This article proffers a personhood-based conception of a meaningful life. I look into the ethical structure of the salient idea of personhood in African philosophy to develop an account of a meaningful life. In my view, the ethics of personhood is constituted by three components, namely (1) the fact of being human, which informs (2) a view of moral status qua the capacity for moral virtue, and (3) which specifies the final good of achieving or developing a (...) morally virtuous character. In light of the ethics of personhood, I will propose the view that a meaningful life is a function of achieving moral excellence or perfection. The moral perfection proposed here, to embody a meaningful life, is of a deontological and satisficing kind. The achievement of satisfactory levels of moral excellence, within sociopolitical and moral limits, captures the essence of a meaningful life. I conclude the article by considering objections against the view proposed here. (shrink)

Personhood is a foundational concept in ethics, yet defining criteria have been elusive. In this article we summarize attempts to define personhood in psychological and neurological terms and conclude that none manage to be both specific and non-arbitrary. We propose that this is because the concept does not correspond to any real category of objects in the world. Rather, it is the product of an evolved brain system that develops innately and projects itself automatically and irrepressibly onto the (...) world whenever triggered by stimulus features such as a human-like face, body, or contingent patterns of behavior. We review the evidence for the existence of an autonomous person network in the brain and discuss its implications for the field of ethics and for the implicit morality of everyday behavior. (shrink)

Could an artificial intelligence become a legal person? As of today, this question is only theoretical. No existing computer program currently possesses the sort of capacities that would justify serious judicial inquiry into the question of legal personhood. The question is nonetheless of some interest. Cognitive science begins with the assumption that the nature of human intelligence is computational, and therefore, that the human mind can, in principle, be modelled as a program that runs on a computer. Artificial intelligence (...) (AI) research attempts to develop such models. But even as cognitive science has displaced behavioralism as the dominant paradigm for investigating the human mind, fundamental questions about the very possibility of artificial intelligence continue to be debated. This Essay explores those questions through a series of thought experiments that transform the theoretical question whether artificial intelligence is possible into legal questions such as, "Could an artificial intelligence serve as a trustee?" What is the relevance of these legal thought experiments for the debate over the possibility of artificial intelligence? A preliminary answer to this question has two parts. First, putting the AI debate in a concrete legal context acts as a pragmatic Occam's razor. By reexamining positions taken in cognitive science or the philosophy of artificial intelligence as legal arguments, we are forced to see them anew in a relentlessly pragmatic context. Philosophical claims that no program running on a digital computer could really be intelligent are put into a context that requires us to take a hard look at just what practical importance the missing reality could have for the way we speak and conduct our affairs. In other words, the legal context provides a way to ask for the "cash value" of the arguments. The hypothesis developed in this Essay is that only some of the claims made in the debate over the possibility of AI do make a pragmatic difference, and it is pragmatic differences that ought to be decisive. Second, and more controversially, we can view the legal system as a repository of knowledge-a formal accumulation of practical judgments. The law embodies core insights about the way the world works and how we evaluate it. Moreover, in common-law systems judges strive to decide particular cases in a way that best fits the legal landscape-the prior cases, the statutory law, and the constitution. Hence, transforming the abstract debate over the possibility of AI into an imagined hard case forces us to check our intuitions and arguments against the assumptions that underlie social decisions made in many other contexts. By using a thought experiment that explicitly focuses on wide coherence, we increase the chance that the positions we eventually adopt will be in reflective equilibrium with our views about related matters. In addition, the law embodies practical knowledge in a form that is subject to public examination and discussion. Legal materials are published and subject to widespread public scrutiny and discussion. Some of the insights gleaned in the law may clarify our approach to the artificial intelligence debate. (shrink)

Lockean accounts of personhood propose that an individual is a person just in case that individual is characterized by some advanced cognitive capacity. On these accounts, human beings with severe cognitive impairment are not persons. Some accept this result—I do not. In this paper, I therefore advance and defend an account of personhood that secures personhood for human beings who are cognitively impaired. On the account for which I argue, an individual is a person just in case (...) that individual belongs to a natural kind that is normally characterized by advanced cognitive capacities. Since “human being” is just such a natural kind, individual human beings can be persons even when they do not themselves have advanced cognitive capacities. I argue, furthermore, that we have good reason to accept this account of personhood over rival accounts since it is uniquely able to accommodate the intuitive concept of an impaired person. (shrink)

Drawing heavily on recent empirical research to update R.M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism and expand Hare's treatment of "intuitive level rules," Gary Varner considers in detail the theory's application to animals while arguing that Hare should have recognized a hierarchy of persons, near-persons, & the merely sentient.

