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THE MORAL AND METAPHYSICAL

ASPECTS OF PERSONHOOD

By

Michael Francis Goodman

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Philosophy

1986

H§7Jflfi93

ABSTRACT

THE NDRAL AND MEI‘APHYSICAL
ASPECTS OF PERSONHOOD

BY
Michael Francis Goodman

Holding that there is a distinction between persons in the
metaphysical sense and persons in the moral sense, I show that the
conditions for personhood is inadequate to capture the notion of the
person in the moral sense. The proposed conditions for personhood
are: consciousness, rationality, self—consciousness, the ability to
adopt and reciprocate a personal attitude toward another being,
complex communication, self-motivated activity, and free will.

A person in the metaphysical sense is defined as an intelligent,
conscious, feeling agent. The problem I find is that this set of
conditions has been taken to be adequate for moral as well as
metaphysical personhood. A person in the moral sense is defined as
a being with both rights and responsibilities. The question, "What
must a being be like to have rights and responsibilities?" is not
answered by laying out the above list. If we run through each of
the proposed conditions, we find that none point to any connection
between possessing the characterisatic and being held morally

responsible for the actions we commit.

l

Michael Francis Goodman

Even if we consider the sum.of all the conditions, we can come up
with an individual who possesses each of them and is still not to be
considered a moral person. It is the sociopath, one who is self—
conscious, rational, free, and so on, but cannot make out the
difference between right and wrong, who is unable to understand the
concept of doing something because it would be morally right to do
it, or not do it because it would be morally wrong; in short, the
individual who simply has no idea what those concepts mean and
entail.

It is just here, in my characterization of the sociopath, that I
argue for a necessary and sufficient condition for moral personhood,
i.e., the :moral consciousness lacking in the sociopath. It is
argued that no being can be held morally responsible for any action
where that being is, in principle, unable to recognize the action as
valuable or disvaluable, good or bad, moral or immoral . Moral
personhood, then, requires moral consciousness. It is also shown
that having 'moral consciousness entails having many, if not all, of

the other conditions for personhood.

Dedicated
to the Memory of
Pauline Josephine Polhemus
My Beloved Grandmother

ACIQWIEDQ’IEN’I‘S

The circle of teachers and friends who, in one way or other,
influenced my thought during the period in which this project was
completed is quite large. It is difficult to know, in some cases,
whence various ideas emerged, and I am sure I will have left out
mentioning some people who should be noted. First, I extend my
thanks to Professor Bruce Miller, the dissertation director, who
allowed :me the freedom to write according to my inclinations without
the burden of threatening rejection. His kindness in criticism,
good counsel, and patience were extraordinary. Second, for giving
me the idea for this project in the first place, for heading me in
the right direction so many times, and for the numerous
conversations, I wish to express my appreciation to Professor
Martin Benjamin. For the myriad cements, criticism, discussions,
and ideas, my thanks goes to Professors Susan Armstrong—Buck, Howard
Brody, Herbert Hendry, Lawrence Porter, James Roper, Ronald Suter,
and Harold. welsh. For a bit of advice, not made in passing, on
"writing dissertations in general", I thank Professor Winston
Wilkinson. For "Dasein und Mitsein", over the long haul and through-
the—hoops, as .my friend and teacher, Mr. Stanley C. Mortel has my

deepest gratitude and respect.

iii

II.

III.

IV.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Question and Its Significance
Perspectives on the Conditions of Personhood
Deciding on Persons: Rorty, Personhood, Relativism
What is a Person?

Personhood and Potential

Where Do we Go From Here?

Notes

Bibliography

iv

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Question and Its Significance

Philosophical discussion and debate concerning the nature and
scope of human life has continued for centuries, and the problems
associated with this ongoing conversation are still with us today.
Lucretius, for example, contends that human life is inexorably bound
up with conscious experience; that a person's history is to be
viewed from this essential consideration. Kant, on the other hand,
while failing to outline detailed ontological criteria for
humanness, makes the moral claim that all rational beings should be
treated, never as mere means, but always as ends in themselves. we
may suppose, however, that Kant w§§_ attributing rationality to
humans, and assume also, I think, that rationality serves for Kant
as an indicator of moral agency, taken in its broadest sense. Both
consciousness and rationality, qu§_conditions of moral agency, will
play a critical role in much of the discussion to follow. However,
it is not only in connection with the various mgral_issues that can
and do arise that we are interested in these apparently natural

human qualities, but also in a wholly metaphysical sense, since

 

consciousness and rationality are two of the primary, at least
necessary, if not sufficient, conditions many important writers on
the concepts of humanness and personhood feel crucial to the entire

issue.

