 Perhaps we should conclude that identity is not what matters. Instead, what matters is some other relation, but one that accounts as readily as identity for such facts as that the owner of the original ship would be entitled to both the restored version and the reassembled one. For the case of personal identity, Parfit (1984) develops such a response in detail. A related reaction would be to claim that if both competitors have equal claim to be the original, then neither is the original. If, however, one competitor is inferior, then the other wins the day and counts as the original. It seems that on this view certain contingencies can establish or falsify identity claims. That conflicts with NI. Suppose that \(w\) is a possible world in which no ship is assembled from the discarded parts of the remodeled ship. In this world, then, the remodeled ship is the original. By NI, the restored ship and the original are identical in the actual world, contrary to the claim of the “best candidate” doctrine (which says that neither the remodeled nor the reassembled ship is the original). There are, however, more sophisticated “best candidate” theories that are not vulnerable to this objection (Nozick 1982).