Econ & Identity Theory

Seeking to explain why a stupid theory was stupid (hint- it was because it was a theory and only stupid people, i.e. pedagogues, care about theories) Akerlof & Kranton did something more stupid yet- they made a distinction between the agent and his identity- in a paper they wrote 20 years ago- 

An individual gains utility when her actions and those of others enhance her self-image.

Why not say 'people become taller if they stand on tip-toe and everybody says 'oh my! how much taller you've gotten!' ? In this way, when the Doctor tells me that I am morbidly obese because I weigh 20 kg more than anyone of my height ought to weigh if they want to avoid diabetes or heart disease, I could put on a pair of stilts and hire people to say that I'm eight foot tall- in which case I am underweight. 

We may say that actions, in the main, are motivated by 'ophelimity'- expected gain- or utility which might cash out, under Knightian uncertainty as 'regret minimization'- because there is a 'fitness landscape' which weeds out behavior with negative survival value or, more actively, drives extinct all but those with a particular adaptive trait. 

What is foolish is to cure one type of idiocy- viz. pretending expected utility theory (which is only accessible if there is no uncertainty, perfect information, zero cognitive costs, P=NP etc, etc) is descriptive- with another crazier type of idiocy- viz. that people have multiple identities. There is me the fat guy who knows he needs to lose weight and there is another me the crazy bastard who puts on stilts and hangs out only with peeps wot say how tall he is. Obviously, there must also be a crazy bastard me who is totes gay for fat, sad, me but, nil desperandum, there must be a fat, sad, me who will oblige crazy-bastard-on-stilts me. The task of Economics is to arrange a marriage between these two of my various identities so Pareto optimality is achieved. Pareto himself preferred the term ophelimity to utility. What would he made of an Econ which would be matchmaker between, crazy-fat-bastard-on-stilts, Hamlet and poor drowned Ophelia whose corpse is drifting away down the stream?

Furthermore, self-image, or identity, is associated with the social environment:

But self-image is not identity. There are few men or women who are not chided by those closest to them to put aside their vanity and behave as befits what they are. The 'social environment', like the 'natural environment' can determine which identities- i.e. bodies- thrive or at least remain alive. But both can be changed by 'identities'. Akerlof and Kantor had lived too long on Campuses which had been getting steadily crazier and crazier since the late Sixties. 

People think of themselves and others in terms of different social categories.

Which is why all White Peeps must be sentenced to endless lectures on Critical Race Theory. Also, how come some heterosexual men still have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! We must re-educate all straight men till they chop off their own bollocks.  

Examples of social categories include racial and ethnic designations, and in the school context include, for example, “jock” and “nerd.”

Akerlof was 62 years old when he wrote this shite. Had he watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer he'd have known that kids in middle school had outgrown this sort of nonsense. The typical African American would play at different roles in High School and then settle upon an identity sometime between College and the Coffin. But the thing itself is no biggie. At the end of the series, everybody who could be a Vampire Slayer was a Vampire Slayer but then after the monsters were slain they got on with their lives. But life is what shows us the emptiness of any Identity save one univocal with... ah! who can say?

Prescriptions give the ideal, or stereotypical physical attributes and behavior, of people in each category.

But Paideia itself kills off those prescriptions. You quit measuring your dick or examining the mirror to see if maybe you need to start to shave. There are better things to measure and among razors Occam's is best.  

Individuals then gain or lose utility insofar as they belong to social categories with high or low social status and their attributes and behavior match the ideal of their category

Very true. If I were reclassified as an 18 year old, all my aches and pains would disappear.  Alan Kirman, by no means an imbecile, tried to repair Akerlof's stupidity in a 2006 paper co-authored with Teschl

In our view, the identity of the economic agent is

they mean motivation, not identity. If economic agent, Smith, buys cake not bread, we all agree that the identity of the buyer of cake is Smith. Previously, he bought bread. Also, he hates cake. Today he bought cake because it is his Mummy's birthday. She too hates cake but she forced him to be an economic agent when what he really wanted was to become a Secret Agent like James Bond.  

not characterized by a given and unchanging preference ordering or orderings,

save that which obtains at 'the end of time' after everything that can happen has happened or has been simulated or else everything 'factorizable' about human behavior has been as fully specified as possible. 

but reflects rather a process of continuity and change, i.e. an interplay of three different aspects of a persona that evolve over time:

why just three?  

what she currently is and does,

why not what she currently believes she is and who she is doing?

who she wants to be and where she chooses to participate, that is, to which social group she chooses to belong.