2

More recently than Lucretius and Kant-and I think this is the
primary reason for the question "What is a person?" being so
seriously considered today-the term, "human" has come under fire
from a number of individuals advocating a distinction between
'human' and 'person'. Whereas humans have, in the past, been
considered as possessing certain. moral rights, specifically the
right to life, the deepening concerns of anti—abortionists, to take
a clear example, have awakened many analytic philosophers to the
need for a more perspicuous account of what is meant by these
terms. As we know, ascriptions of humanhood can and have ranged
from, the aged to the infant, from the full-term fetus to even the
zygote, the question remaining throughout, "What must a being be
like to be human?"

It will be shown that answers to this question have come in many
and various forms, with each writer picking out some one, two, or
three characteristics deemed essential for humanness. What is most
striking to this writer is the recent fascination with the term
"person". .Most of us have always used 'person', and still do,
though perhaps with a bit more caution, to refer to some being we
know, or recognize on the street, or whatever. we say things like,
“Yes, I know that person', and "Will the person who owns the green
Chevy please remove it from the driveway?" And though we seem to be
referring to humans in utterances such as these, it would sound
exceedingly odd to replace 'person' with 'human being' in like

contexts, yielding something such as, "I am the human being who

3
phoned about the carpet." That is, 'person' has more often come to
be used in a general rather than particular sense.

On the other hand, there seem to be perfectly ordinary statements
and contexts in which 'person' and 'human being' are apparently
interchangeable, e.g., "John is sure a 9999 ...", where either term
fits nicely into the space. It is not at all clear to me that many
*writers have intended 'to draW'much of a distinction between these
terms in their published.work, though there is increasing care being
taken to accomplish this of late, especially in the writings of such
people as Richard Rorty, Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and Mary Anne
warren. And if there is_ to be a distinction between 'human' and
'personf, we must ask what it is to consist in. The answer will no
doubt provide us with different answers to the questions, "What is a
human being?” and."What is a person?"

Consider the follwing argument:

'AF is composed of human parts.
'AF is a living being.

Hence, 'A' is a living human being.<l>

Surely there is an equivocation here on the term "human". There may
even be an element of the Fallacy of Cbmposition at the core of this
argument. NOw, as Becker points out, a conceptus is of the human
species and it is also a living being. But this does not justify

the inference that the conceptus is a human being. And though it

4

nay' well be the case that a conceptus really is a human being, the
argument above does not show it. What it does show, I think, is that
there just might be a difference between being human and being a
human being. For instance, human sperm cells are, strictly by
hypothesis, human, but they are not human beings, at least not in
the ordinary usage of that term. This is to say, at very least,
that even if someone feels a strong need to continue to refer to
conceptuses, or human sperm. cells, as human beings, it must be
admitted that they are not identifiable as being anything but
biologically similar to those beings we encounter in libraries,
grocery stores, concert halls, and so on.

One plausible response to the query about what a being must be
like to be human is to point out that.most of the humans we are at
all acquainted with have desires, beliefs, frustrations, fears, and
the like. These seem to be, so far as we have yet
determined/discovered, uniquely human qualities. But just as it

would be questionable, prima facie, to deny humanhood to a being

 

(born to human parents) who did not display one or more of these
qualities, so it is equally questionable to ascribe humanhood to a
being (ggt_ born to human parents) who g9§§_display one or more of
these qualities, i.e., if these qualities do indeed account for at
least part of the criteria for being considered a human being.
Again, the natural questions to ask are, "What are the criteria for
humanhood?" and, "Are the criteria, or any one criterion, or
specific combination, necessary and/or sufficient for conferring
humanhood upon a being?"

