  But even if we grant the need for the kind of unity desired by both  the Kantians and the communitarians, this does not yet imply that we  must grant the life-long unity on which they both insist. It may be instead that only certain parts of one's life are  unified in the way they describe, and these could in fact be  stretches defined also by the obtaining of strong psychological  connectedness, say (such that one's life would be better conceived as a collection of short stories than as a novel). In other words, it  could be that reductionist theories of personal identity dovetail  with these normative considerations already, so that rather than  constituting a constraint on that theory (and disuniting theories  like it), such considerations actually  buttress it.