If only things were so easy! Proust wrote a very long book to show that we don't belong to the social group we think we are choosing to belong.  

Each of these aspects will correspond to a vector in the characteristics space,

there is no such 'characteristic space' because shite like this can't be factorized, is intricately impredicative and, more importantly, is non-informative if not nonsense. We may as usefully say 'everything is encoded in the poop of the neighbor's cat whose Nicaraguan horcrux is showing signs of actually having an at least partially Guatemalan identity.' 

a list, undoubtedly very long, of all relevant features of that aspect.

But very long lists can have zero impact on decision making. Cognition is costly.  

The three chosen vectors can be thought of as forming the ‘corners’ of a triangle of identity that moves and changes in a space of characteristics.

Only in the sense that the poop of my neighbor's cat can be thought of as forming the 'corners' of a polygon which once fucked a triangle and gained supernatural powers along with a nasty STD which is why its corners keep falling off. The moral of this story is stay clear of triangles- even the acute ones. You may be called a square for saying so but I used to be a polygon, till one of my corners fell off. 

John Davis added to this mishegoss by arguing that 

 the individual has a special personal identity capability, ‘interpreted as a capability for maintaining and developing an account of oneself in changing interactions with others’ (Milnar & Crespo)

This is bullshit. We pay good money so as not to have to give an account of ourselves for what we do with out own money or time. This is not to say that where you have a fiduciary or other contractual or statutory or professional duty, you might not be obliged to give such an account. But that's why you say 'no comment' and get a fucking lawyer. But this is a case of once bitten twice shy. You so order your affairs such that you either have 'Hohfeldian immunities' or it is just too fucking expensive and annoying for anyone to bother trying to get you to account for your actions. Worst comes to the worst, convert to some bizarre religion and start talking about it if you are asked to explain your actions.  

He labels this position ‘the capabilities conception of the individual’ (2011, 170).

We are capable of doing stupid shit. Take Nixon. He was capable of taping himself committing impeachable offences. But we quickly discard such capabilities. It is not a good idea to tape yourself or to have a 'discursive' self-image. The thing may feed your vanity, but it is actually your Achilles heel. 

The truth is there are sound game-theoretic reasons why our own true motivations are a mystery to us. If they weren't they'd be easily 'hacked' by a predator or a parasite.  

Individuals have several changing capabilities. The danger to be avoided is the possibility of transforming the individual in a set of multiple selves, not a unified single being. He believes this problem can be overcome with ‘self-narratives’ – ‘discursive accounts people keep of themselves’ (2011, 183) – that allow people to ‘construct personal identities for themselves in the form of autobiographies’ (2011, 171).7 The identity capability is people’s ability to organize themselves through a self-narrative (2011, 190). Self-organizing allows people to have enduring personal identities (2011, 209). Self-narratives are ‘evolutionary, open-ended, and generally do not get resolved, because people are continually engaged in developing their capabilities and this continually creates new possibilities for how their narratives will proceed’ (2011, 209). Rather than an individual task, this implies a mutual influence of personal and social identities: ‘who they [individuals] are is socially influenced, while at the same time they are a part of the social world because they influence it as well’ (2011, 213). Thus, self-narratives are both individual and social.

But those stupid lies are dangerous to the self and dangerous to society. It is better to shrug your shoulders and look at the other guy like he's a fucking Martian if he starts trying to cross-examine you. Alternatively, you could go on the offensive. You could say 'you only ask that coz you eat dog shit. Many of Lizard People do you know. Ever heard of David Icke? Crack a book sometime.' 

Libtards in the Academy bought into a notion of Identity as a 'narrative'. But only Maoists or Freudians or Cult leaders pretend any such things exist. But this is because charlatanism has a knack of getting high on its own supply and then dropping dead because that supply was shit.  

Miriam Teschl (2011, 79)8 describes Davis’ position on identity: This evolution and development of capabilities occurs through social interaction in society.

as opposed to social interaction inside a rock at the bottom of the sea.  

Conflict is important here: different capabilities arise out of different social identities, but it is the conflicts between identities that generate the need to engage in self-organizing processes.