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal (...) theorists for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Carol Rovan, The Bounds of Agency.

The concept of artificial intelligence is not new nor is the notion that it should be granted legal protections given its influence on human activity. What is new, on a relative scale, is the notion that artificial intelligence can possess citizenship—a concept reserved only for humans, as it presupposes the idea of possessing civil duties and protections. Where there are several decades’ worth of writing on the concept of the legal status of computational artificial artefacts in the USA and elsewhere, (...) it is surprising that law makers internationally have come to a standstill to protect our silicon brainchildren. In this essay, it will be assumed that future artificial entities, such as Sophia the Robot, will be granted citizenship on an international scale. With this assumption, an analysis of rights will be made with respect to the needs of a non-biological intelligence possessing legal and civic duties akin to those possessed by humanity today. This essay does not present a full set of rights for artificial intelligence—instead, it aims to provide international jurisprudence evidence aliunde ab extra de lege lata for any future measures made to protect non-biological intelligence. (shrink)

Personhood is an extensively discussed theme in contemporary African philosophy, which has taken metaphysical, epistemological and normative dimensions. In Western philosophical traditions, discourse on personhood is transmuting to debates on transhumanism. Missing in the African philosophical literature is consideration of transhumanism and an explication of the relationship between personhood and transhumanism. In this article, I critically examine the relationship between personhood and transhumanism in an African context. Drawing on Barry Hallen’s African metaphysical account of personhood (...) and Thaddeus Metz’s Afro-communal normative conception of personhood, I argue that while some transhumanist elements are embedded in African normative and ontological conceptions of personhood, some others are not. In the final analysis, I defend an Afrofuturistic account of personhood that is compatible with some censored essentials of transhumanism in African thoughts. Keywords : Personhood, Transhumanism, Barry Hallen, Thaddeus Metz, Africa, Yoruba. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. (...) To facilitate a meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematize moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights. (shrink)

A common Western assumption is that animals cannot be persons. Even in animal ethics, the concept of personhood is often avoided. At the same time, many in cognitive ethology argue that animals do have minds, and that animal ethics presents convincing arguments supporting the individual value of animals. Although “animal personhood” may seem to be an absurd notion, more attention needs to placed on the reasons why animals can or cannot be included in the category of persons. Of (...) three different approaches to personhood—the perfectionist approach, the humanistic approach, and the interactive approach—the third approach is the strongest. Personhood defined via interaction opens new doors for animal ethics. (shrink)

Recent artificial intelligence advances, especially those of large language models (LLMs), have increasingly shown glimpses of human-like intelligence. This has led to bold claims that these systems are no longer a mere “it” but now a “who,” a kind of person deserving respect. In this paper, I argue that this view depends on a Cartesian account of personhood, on which identifying someone as a person is based on their cognitive sophistication and ability to address common-sense reasoning problems. I contrast (...) this with a different account of personhood, one where an agent is a person if they are autonomous, responsive to norms, and culpable for their actions. On this latter account, I show that LLMs are not person-like, as evidenced by their propensity for dishonesty, inconsistency, and offensiveness. Moreover, I argue current LLMs, given the way they are designed and trained, cannot be persons—either social or Cartesian. The upshot is that contemporary LLMs are not, and never will be, persons. (shrink)

This article invokes the idea of personhood (which it takes to be at the heart of Afrocommunitarian morality) to give an account of corrective/rectification justice. The idea of rectification justice by Robert Nozick is used heuristically to reveal the moral-theoretical resources availed by the idea of personhood to think about historical injustices and what would constitute a meaningful remedy for them. This notion of personhood has three facets: (1) a theory of moral status/dignity, (2) an account of (...) historical conditions and (3) the achievement of moral excellence by the agent (personhood). This article argues that a just society is a function of (1) and (2), and it further argues that the aim of rectification justice is to correct these two facets of a society, which are necessary for (3) to be possible. The aim of correcting history just is to make personhood a possibility for all humanity, particularly of those who were victims of past injustices. (shrink)

