Person
{{otheruses}}The term
person is used in
common sense to mean an individual
human being. But in the fields of
law,
philosophy,
medicine, and others, it means the presence of certain characteristics that grant a certain legal, ethical, or moral standing. For example, in many jurisdictions, the law allows a group of human beings to act together as a single composite entity called a
corporation, and the corporation is considered a
legal person with standing to sue or be sued in court. In philosophy and medicine,
person may mean only humans who are capable of certain kinds of thought, and thus exclude embryos, early fetuses, or adults with certain types of brain damage.
(1)(2) Origin of the concept of personhood
Person and Personhood in relation to the human being are the concepts that were formulated in the early
Christian theological
tradition, during the first centuries A.D. by the great
Church Fathers. The very concept of person (prosopon in
Greek) was the result of a theological dispute, how
God, according to the Christian (
Orthodox) teaching, can be One and three at the same time. Further explication of the problem let to the formulation that there is one substance (or being) and three persons (hypostases):
God Father,
God Son and
God Holy Spirit, but still just one God, not three. This theological concept of the person as something that has a specific identity and holds the fullness of being, was applied to the
human being as well. The Church Fathers interpreted the "
icon of God" in man as human ability to exist as a person, having his/her own unique identity in communion with other persons. Later in the West the concept was translated into Latin as persona and was explained by
Boethius and St.
Augustine as something characterized by rational capacities.
(3) Scientific approach
As an application of
Social Psychology. and other discplines, phenomena such as the
perception and
attribution of personhood have been scientifically studied.
(4)(5) Typical questions addressed in Social Psychology are the accuracy of attribution, processes of perception and the formation of bias. Various other scientific/medical disciplines address the myriad of issues in the development of
personality.
Individual rights and responsibility
Closely related to the debate on the definition of personhood is the relationship between persons',
individual rights, and
ethical responsibility. Many philosophers would agree that all and only people are expected to be ethically responsible, and that all people deserve a varying degree of
individual rights. There is less consensus on whether only people deserve individual rights and whether people deserve greater
individual rights than non-people. The
rights of animals are an example of contention on this issue.
Who is a person?
- Human beings, after birth - Once human beings are born, personhood is considered automatic in the normal course of events.
- Exceptions: - Exceptions to this are often emotive and controversial. Some people have given opinions that fetuses, the disabled, the profoundly and long term brain damaged, those in coma or other persistent vegetative states, may be dubious as regards personhood. Such views are strongly debated from both sides.
- Animals - Some philosophers and those involved in animal welfare, ethology, animal rights and related subjects, consider that certain animals should also be granted personhood. Commonly named species in this context include the Great Apes and possibly cetaceans or elephants, due to the acknowledged intelligence and intricate societies of such species.
- Certain societal constructs - certain social entities, are considered legally as persons, for example some corporations and other legal entities. This is known as legal, or corporate, personhood.
In addition speculatively, there are three other likely categories of beings where personhood might be at issue:
- Unknown intelligent life-forms - for example, should alien life be found to exist, under what circumstances would they be counted as 'persons'?
- Artificial life - at what point might human-created life be considered to have achieved personhood?
- Artificial intelligence - assuming the eventual creation of an intelligent and self-aware system of hardware and software, what criteria would be used to confer or withhold the status of person?
- Modified living beings - for example, how much of a human being can be replaced by artificial parts before personhood is lost?
- Further, if the brain is the reason people are considered persons, then if the human brain and all its thought patterns, memories and other attributes could also in future be transposed faithfully into some form of artificial device (for example to avoid illness such as brain cancer) would the patient still be considered a 'person' after the operation?
Such questions are used by philosophers to clarify thinking concerning what it means to be human, or living, or a person.
Implications of the person/non-person debate
{{Original research|section|date=September 2007}}The personhood theory has become a pivotal issue in the interdisciplinary field of
bioethics. While historically most humans did not enjoy full legal protection as persons (women, children, non-landowners, minorities, slaves, etc.), from the late 18th through the late 20th century, being born as a member of the human species gradually became secular grounds for the basic rights of liberty, freedom from persecution, and humanitarian care.Since modern movements emerged to oppose animal cruelty (and advocate
vegan philosophy) and theorists like
Turing have recognized the possibility of artificial minds with human-level competence, the identification of personhood protections exclusively with human species membership has been challenged. On the other hand, some proponents of
human exceptionalism (also referred to by its critics as
speciesism) have countered that we must institute a strict demarcation of personhood based on species membership in order to avoid the horrors of
genocide (based on propaganda dehumanizing one or more ethnicities) or the injustices of forced
sterilization (as occurred in many countries to people with low I.Q. scores and prisoners).While the former advocates tend to be comfortable constraining personhood status within the human species based on basic capacities (e.g. excluding human stem cells, fetuses, and bodies that cannot recover awareness), the latter often wish to include all these forms of human bodies even if they have never had awareness (which some would call
pre-people) or had awareness, but could never have awareness again due to massive and irrecoverable brain damage (some would call these
post-people). The
Vatican has recently been advancing a human exceptionalist understanding of personhood theory, while other communities, such as Christian
Evangelicals in the U.S. have sometimes rejected the personhood theory as biased against human exceptionalism. Of course, many religious communities (of many traditions) view the other versions of the personhood theory perfectly compatible with their faith, as do the majority of modern
Humanists.The theoretical landscape of the personhood theory has been altered recently by controversy in the bioethics community concerning an emerging community of scholars, researchers, and activists identifying with an explicitly
Transhumanist position, which supports
morphological freedom, even if a person changed so much as to no longer be considered a member of the human
species (by whatever standard is used to determine that).
Nonhuman sentient beings as persons
The idea of extending personhood to all animals has the support of legal scholars such as
Alan Dershowitz(6) and
Laurence Tribe of
Harvard Law School,
(7) and
animal law courses are now taught in 92 out of 180 law schools in the United States.
(8) On May 9, 2008,
Columbia University Press will publish
Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation by Professor
Gary L. Francione of
Rutgers University School of Law, a collection of writings that summarizes his work to date and makes the case for non-human animals as persons.There are also hypothetical persons, sentient non-human persons such as sentient extraterrestrial life and self aware machines. The novel and animated series
Ghost in the Shell touch on the potential of inorganic sentience, while classical works of fiction and fantasy regarding extraterrestrials have challenged people to reconsider long held traditional definitions.
See also
{{Wiktionary|person}}
References
-
[ Strawson, P.F. 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen: 104.]
-
[Locke, John. 1961. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London:Dent: 280.]
-
[Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1997). ISBN 978-0881410297]
-
[Person Perception. Second Edition. Schneider, Hastdorf, and Ellsworth. 1979, Addison Wesley ISBN 0-201-06768-4]
-
[Second-Language Fluency and Person Perception in China and the United States]
-
[Dershowitz, Alan. Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, 2004, pp. 198–99, and "Darwin, Meet Dershowitz," The Animals' Advocate, Winter 2002, volume 21.]
-
["'Personhood' Redefined: Animal Rights Strategy Gets at the Essence of Being Human", Association of American Medical Colleges, retrieved July 12, 2006.]
-
["Animal law courses", Animal Legal Defense Fund.]
External links
{{Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights}}{{Human rights}}
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