Very true. If you are a capitalist, there is a big conflict between your identity as a capitalist and your inclination to buy a sandwich. This is because capitalists are assumed not to consume anything. That is why it is important to understand that a 'self-organizing process' is occurring any time any one buys a sandwich or takes a piss or has a wank. 

Still, it is nice to think of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type conflicts occurring all over the place and this generating the need for 'self-organizing processes' which probably involve downloading an app to your smartphone. 

Social identity has two aspects for individuals. One is relational and concerns an individual’s engagement with others from a particular position or role that they occupy using first-person, i.e., self-reflexive, representations.

So, when delivering a Pizza, don't overthink your motivation.  On the other hand, if you forget to bring the Pizza and are actually urinating on the door whose bell you have rung, your reflexive self-representation as a Pizza guy who was just trying to deliver a fucking Pizza for fuck's sake and how was I to know that the bell I rang was that of my wife's lover? As for my pissing on the doorstep- it wasn't coz I was drunk- it was just standard operating procedure when delivering invisible pizzas to peeps wot didn't order them. Of course, the better thing to do is to keep shtum when arrested. Your lawyer may be able to get you off by claiming you were suffering from some tropical disease you picked up when you were with the Peace Corps. 

The other is categorical and concerns the collective aspect of their identity, assessed from a third-person perspective.

There are an infinity of those. Spend a little money and get one you like.  

Over their lifetimes, individuals keep narrative accounts of themselves,

as Secret Agents on Mars who have sex with aliens.  

which is a way to reflect on conflicts that their social identities may create,

Wife doesn't understand me. UX-74, the sentient gas from the Asteroid belt, however, knows how to keep me hard. No. It does not involve a strap on. Anyway, sentient gasses aren't that way inclined. Crack a book sometime.  

and this engagement and self-examination is what constitutes their personal identities.

as boring farts who got tenure before everybody discovered that stuff which seemed cool then was stoooopid.  

Indeed, personal identity is an evolving narrative, but it does not necessarily have to be a single, continuous story.

Coz UX-74, the sentient gas from the Asteroid belt could become embodied in your neighbor's wife. She does have a strap-on but not necessarily as part of a single continuous story coz you have been turned into a sentient gas- or, in my case, fart.  

It is rather a succession of ongoing conflict-solving discursive accounts, which also help the individual reflect upon the past and project themselves into the future.

why not parallel realities? Did these guys not watch Quantum Leap?  

It is a way of being influenced by and influencing the social structure in which the individual evolves. The individual is thus socially embedded, and yet each self-narrative is highly individualized.

Sadly, narratives can't be individualized greatly without becoming as boring as shit. There are only a small number of plots which can hold anybody's attention. This is the moral of the final episode of the first series of She-Hulk Attorney at Law. 

Ivana Anton Mlinar & Ricardo F. Crespo, in a paper titled 'Identity theories in Economics ; a Phenomenological Approach', write 

Buying a new car is an economic action.

It may be. It may not. Only if scarcity obtains and a rational calculus of an objective was applied would the action be economic. The fact that an action has a certain type of effect does not mean the action was, itself, of that type.  

When buying a car, you make calculations and economic comparisons among car models, taking into account their specific features.

I don't. I get expert advise. If this is unavailable I look at the worst case scenario. If the thing is a 'lemon', how much do I stand to lose on resale or return? This is a well studied 'information asymmetry problem'. Thus, I know in advance some manufacturers of okay-but-not-great cars will go to great lengths to protect me from the 'lemon' downside because they want to sell cars to guys like me who know shit about cars. This means I will look for less protection because there must be other manufacturers who have low marketing costs to better informed customers. This means I need to identify the market or forum where guys with my level of income but greater knowledge congregate and establish metrics. But manufacturers know this as well. There's a tradeoff here between becoming a pseudo-connoisseur and getting shafted and being an ignorant guy who also gets shafted. Maybe, I'll pay a little money to get expert advise. 

However, you may also feel loyalty to a brand, sympathy for the seller, or you may be used to buying cars from a single dealership; you listen to and take into account your wife’s tastes and opinions; you might be influenced by the beauty of a specific car, and so on. In short, there are plenty of motivations involved in the transaction.

There is only one motivation for the customer- viz. 'regret-minimization'. You buy a car your wife hates and you will regret it even if you say you don't coz people know your wife and are silently chuckling over the hell she is giving you.  

 Thus, we need a concept of agency and identity that supports all the abilities and characteristics implied in the second meaning above.