Criticizing Richard Swinburne’s conception of God, John Hick argues that God cannot be personal because infinity and personhood are mutually incompatible. An essential characteristic of a person, Hick claims, is having a boundary which distinguishes that person from other persons. But having a boundary is incompatible with being infinite. Infinite beings are unbounded. Hence God cannot be thought of as an infinite person. In this paper, I argue that the Hickian argument is flawed because boundedness is an equivocal notion: (...) in one sense it is not essential to personhood, and in another sense—which is essential to personhood—it is compatible with being infinite. (shrink)

This article ascertains what philosophical implications can be drawn from the moral idea of personhood dominant in African philosophy. This article aims to go beyond the oft-made submission that this moral idea of personhood is definitive of African moral thought. It does so by advancing discourse with regards to personhood by exploring its relationship with another under-explored idea in African ethics, the idea of partialism. This article ultimately argues that the idea of personhood can be associated (...) with two (related) sorts of partialisms: agent-related and other-centered partialisms. (shrink)

The lives of persons are valuable, but are all humans persons? Some humans—the immature, the damaged, and the defective—are not capable, here and now, of engaging in the rational activities characteristic of persons, and for this reason, one might call their personhood into question. A standard way of defendingit is by appeal to potentiality: we know they are persons because we know they have the potentiality to engage in rational activities. In this paper I develop acomplementary strategy based on (...) normativity. We know that the humans in question are persons because we know that lacking the here-and-now ability to engage in rational activities is—for them, unlike for tulips or kittens—a falling-short of some norm. Their personhood, in other words, is established on the basis of their being subject to the norm of having those here-and-now capacities. (shrink)

In her paper titled “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) takes a swipe at the functionalist account of personhood. The problem with the functionalist view of personhood is that...

Kagan argues that human beings who are neither persons nor even potential persons — if their impairment is independent of genetic constitution — are modal persons: individuals who might have been persons. Moreover, he proposes a view according to which both personhood and modal personhood are sufficient for counting more, morally, than nonhuman animals. In response to this proposal, I raise one relatively minor concern about Kagan's reasoning — that he judges too quickly that insentient beings can have (...) interests — before engaging the appeal to modal personhood. I challenge the thesis that modal personhood is relevant to one's moral status, first, by way of analogy to a kicker who misses a field goal though he might have made it; second, by casting doubt on implications for two impaired infants ; and, finally, by examining implications for dogs who would count as modal persons when genetic enhancements are capable of transforming them into persons. (shrink)

Political philosophy is obviously concerned with people. If there were no people we would have no subject. But the contemporary significance of the concept of personhood is largely due to its central role in liberal political philosophy. Puzzles about personhood typically arise as objections to liberalism.

The escalating global ecological degradation underlines the continued importance of the need of effective nature protection. In recent years a new concept– “environmental personhood” was developed. The article analyses the concept and asks the question if it can help with the efficiency of protecting the nature. It is the attempt to transfer the essence of human rights to animals and ecosystem, so they will no longer be right’-less. This concept has some of its beginning in the idea of “common (...) heritage of mankind”, which means that some places belong to the whole of humanity and that the resources of these places should be available to all. This article outlines the roots, the development and traces current trends in the legal personification of non-human persons. It asks legal-theoretical questions about the limits and possibilities of opening up the concept of legal personhood for non-human legal persons in order to protect the nature and discusses the possibility of creating new institutions that could protect it. The article also shows the importance of creating a new society sensitive to nature’s needs. (shrink)