5

It will appear somewhat far-fetched to many people, I believe,
that a fictional character such as Frankenstein's miscreant might
seriously be the object of debate over ascriptions of humanness.<2>
Human beings, for the most part, have rights, obligations, and
privileges, and are subject to various positive and negative social
and legal sanctions, such as taxation, punishment, and so on.
Surely, it might be argued (to anticipate Richard Rorty's argument)
only human beings are taken to be part of the "fellowship of
mankind". Anyone can see, just by the utterly primitive nature of
his ability to act in accord with the laws of the community, that
the "monster" is not a member of 9_u_1; community. But consider, for
instance, the more realistic case of Charles Manson and his
followers. Their acts of slaughter are intolerable--some‘would
even say inhuman. Does that make Manson.ggghuman? It does not, for
now an important further distinction can be drawn, viz., between the

biological and social senses of being human.<3>
To :make this bifurcation have much force, what one needs are
clear-cut examples of beings who fit into one category but fail to
fit into the other. That is, we need to find a being who is
biologically but not socially human, and a being who is socially but
not biologically human. However, before these examples can be
enumerated, if there indeed are any, one needs to set out, very
carefully, the criteria for belonging to one or the other category.
This amounts to defining the terms "biologically human" and
”socially human", and indicating how these terms gan_have different

referents.

6

Let us follow John Noonan momentarily and say that a biological
human being is a being with a genetic code of a certain kind.<4>
The sort of code required, then, for biological humanness will
consist in one which is generically identical with that of Hgmg
sapiens. Thus, any being not in possession of genetic coding of
this nature will be nonhuman. we see that Manson is probably
biologically human on this criterion. But, then, so are spenm cells
and patches of skin tissue taken from members of our own species.
It is clear that this criterion will not suffice for defining 'human
being', but may serve perhaps only for designating what is of the
human species. Perhaps, however, this is all that we mean when we
use the term "biologically human". I have a strong inclination to
say that this is what we mean.

Thus far there has been no indication that biological humanness
is a sufficient condition for what I earlier imputed to mg§E_humans,
namely, rights, duties, privileges, etc. In fact, individuals
imprisoned in the United States for felonious crimes lose many of
the rights they previously enjoyed, even though they continue to be
humans in what we have called the biological sense. They do not
lose all of their rights, however. They retain rights not to be
tortured, to be given adequate daily portions of nourishing food,
clean air, shelter, warm clothing, facilities for maintaining bodily
cleanliness, and so forth. On the other hand, an individual
sentenced to capital punishment is in a much different position.

While it is true that all of the aforementioned rights remain in

7

force during the individual's "last days " , there is a sense in which
those rights are only temporary and seem completely absent at a
specific moment on the day of execution. Seen in this light, we
have a case where a living biological human being has no rights, in
the legal sense, including the right to life.<5>

If 'biologically human' is reasonably clear and for the most
part acceptable, at least for the present purposes, the next task is
to explicate the meaning of 'socially human' . Let us say that a
being is socially human just in case that being is a recognized
member of the community which includes, but is not necessarily
limited to, biological humans. As members of this public society,
the individual must behave in certain "social" ways, or, at least
have the ability to behave in these ways. The recluse, for example,
while not living much of the time in society, still retains the
title "socially human" . My suspicion is that this is due, in large
measure, to the fact that the recluse is recognized as biologically
human and hence, as having the cagcity to engage in social
interaction of the requisite sort. But, quite the opposite is true
of the fetus, and perhaps also true of those in a state of
irreversible coma. While they must without doubt be considered
biologically human, it seems clear to me that they are not socially
human. They cannot communicate, which is a necessary condition for
social agency. I think this is the sole significant difference
between those to be considered socially human and those not to be

considered as such .

8

Notice that on our definition of 'socially human' there is no
presumption of biological humanness . The important stipulation is
that the social human 96% in certain ways . Having some specific
attributes, such as rationality, free will, an ability for complex
communication , and the capacity for self -motivated activity would
make it possible for a being to "fit in" and function within the
society. So, for the sake of argument, it would be at least
plausible to welcome creatures like Richard Rorty' s Antipodeans into
our own community.<6> In fact, given Rorty‘s description of this

race of intelligent beings , the onus probandi would presumably lie

 

with anyone unwilling to accept them as at least socially human.
There arises a problem now with the adequacy of the locution
"socially human", and here again as will be seen, this is one of the
ways in which the term "person" becomes of major importance; in
fact, important enough to raise the question, What is a m , as

a distinct question from the question, What is a human being? As

 