Fuck off! Regret doesn't involve a whole lot of agency- menus are given and your choice is be shafted now by this guy or be shafted later by that other guy- and identity is irrelevant. People are laughing at you for buying a heap of junk. You try telling them about that time Mrs. Mwanga slapped you in Swahili class and you shit yourself and they laugh even more- more especially when your wife reveals that's the reason you quit teaching and had to settle for a job working for her idiot brother. 

Resale value has nothing to do with agency or identity, nor does fuel efficiency. Do Mlinar & Crespo really get a lot of calls from friends and family asking them to apply phenomenological conceptions of identity and agency to help them decide between buying a Vauxhall Corsa and Nissan Qashqai? 

In fact, these traits do not call for an ‘economic’ specificity in agents and their identity. Agents performing economic actions are entirely involved in these actions. A notion of ‘economic agent’ only makes sense for the third meaning the economic; consequently, as the third meaning is an ‘idealization’, we can only speak about an ‘economic agent’ as an unrealistic simplification.

Not if we were employed as economists by Vauxhall or Nissan or were industry analysts working for a hedge fund. 

In the second meaning, there is no economic agent, but ‘simply’ a human agent, that has to be considered in her completeness.

would she sleep with me if I told her I did Tom Cruise's taxes? We often go out for a curry together.  

Similarly, we do not need a specific notion of identity for economic actions but ‘simply’ a human identity – in all its richness.

An identity class consists of members who are interchangeable for some particular purpose. For economic purposes, human beings- in all their richness, like hens- in all their richness, are interchangeable when something about them is a factor of production or a determinant of demand for particular industries.  

The example of buying a car shows how all kinds of motivations influencing human agency are involved. Hence, it seems clear that an identity theory becomes necessary to grasp economic affairs because the economic agency is essentially a human agency.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Hens can eat corn as can men. It is quite possible that the corn industry may prefer to supply hens rather than men. Hens don't pay for corn, because they have no money. But those feeding corn to the hens may be making money by selling their eggs and their corpses. Yet, as the old saying goes 'sheep eat men'- i.e. human beings may be displaced from land which can be more profitably used to raise sheep. But then our species can be displaced from particular habitats by evolutionary pressures. Ultimately, evolutionary game theory unites the Life Sciences and Economics. Both are about the same thing- survival on an uncertain fitness landscape. In aggregate, a regret minimizing multiplicative update weighting algorithm may characterize evolutionarily stable strategies for hens as much as men. But this is like 'the problem of prediction from expert advice, in which a decision maker needs to iteratively decide on an expert whose advice to follow. The method assigns initial weights to the experts (usually identical initial weights), and updates these weights multiplicatively and iteratively according to the feedback of how well an expert performed: reducing it in case of poor performance, and increasing it otherwise.' In other words, the phenomenology, or inwardness, or soul, of the agent is irrelevant. Experts matter if their expertise is about the traits of the population and the likely fitness landscape. 

Indeed, the agent, the acting-who must be considered in all her wholeness.

Only by those who can get paid to do so or who have private means and nothing better to do. Life is cruel. Stupid shit which nobody will pay for either doesn't get done or else is done for a bad reason or is done by crazy people.  

In the last section, we will introduce an identity theory that supports the characteristics of human agents when dealing with economic affairs, explaining the link between identity and agency. The standard economist can be sceptical about the usefulness of considering identity in economics. This is understandable in the context of economics as currently conceived. However, within the conception of economics as a social science, with a methodology that leaves room for prudential reason assessing decisions stemming from an incommensurable plurality of motives, identity happens to be a central motive. This concept differs greatly from today’s economics but draws closer to classical political economy. The authors of this paper believe that the ‘spirit’ of this ancient original thought about economic life should be re-established and that personal and social identity constitute a critical factor for consideration.

This is like substituting a nineteenth century panel of experts for a twenty first century panel. John Stuart Mill might say 'horsepower is what matters when you buy a carriage. Horseless carriages don't actually get hitched to horses so you probably need a really powerful bunch of horses to get it to move by pushing it.' Karl Marx would say 'carriages are owned by the fucking bourgeoisie mate. Horseless carriages are hitched to proletarians. But proletarians actually make the horseless carriage! Thus the horseless carriage is actually the proletariat-as-horse! The more carriages the proletariat fabricates the more the proletariat is compelled to pull those carriages! Coming back to the question of what sort of car to buy- how about a Ford Mustang? That's got a horse in its name.' 

