What do you believe personhood entails?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

I think this particular topic would fit under the moral section, so here it goes.

1. If you had to define a concept of personhood, how would you do it? Or, what do you think moral personhood means? If you wish, give examples of your idea of moral personhood.

This seems like a complicated subject, as I can see few who agree on what moral personhood would be, but most I have seen in the ethical literature seem to talk about self-awareness, the conception of the self in some form (important for modern Utility theory P.U.)

[Covenant]

I think this particular topic would fit under the moral section, so here it goes.

1. If you had to define a concept of personhood, how would you do it? Or, what do you think moral personhood means? If you wish, give examples of your idea of moral personhood.

This seems like a complicated subject, as I can see few who agree on what moral personhood would be, but most I have seen in the ethical literature seem to talk about self-awareness, the conception of the self in some form (important for modern Utility theory P.U.)

I think if you're self aware enough to take offense or disagree when I call you an object, you've achieved personhood. A computer that is aware of itself, but unable to express itself individually from me on it's own is just a clever number cruncher. Elephants are smart, they seem to recognize social attachments to other dead elephants, and like dogs and such have grieving processes. Grey Parrots have the intelligence of a small child, and will be worried about you and delight in tormenting guests and such. My grandpa's parrot would regularly fly into the rafters, call at him and us in his Mother's voice, and then laugh hysterically when we went up to look around.

But these are not person characteristics. I think even a highly evolved hive organism capable of building, like, ant cars and ant playstations or whatever would still not be a 'person' in the sense of an individual, self-motivated being. Frankly, a lot of people don't act like it, and there are environments in which acting more like an ant or a machine is more beneficial than acting like a person, and some of the foundations for moral personhood are set aside in the interests of survival or expediency or something else.

Frankly, 'moral personhood', as distinguished from legal personhood, is a designation that may not even exist at all, and the line between a 'legal person' and 'moral person' is mostly one people make on their own. Can you give us a context?

[Magus]

Though it may seem to be begging the question, one of the best definitions I've found for personhood is the ability to ask the question: "What defines personhood" - or perhaps, alternatively - "What defines me, as a person" - or at an even more basic level - "Who am I?" Since this definition isn't easily measurable by the scientific community, it's usefulness is undoubtedly lessened when compared to some other posters' renditions.

Alternatively, an idea I'm playing around with is that personhood is the ability to overcome the survive/reproduce tendency.

[Sikon]

One might define moral personhood as being a sapient entity who should be treated as having human rights.

No simple universal answer is obvious for making all judgments, but the Turing Test is a start. If the entity can appear to be as capable as a human when judged in prolonged conversation, then that suggests they are sapient. Such is not a perfect test. Indeed, some simple computer chatbots of today appear as intelligent as some people on the internet in a brief conversation...

Some entities like an utterly paralyzed person or a hypothetical intelligent alien would be sapient but possibly unable to pass the Turing Test due to inability to communicate. Still, even if a sapient entity didn't pass the Turing Test, one would usually expect some evidence of its sapience in actions. If the hypothetical intelligent aliens innovated, designed spaceships, and arrived in them, that would obviously suggest sapience.

In other words, usually an entity could indicate they were sapient and deserving of moral personhood either by a high enough level of communication or by sufficiently sophisticated actions. Sometimes a third method to guess would be apparent brain capability. For example, one can be confident that an utterly paralyzed person is sapient ("alive") if their brain is fine, making them obviously not a brain-dead corpse even if they can not presently communicate or act.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Oh hey. Sorry for the delayed response, but I was stuck at the Library and all the computers were taken up by myspacers.


A lot of the examples of personhood you have given so far do seem to be part of the personhood literature I have read. Typically, personhood is associated with what most seem to think it means to be a human. It's why Humans are seen as special.

I think the most abundant classification for personhood critieria are the rational-attributes, like autonomy, rationality, self-awareness, and preference-manufacturing.

[Covenant]

Oh hey. Sorry for the delayed response, but I was stuck at the Library and all the computers were taken up by myspacers.


A lot of the examples of personhood you have given so far do seem to be part of the personhood literature I have read. Typically, personhood is associated with what most seem to think it means to be a human. It's why Humans are seen as special.

I think the most abundant classification for personhood critieria are the rational-attributes, like autonomy, rationality, self-awareness, and preference-manufacturing.

Something that can't act rationally, but is still intelligent, is usually classes as insane or an animal. Same with autonomy. Something that is rational but cannot act on it's own is a machine of some sort, not a person.

Generally though, I think the idea of 'moral personhood' is flawed. It really should be more like 'moral humanity' since corporations are 'legal persons' but not persons at all is a fairly botched-up bit of semantics there. If or if not something operates as a person, such as a hive organism, has nothing to do with how you treat it. My dog is not a person, but it is not deserving of cruelty and malice, since it can still feel pain, understand it has disappointed me and seek to remedy that, and so on. As I mentioned, Parrots are as intelligent as small children. Is a parrot a person? Are children not?

We don't need fancy definitions for ourselves until we run into something else that has the ability to demand these same rights of us. If Gorillas became intelligent, monocle wearing Londoners tomorrow and formed a union to campaign for Gorilla Rights, we'd have a reason for this term. But even then, think about it this way:

Gorillamen are Not People. They're Gorillas.
Gorillamen are intelligent, self-aware, monocle and tophat wearing animals.
Gorillamen are therefore deserving of the same legal rights as us, since we'd extend them to an aboriginal tribe that has no more of a cultural connection to us than the Gorillas.

If someone is therefore considered a legal person, and has the same protections against murder, discrimination, etc as the rest of us, then how are those inalienable rights not evidence of what people call a 'moral personhood'? At that point, what's the difference?

[Darth Wong]

I don't see what's wrong with treating personhood as a function of intelligence. That's why we consider apes to be something less than people, even though they are clearly self-aware.

PS. I guess some people want something they can regard as a binary on/off state, rather than a sliding scale. There's a lesson about basic philosophies there somewhere.

[Rye]

I think this particular topic would fit under the moral section, so here it goes.

1. If you had to define a concept of personhood, how would you do it?

I think "personhood" refers to any mature sapient entity that can make decisions, with gradations of diminished responsibility for kids as they become more and more simplistic in their thoughts towards the start of their lives. I think, based on that, we can determine other species to be "lesser" persons not totally responsible for their actions, obviously, or if we met an alien race if they were at least equal with us or totally foreign.

This seems like a complicated subject, as I can see few who agree on what moral personhood would be, but most I have seen in the ethical literature seem to talk about self-awareness, the conception of the self in some form (important for modern Utility theory P.U.)

"Moral personhood" is ambiguous in your question, it could mean "what does it mean to be a moral entity," or it could mean "what does it take to be factored into an ethical situation as a person?"

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Well, Mr. Wong, you bring up a good point about personhood being a function of intelligence, and I think a lot of ethicists would agree with you on that. The Literature seems to indicate that self-awareness comes in degrees, and those degrees stem from degrees in intelligence.

There are several creatures which seem to exhibit various forms of self-awareness, but Humans seem to be special due to the high level of it they exhibit to the extent that they have the smarts to comprehend themselves as a distinct self. Humans seem to have a lot more to their life's journey in terms of preference-generating capacity, so I would think it would be worse to kill a Human Person than another animal who didn't have the cognitive capacity.