People change throughout the course of their lives. As people grow older, taste, preferences, personalities, and beliefs all change with the changes of an aging body. Some people seem to be completely different people compared to their former selves. That is why I believe that Harold Arnold a completely different person than the Bill Burchfield, he was when he murdered his wife 37 years ago. With such a large time gap between his escape and recapture, Arnold is no longer the same person he was back when he escaped prison. Therefore, he should not have to serve a full prison sentence for the murder of his wife.
I believe that Bill Burchfield is a different person than Harold Arnold based off Derek Parfit’s argument about personal identity.…show more content… Locke’s theory of personal identity is based on the premise that “ the sameness of a rational being; and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then…”(Locke 333). Locke believes that if the conscious memory remembers an action or event, it links a person’s connectivity to that event. In the article written by the Economist, Arnold acknowledges his memory of the shooting, as “something you live with every day” (Economist 2). The one problem I find with the idea of memory equating to the connectedness of personal identity is that only Arnold knows how he remembers the situation. In his own accord, he recalls the event as “the most tragic thing that ever happened in my life” and that it was an accident (Economist 2). If Arnold recalls the event as an accident, then based off Locke’s theory, Arnold connects with the memory of an accident not manslaughter. Thus, further removing him from the Bill Burchfield, who plead guilty of manslaughter almost 4 decades