Husserl started off as a mathsy guy back when people thought intuition could be non-arbitrary. In other words, sooner or later maths would put everything on an algorithmic basis. Truth would be provable for everybody or have 'naturality'- i.e. non-arbitrariness. There would be certainty. One implication would be that Evolution would pose no scandal. Whether God created us in his image or we are just hairless apes wouldn't matter. Nature would be Truth would be Mathematical and thus the Logos, indeed, would be all. 

For Husserl , us being persons originates in us performing a specific kind of intentional act, which he calls ‘position-taking’ (Stellungnahme).

having an opinion- this is 'doxa'. But this is a foolish opinion. Us being persons originates in us being babies and then us being little kiddies and then obnoxious adolescents and so forth. Many of us have no opinion on anything but can adopt any old shit if it is to our advantage or seems cool or holds boredom at bay.  

Husserl may have had the intention of making a big deal about intentionality but he failed because we think he merely had the intention of writing bollocks so as to get peeps to think he was smart. 

The whole point about intentions is that we only talk about them because they are strategic. The murderer needs to say that he only intended to help the guy he stuck a knife in. There was this piece of dirt on his shirt and I intended to brush it off very gently with this brush I was holding in my hand except it turned out it was a knife. How did it get there? Fuck if I know.

Uncertainty under coordination and discoordination  is the reason it is useful to have a separate branch of 'theory of mind' for intentions.

In the same sense, Wojtyla asserts that “knowledge about man and his world has been identified with the cognitive function […] And yet, in reality, does man reveal himself in thinking or rather in the actual enacting of his existence? –

acts are important. Thoughts, for most of us, are not.  

in observing, interpreting, speculating, or reasoning […] or in the confrontation itself when he has to take an active stance upon issues requiring vital decisions and having vital consequences and repercussions?” (Wojtyla 1979, vii–viii).

Fuck that. Do what the smart folks are doing or what the guys with the guns want you to do.  

To be a self – namely, to be a person – means, first, not to be a natural object 

be an unnatural subject instead. Phenomenology will send you round the bend. More work for the psychoanalysts- right? Then yet more stupid charlatans can get busy marrying Husserl to Freud or Heidegger to Marx or other such foolishness. Meanwhile sensible socioproctologists concentrate on marrying dogs to cats.

– that is, an ‘I’ does not appear as a dependent part of causal connections,

so, this is a nineteenth century ideology which doesn't get that Nature may not be composed of inert stuff tightly bound together by causal chains. Causality costs money- i.e. energy or information- & the economy of the Universe may be more parsimonious than we can imagine. Since meaning is economy- at least in Hinduism- Life may actually be even less meaningful than Nature. It is merely a sort of arbitrage on a collapsing market. 

as a mere individual with its specific essential features, but it emerges in motivational connections of intentional subjects.

so, intentionality is game theoretic- i.e. strategic.  

This can be understood considering that causality is the fixed and empirical legality of physical nature, characterized by certainties in expectations,

So Quantum Theory is just bullshit then. Still, in Physics, we don't have to worry about bosons trying to put one over on fermions. Thus we can speak of wave functions. In Econ, Uncertainty is Knightian. There are no probability distributions because possible states of the world are unknown.  

whereas motivation serves as the basic principle of consciousness – in other words, of the subjective condition.

No. Motives are things imputed or ascribed to for a particular purpose. They aren't 'basic' to any thing. They are second order. First order stuff has to do with conatus and oikeiosis- staying alive and helping your family or group survive. We don't cite motives for first order stuff- like kissing Mummy. We do cite motives when refusing to kiss Mummy because she is very cruel and is made us do our homework when that time could have been more profitably spent beating the Maths teacher till he gave us a better grade.   

Husserl (2004, 299) asserts, ‘It should be taken into account that this causality of nature, […], is radically different from the causality of motivation that purely reigns inside the sphere of the mental, of the sphere of the immanent subjectivity. In the case of causality of motivation, the necessity of the connection is comprehensible’. For him, ‘causality in the physical nature is nothing else than a fixed empirical regulation of coexistence and succession, always given in the experience in form of certainties in expectation’ (1960, 134).

But 'experience' is costly in terms of cognition. We have to be choosy about what we experience and parsimonious in signal reception and processing. That's why Knightian Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of empirical reality or our 'Lebenswelt' or phenomenology or whatever. There is always something arbitrary about this. Canonicity or Naturality, for a particular purpose, may arise- but we can't be sure this ever happens. 

