The Psychology of Personhood: Philosophical, Historical, Social-Developmental, and Narrative Perspectives. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2014.881615.

There is surprisingly little attention in Information Technology ethics to respect for persons, either as an ethical issue or as a core value of IT ethics or as a conceptual tool for discussing ethical issues of IT. In this, IT ethics is very different from another field of applied ethics, bioethics, where respect is a core value and conceptual tool. This paper argues that there is value in thinking about ethical issues related to information technologies, especially, though not exclusively, issues (...) concerning identity and identity management, explicitly in terms of respect for persons understood as a core value of IT ethics. After explicating respect for persons, the paper identifies a number of ways in which putting the concept of respect for persons explicitly at the center of both IT practice and IT ethics could be valuable, then examines some of the implicit and problematic assumptions about persons, their identities, and respect that are built into the design, implementation, and use of information technologies and are taken for granted in discussions in IT ethics. The discussion concludes by asking how better conceptions of respect for persons might be better employed in IT contexts or brought better to bear on specific issues concerning identity in IT contexts. (shrink)

This article reflects upon the increasingly popular claim that animals are persons. Such a claim can take a metaphysical, a moral, or a legal meaning. Animals may or may not be persons, but I challenge the assumption that it is even fruitful to think about the ways in which animals are “persons.” At best, it is a relatively narrow assimilationist conceptual exercise. At worst, it distracts us from conceptualizing more effective strategies to improve the welfare of animals and impoverishes more (...) promising avenues of philosophical investigation on interspecies relations and on the nature and moral status of both animals and human beings. (shrink)

In non-philosophical discourse, “identity” is often used when the specific character of artefacts is described or evaluated. We argue that this usage of “identity” can be explicated as referring to the symbol properties of artefacts as they are conceptualized in the symbol theory of Goodman and Elgin. This explication is backed by an analysis of various uses of “identity”. The explicandum clearly differs from the concepts of numerical identity, qualitative identity and essence, but it has a range of similarities with (...) the notion of self-concept used in psychology and practical philosophy. The proposed explication is used to analyse claims about identity-pluralism and identity-conflicts. Firstly, the explication allows us to distinguish various ways how the same artefact can have a plurality of identities. Secondly, more or less sharp conflicts within an identity or between identities of an artefact are distinguished. Thirdly, many phenomena called “identity-conflicts” are only apparently identity-conflicts and can be analysed as involving some other form of tension. (shrink)