This chapter is about personhood in relation to ethics and to conciliar Christian theology, and how concepts of personhood may discriminate against profoundly cognitively disabled human beings. (By ‘conciliar Christian theology’ I mean the Christian theology that is articulated in, or endorsed by, the first seven ecumenical councils.) -/- I believe we can learn several things about personhood by looking at these two topics together. By examining ancient and medieval concepts of personhood and some modern conceptions (...) of personhood we gain a better grasp of the variety of concepts and what substantive work they were intended to do. By becoming familiar with (part of) the history of concepts of personhood we are better situated to appreciate and judge the theoretical work that these concepts were intended to do and what consequences they have in ethical and theological theorizing. -/- In the first section I tell a select history of moral philosophers theorizing about personhood and discuss these in relation to human beings with profound cognitive disability. I focus on John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Mary Anne Warren. In the “When Personhood Is Discriminatory” section I argue that concepts of personhood, especially modern concepts of personhood, are typically used in a manner that discriminates against human beings with profound cognitive disabilities. I give two arguments against discriminatory uses of personhood, the Moral Shift Argument and the Argument against Exclusive Personhood. Although the Moral Shift Argument is deductively valid, it probably has little persuasive power over those who do not share the moral belief that profoundly cognitively disabled human beings are equal members of the moral community. However, the Argument against Exclusive Personhood has more argumentative force because it denies the claims that personhood is “self-evident” and that it is “obvious” to everyone. In the following section I survey a select history of concepts of personhood in order to establish the claims that concepts of personhood are not self-evident and are not obvious to everyone. This history of personhood goes back to ancient and medieval Christian theorizing and debating about personhood. It shows that concepts of personhood are not “self-evident” but rather are theoretical posits that are posited in theory construction in order to explain certain putative theological facts. Given that personhood is a theoretical posit and is not “self-evident,” moral philosophers who aim to determine the extent of the moral community on the basis of a supposedly “self-evident” concept of personhood are not justified in doing so. Moreover, given the Argument against Exclusive Personhood, philosophical theologians who wish to articulate models of the Trinity or Incarnation that are consistent with the seven ecumenical councils will find that they, like moral philosophers, are not justified to assume, or to insist on, modern personhood for their models of the Trinity or Incarnation. My overall conclusion, then, is that modern personhood is bad for ethics and unnecessary for conciliar ecumenical Christian theology. (shrink)

This paper explores the debate between personists, who argue that the concept of a person if of central importance for moral thought, and personists, who argue that the concept of a human being is of greater moral significance. On the one hand, it argues that normative naturalism, the most ambitious defense of the humanist position, fails to identify moral standards with standards of human behavior and thereby fails to undermine the moral significance of personhood. At the same time, it (...) contends that a more focused attention on the morally relevant features of human life may indeed play a crucial role in enhancing our moral understanding. (shrink)

A review of Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two-Level Utilitarianism, by Gary E. Varner. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 336. H/b £40.23. and The Philosophy of Animal Minds, edited by Robert W. Lurz. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 320. P/b £20.21.

In this paper, I shall set out the pros and cons of assigning legal personhood on artificial intelligence systems under civil law. More specifically, I will provide arguments supporting a functionalist justification for conferring personhood on AIs, and I will try to identify what content this legal status might have from a regulatory perspective. Being a person in law implies the entitlement to one or more legal positions. I will mainly focus on liability as it is one of (...) the main grounds for the attribution of legal personhood, like for collective legal entities. A better distribution of responsibilities resulting from unpredictably illegal and/or harmful behaviour may be one of the main reasons to justify the attribution of personhood also for AI systems. This means an efficient allocation of the risks and social costs associated with the use of AIs, ensuring the protection of victims, incentives for production, and technological innovation. However, the paper also considers other legal positions triggered by personhood in addition to responsibility: specific competencies and powers such as, for example, financial autonomy, the ability to hold property, make contracts, sue. (shrink)

Traditionally, it has been assumed that metaphysical and practical questions about personhood and personal identity are inherently linked. Neo-Lockean views that draw such a link have been problematic, leading to an opposing view that metaphysical and ethical questions about persons should be sharply distinguished. This paper argues that consideration of this issue suffers from an overly narrow conception of the practical concerns associated with persons that focuses on higher-order capacities and fails to appreciate basic practical concerns more directly connected (...) to our animality. A more inclusive alternative is proposed. (shrink)

A widely adopted approach to end-of-life ethical questions fails to make explicit certain crucial metaphysical ideas entailed by it and when those ideas are clarified, then it can be shown to be inadequate. These metaphysical themes cluster around the notions of personal identity, personhood and humanness, and the metaphysics of substance. In order to clarify and critique the approach just mentioned, I focus on the writings of Robert N. Wennberg as a paradigm case by, first, stating his views of (...) personal identity, humanness, personhood, and the relations among them; second, offering a comparison of a view of humans as substances (understood in the classic interpretation of Aristotle and Aquinas) vs. a view of humans as property-things; third, applying the metaphysical distinctions surfaced in the second section towards a critique of Wennberg. (shrink)

Wennemann argues that the traditional concept of personhood may be fruitfully applied to the ethical challenge we face in a posthuman age. The book posits that biologically non-human persons like robots, computers, or aliens are a theoretical possibility but that we do not know if they are a real possibility.

The debate on enhancement ethics cannot escape some of the deeper questions troubling the concept of personhood. That is, in a sentence, my reading of Robert Sparrow’s target article (Sparrow 2022)...