The intentional character of an ‘I’ entails taking a stance towards things, towards the world and others, not merely relating in a fixed, predictable way but in a comprehensible manner.

But nothing is more predictable than that a charlatan, or practitioner of pseudo-science, will talk high falutin' bollocks of an obviously foolish kind. Why speak of an intention to act when it is merely a meta-action cancelled out by the fact that an infinite number of contradictory meta-actions are compossible with any given action- or no fucking action at all?

It consists of more than perceptual, wakeful awareness, but it does not involve other higher-order activities in its original core sense. Taking a stance does not include making explicative or comparative judgments  – higher order activities.

Not necessarily. A judgment is still a judgment even if no evidence is examined and no stance is taken. A higher order activity involves a review of lower order activities. But such review may arise even if there is no such intention on anyone's part. Only where some great cost or conflict is to be avoided might 'review' be invoked.  

It is simply the defining feature of the personal subjective condition of the self; then, it is the “quality” of the subjective way to view or connect with objects (facts, etc.), revealing their traits but not as imposed features.

In which case this is a Brouwerian choice sequence which may be 'lawless'. Intuitionism, Semiotics, Phenomenology all arose out of a faulty, nineteenth century, view of Physics and would have the effect of putting to rest the Darwinian scandal. It turned out that the real scandal for Reason would arise only if Darwin was hopeless wrong because then only Occasionalism of a very strict Monist sort would be true. Of course, for us, this may still be the case. It's just that we are in the wrong universe. More sadly, the Universe each of us is at home in is unique and wholly arbitrary.

Subjective receptivity adopts this form: specific availability directions are in the person, influencing the (theoretical, axiological or practical) way she handles an object (facts, etc.).

Till she sees it is more sensible to outsource that kind of stuff. But then, our genes have already done so.  

All position-taking occurs as a specific form of intentional directedness towards being, values, or goals.

Only in a manner of speaking. The truth is, no position-taking occurs save if that is what one is paid to do but even then the thing is just play-acting.  

By means of a progressive position-taking exercise, a stable, “sedimented” character is shaped –

only to be abandoned if something else pays better or you suddenly realize everybody thinks you are a boring fart.  

that is, the person becomes determined, more receptive to specific dimensions or directions of the availability of things or facts. 

this happens even to slaves who never got to take any position. Indeed, the less meaningful or rewarding our activity, the more we take on the traits, generally negatively, associated with it.  Phenomenology may have started off innocently enough as a search for something deeper and more meaningful than what was available in an increasingly utilitarian Academy. But it soon became shrill and sententious. 

... how could first personal givenness be brought about by narrative structures?

Joyce gave the answer. If you have literary genius then your narratives have that epiphanic quality. Phenomenology didn't notice the advances that were being made while it was going quietly potty.  

An account of self that disregards the basic structures and features of our intentional-experiential life is not fundamental,

because 'experiential life' is co-evolved, multiply realizable, and may be replaced by something with greater adaptive fitness. 

and this is the first-person perspective with the primitive form of self-reference that it entails.

Nope. Self-reference is something evolves. Maybe ontogeny really does replicate phylogeny in this particular case but, either way, Joyce got everybody to see that the Narratives begin with the 'he' of the Epics and end in the always vanishing I of the modern novel.  

In order to tell stories about one’s own experiences and actions, one must already hold a first-person perspective.

No. The reverse is the case. One must first have a third person perspective of oneself- 'baby want cake'- before you evolve a second person perspective as belonging to another till finally you start getting tp 'ego autonomy'. Consider Tolkein's Gollum who speaks of himself as though he were a little child. We may well believe that this sort of self-pity and inability to see oneself as responsible for one's own action is the mark of a tyrant or a psychopath. Yet such people may have high cognitive functioning. They can present an account of themselves which might be very convincing and which might win sympathy for them. 

Identity arises where autonomy has been established. But that may involve going beyond language which is merely our 'being for others'. Stories unfold in time. There is 'Granger causality'. But Identity may be outside time. It may have no principle of causation or principle of sufficient reason. We simply don't know. For any specific purpose, there is a good enough way of simplifying the problem by 'factorizing' it or specifying different 'representative agents'. But that is an extensional matter. Identity may be wholly intensional.