in the other facts. Parfit explains that from this so-called "Argument from Below" we can arbitrate the value of the heart and other organs still working without having to assign them derived significance, as Johnston's perspective would dictate.