Advocates of the Person-Centered Healthcare (PCH) approach say that PCH is a response to a failure of caring for patients as persons. Nevertheless, there are many human subjects falling to fulfill the requirements of a traditional philosophical definition of personhood. Hence, if we take, PCH seriously, a greater clarification of the key terminology of PCH is urgently needed. It seems necessary, for instance, that the concept of the person should be extended in order to include those individuals with insipient (...) or immature levels of consciousness, as well as those who are severely and permanently mentally handicapped. In this article, we will depart from some well-known philosophical concepts of what it means to be a person and try to offer a broader and more inclusive meaning. We suggest that persons are human beings with a socially recognized biography, which implies to recognize as persons individuals with necessities, but also with narratives about their interests and claims, expressed sometimes by other people related to them. This is particularly the case of individuals that suffer from severe disorders of consciousness. For those, is not only care that matters; respect matters too. Caregivers should therefore not only sympathetically care for the well-being of these people; they should also be concerned to respect their interests and claims by interpreting them empathetically, in the light of their biographical story. Our conclusion is that, in order to be coherent, PCH must consider individuals with severe disorders of consciousness as persons and we think that our revised concept of personhood fits with this requirement. (shrink)

Amongst traditionally-available frameworks within which end-of-life decisions in Intensive Care Units are situated, we favour Ordinary versus Extra-ordinary care distinctions as the most helpful. Predicated on this framework, we revisit the concepts of personhood and autonomy. We argue that a full account of personhood locates its foundation in relationships with others, rather than merely in “rationality”. A full account of autonomy also recognises relationships with others, as well as the actual reality of the patient’s situation-in-the-world. The fact that, (...) when critically ill, the patient may no longer be able to take an active role in decision-making does not bring about the end of their personhood, or of their autonomy. Because the patient’s autonomy is intimately linked to their relationships with others, once critical illness supervenes, respect for their autonomy devolves to those others with whom the patient is in relationship. In practical application, this means that there must be a dialogue, as the end-of-life of the critically-ill patient in ICU comes into view. Such dialogue should be grounded on this understanding in order to conform best to moral philosophical principles. Ideally the dialogue will involve all those with whom the patient is in relationship and, practical difficulties within an ICU notwithstanding, will aim to be inclusive, non-coercive and reflective as it seeks to maximise the good of the patient in their unique context. (shrink)

Should we allocate costly health care to patients diagnosed with disorders of consciousness (DoC), such as patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state? Peterson, Aas, and Wasserman (2021) argue that we should in their paper “What justifies the allocation of health care resources to patients with disorders of consciousness?” Their key insight is that the expected benefits to this patient population helps to justify such allocations. However, their insight is attached to a consequentialist framework aimed (...) at maximizing aggregate social welfare. An alleged virtue of their framework over Braddock’s (2017) approach is their agnosticism about the moral status and rights of DoC patients. In this commentary, however, we argue that their agnosticism is the biggest problem with their approach: failing to treat DoC patients as persons with rights runs the moral risk of violating their rights, which is more serious than the risk of failing to maximize social utility. A better approach that reduces moral risk would incorporate Braddock’s (2017) precautionary presumption of personhood. We should stand in solidarity with DoC patients and treat them as persons with dignity and rights. (shrink)

ExtractThe idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law. In the law, a ‘person’ is essentially the subject of rights and obligations, while a thing may be owned as property. In ethics, a person is an object of respect, to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means (...) to an end, while a thing has only a derivative value, and may be used as a means to some person's ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category. For various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus, a non-human animal, the environment, or an object of great beauty, as a person, but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they are to be valued only as means.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

For caregivers of minimally communicative individuals, providing support in the absence of clearly meaningful responses is ethically fraught. We conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data from caregivers of individuals who are minimally communicative, including persons with advanced dementia and individuals in disorders of consciousness. Our analysis led to two central claims: (1) Personhood is a threshold concept that is situated, relational, and dynamic and (2) in circumstances in which personhood is difficult to judge, caregivers can “fill the (...) gap” to reach the threshold through a repertoire of strategies. Because personhood is in part an attribution from others, a situational loss of personhood does not preclude restoration, nor does it eliminate moral status. (shrink)

