Would You Rather Lose Your Morals or Your Memory?

New Republic: 

When Nina Strohminger was a teenager, her grandmother had dementia. “Before she got sick, she was not a very nice person,” Strohminger said. “One of the first things that went when this disease was taking hold is she became really, really nice. I just remember her stopping me one day and saying ‘Nina, your skin is so beautiful,’ and I was like ‘what is happening?’”

We spoke on the phone, both of us traveling—I paced outside of a Starbucks in Brooklyn while she packed her things to move from Durham, NC, where we both lived at the time, to New Haven, CT, where she’d be starting as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. (Full disclosure: Strohminger is a friend and collaborator of mine.)

…

In a forthcoming paper with University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols, Strohminger advances  a novel solution: What makes us who we are is our moral character—whether we’re honest, what sorts of things we value, and how well we treat our grandchildren.

Read the whole story: New Republic