The concepts of personhood and human dignity are widely used in contemporary healthcare ethics. This chapter provides a brief overview of how the concept of human dignity came to be so important in healthcare ethics, and examines how the concept’s widespread use and relationship to the concept of personhood have led to problems regarding its meaning and relevance. A practical solution is then presented. The rise of the concept of human dignity in healthcare ethics The word dignity is (...) derived from the Latin dignus, which means worthy. Since dignity refers to worth, human dignity refers to the worth of the human. What makes the concept of human dignity important for ethics is that, unlike the dignity of a queen or the dignitaries at an awards ceremony, which expresses the worth or status of particular human individuals in relation to others, human dignity is meant to express a worth that is equally shared by all human individuals. It is not meant to be dependent upon their social status, economic wealth, race, gender or anything else. Moreover, it is meant to affirm a worth beyond price. Human individuals are said to be moral goods or ends in themselves, not merely good or useful as means to achieving other ends. (shrink)

What I will be referring to as the normative view in contemporary African discourse on personhood has received substantial treatment and is beginning to exhibit the sort of systematic coherence that I believe Kwasi Wiredu once anticipated.1 Much of this is due to Wiredu's own work, as well as important recent work by Polycarp Ikuenobe, whose most recent articulation and defense of the view appear in this journal.2 My aim is to engage with this way of thinking about what (...) it means to be a person with a view to repairing aspects of it deemed to be most problematic. To this end, I pursue two broad lines of contestation—the one is theoretical, contesting some of the features it takes to be conceptually required for... (shrink)

Twentieth century philosophers such as Simondon and Heidegger propose theories of subjectivation that inform our thinking about the definition of personhood and how it arises; including in the potentially wide-ranging context of personhood beyond the human. Simondon’s theory of transindividuation unfolds as a series of decenterings that provides a context for future persons that is a dynamic world of processes without fixity or attachment to any one kind of subject. Subjects participate in but do not cause individuation; and (...) they exist on a spectrum of capacity for action with other living beings including animals; human persons; and possibly a variety of future persons. The role of collectivity in the form of the other has been an important aspect of individuation; however I claim that the function of alterity need not be provided exclusively by a self-similar subject. Philosophical individuation theories serve as a foundation for an approach that opens up greater possibility for individuation in the context of future persons by identifying and alternatively fulfilling the underlying functionality required by individuation. (shrink)

In the Introduction to Self to Self, J. David Velleman claims that 'the word "self" does not denote any one entity but rather expresses a reflexive guise under which parts or aspects of a person are presented to his own mind' (Velleman 2006, 1). Velleman distinguishes three different reflexive guises of the self: the self of the person's self-image, or narrative self-conception; the self of self-sameness over time; and the self as autonomous agent. Velleman's account of each of these different (...) guises of the self is complex and repays close philosophical attention. The first aim of this paper is therefore to provide a detailed analysis of Velleman's view. The second aim is more critical. While I am in agreement with Velleman about the importance of distinguishing the different aspects of selfhood, I argue that, even on his own account, they are more interrelated than he acknowledges. I also analyse the role of the concept of 'bare personhood' in Velleman's approach to selfhood and question whether this concept can function, as he wants it to, to bridge the gap between a naturalistic analysis of reasons for action and Kantian moral reasons. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on moral personhood understood in terms of the notion of moral status. An entity is said to have moral status only if it or its interest matters morally for its own sake. Nonutilitarians tend to think of moral status in terms of entitlements and protections that can conflict with, and sometimes override, doing what would maximize the good and minimize the bad. If moral status comes in degrees, and if there is a status of the highest (...) degree (i.e., full moral status), then moral persons are those with full moral status. After giving a more precise account of it, we assess different views of what it takes to qualify for full moral status (some of which appeal to metaphysical notions of person). We also briefly discuss how metaphysical notions of personhood are put to moral use in utilitarian moral theorizing that eschews the notion of moral personhood. (shrink)

Artificial persons are those who speak and act for others. Nurses speak and act for patients as well as for physicians and institutions, or, more aptly, institutionalized medicine. Yet, acting for institutionalized medicine can be harmful to nurses, due to the psychological experience of moral distress and the loss of integrity of their practice. This paper illustrates the harm to nurses as expressed in narratives of their practice, and suggests some initial steps we might take in resisting the artificial (...) class='Hi'>personhood imposed by institutionalized medicine. (shrink)

This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I (...) argue that, once we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Basic Moral Principles and the Concept of a Person Human Persons and Human Organisms The Concept of a Person and the Wrongness of Killing What Makes Something a Person? Is Personhood a Matter of Degree? Is Potential Personhood Morally Significant? Is Species Membership Morally Significant? The Moral Status of Human Embryos, Fetuses, and Newborn Infants Summing Up: Ethics and the Concept of a Person References.

Theories regarding the nature and achievement of personhood in a communitarian context appear to differ in significant respects in the writings of several contemporary African philosophers. Ifeanyi Menkiti seems to regard ethnic differences as sufficient to warrant a national accommodation of multiculturalism with respect to moralities and attendant beliefs. Kwasi Wiredu argues that there is a substantive universal moral principle that undercuts such apparent and relatively superficial diversity. Communitarianism also seems to provide a better framework for explaining how a (...) human being becomes a person than classical liberal theory as enunciated by someone like John Rawls. (shrink)

Basic Questions The following are among the basic questions discussed in this essay: (1) What is the concept of a person? (2) What properties make something a person? (3) Is personhood a matter of degree? (4) Is potential personhood morally significant? (5) Is species membership morally significant? (6) Why is the concept of a person important? Important Arguments The important arguments that are examined include the following: (1) Counterexample arguments: (a) Whole brain death and upper brain death. (b) (...) Brain transplants. (c) Currently irreparable damage versus impossibility of resuscitation. (2) The reprogramming argument. (3) The generalized potentialities argument. (4) Potentialities and comas: active versus passive. (5) Anti-speciesism and the common sense generality of the concept of a person: deities, angels, disembodied souls, extraterrestrials. Important Positions Among the important positions considered are the following: (1) Consciousness is sufficient for personhood. (2) Self-consciousness is necessary for personhood. (3) The capacity for thought is necessary for personhood. (4) Moral agency is necessary for personhood. (shrink)

The view that the fetus' potential for human consciousness confers upon it the right to life has been widely criticised on the basis that the notion of potentiality is so vague as to be meaningless, and on the basis that actual rights cannot be deduced from the mere potential for personhood. It has also been criticised, although less commonly, on the basis that it is not the potential to assume consciousness, but rather the potential to resume consciousness which is (...) morally significant, and on the basis that the fetus does not really possess the potential for consciousness. In response, I argue that these criticisms are mistaken and that the potential for human consciousness is a sufficient condition not simply of potential, but actual, personhood. Since it possesses this potential from the moment of conception, the fetus should be considered an actual person from the moment of its conception. (shrink)

In this chapter I pursue the connection between humans as strong evaluators and humans as strongly valued. The connection is, quite simply, that strong evaluators are valued because they are strong evaluators. Yet, this valuing is of two kinds: someone’s achievements as a strong evaluator can be esteemed, or he can be respected as a person. Personhood is a specific kind of moral status, but it is based on personhood in the descriptive sense. Taylor’s views on persons can (...) be seen as trying to incorporate the Kantian view of the dignity or worth of persons to the more Aristotelian- Hegelian ontology. The distinction between moral and descriptive personhood, and between two senses in which personhood is an “end” serves as an introduction to this theme (3.1). In 3.2 I will ask what the nature of persons is in the descriptive sense. I try to outline and clarify Taylor’s position in relation to some central positions in the contemporary discussions about personhood. I do not argue in detail against rival views about descriptive personhood, I merely hope to map some issues in rough outline. My goal in defending Taylor’s position is modest, I hope that merely stating the position clearly shows some of its appeals. The main point is that persons are certain kind of agents, machines could become persons only through becoming living beings first. The most fundamental idea in Taylor’s view of personhood is that of living responsively and dialogically in a world, which is a “moral space” or a “space of concerns”. Machines do not have a world, and the world of other animals is not a moral space. Taylor’s persons are strong evaluators and respondents, being moved by the world and the other people, and being responsible for their own action. So in this sense one can agree with Jeff Sugarman’s (2005, 809) way of summing it up: “not only are persons at the center of moral inquiry, but also, as Taylor’s work reveals, moral inquiry is at the center of personhood”. In 3.3 I discuss different ways of seeing the basis of the moral status of persons, and defend the direct view: moral personhood is directly grounded in descriptive personhood. (Thus various other options I discuss are “mute formalism”, arbitrary historicism, status-view, instrumentalism and desert-view). In sections 3.4 and 3.5 I ask whether such a suggestion works for those humans, who (at the moment) are not actual persons in the full sense. I further strengthen Taylor’s view and defend it against Feinberg’s criticism. (shrink)

The concept of personhood has outlived its usefulness for bioethics, says Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024). The concept of personhood has been important to the bioethics literature from fairly earl...