mentioned, there is no logical necessity that a being who fits into
that category will possess a genetic code defining biological
htmanness. Hence, there is no necessity that a being who is
socially human be, at the same time, biologically human. The term
"human" then, in 'socially human' , is somewhat misleading. If
perchance beings from different regions of our universe £12?
discovered and accepted into the fellowship ‘of our community, even
though they were of a quite distinct species with radically

different genetic coding from our own, and even from each other,

9

then given their capacities for such things as rationality, self-
consciousness, and complex communication, they m fall within the
scope of the category "socially human". However, this seems to me
to be a very dubious application of the term, though not the
category. I think it would be impossible for us to refer to these
beings as human, though we would not, I believe, be much bothered in
calling them. persons. Oddly enough, this is precisely the epithet
Rorty employs in describing his Antipodeans. If they had sensory
organs in some sense similar to our own, we would accompany them.to
the theater. If the workings of their "minds" appeared to us to be
similar to our own, then.we would admit them into our universities
as students as well as professors. we would brake our automobiles
when they were in crosswalks, and so on. In short, I suggest that
we would begin to treat them like we now treat each other, i.e., as
having a common bond by virtue of liyipg_in the same community.
Each would be "one of us".

With the introduction of the term "person" here, through an
admittedly exotic example, we begin to see the outlines of a problem
that simply won't go away. How is 'person' to be defined? What are
the criteria for personhood? Recall the mention of the dilemma over
the status of the Frankenstein creature. At that point, the
question was, ‘What are the criteria for humanhood? NOw if the
latter question is translated into, When is a being biologically
human?, the answer is fairly clear, i.e., on the condition that we

accept some suitably complex genetic code criterion. However, in

10

many writings of the last twenty years employing the term "human" ,
that term can be replaced with 'person' at all occurrences and lose
very little in the translation. And it seems implicitly agreed that
'person' can best be applied to beings who have, as Tooley says, a
serious moral right to life.<7> We know that persons possess more
than merely the right to live; for instance, persons have certain
moral, legal, and social and cultural responsibilities. Chapter 4
will address, in part, the inadequacy of a solely rights-based
morality. But, for now, since the literature is dominated by
conceptions of this view, we will take our lead from Tooley.

The problem that won't disappear becomes now the problem of who
has a serious moral right to live. And the answer to £h_i_s question
will provide us with sufficient material for answering the question,
"What are the criteria for personhood?" This is so because, if we
take the majority of writers on personhood at all seriously, the
conditions for personhood are sufficient for ascribing the right to
live, in addition to other perhaps less serious moral rights , such
as the right to provide informed consent .

In most papers concerned with the concept of personhood, each
author attempts to give some evidence for and against various
attributes/daracteristics/qualities as relevant for personhood
and/or humanhood. Some of the requiretents cited are quite unique,

e.g., Daniel Dennett's verbal communication and Harry Frankfurt's

 

second-order volitions . Other qualities suggested as necessary for

 

personhood, however, are more common, viz., the capacity for

 

ll

rationality, awareness 9f_ self, and the ability for self-motivated

 

 

activity. One thread running throughout recent thinking about
personhood is the attempt being made to settle the question about
who will/should be accepted into the community of human beings 99a
prsons, with all the rights and privileges appertaining to the
membership of that community. Dogs, for instance, have not been
accepted into our community as persons , and are designated nonhuman

nonpersons. The species canis familiaris has, however, had certain

 

rights conferred upon it, or, better, we have in some cases
obligated ourselves to treat members of that species in certain ways
and to refrain from treating them in other ways. The standard for
such treatment seems to be covered by reference to the term
”cruelty". Dogs ought not be tortured, deprived of food and water,
or be exposed to excessive doses of heat or cold. The list could
continue. Nonhuman nonpersons are accorded a due measure of concern
by us for their well-being, but this does not include, at least for
now, the right to live, or the claim that heroic measures ought to
be taken for their benefit. This concern is not moral concern
except perhaps in so far as a principle of general utility might
require its being so taken in certain circumstances, or in cases
where there is cause for concern over inflicting unnecessary pain.
Human persons, on the other hand, g9_have the right to live, at

least prima facie, the important question being, What is the

 

extension of 'human person'? we are at a distinct advantage here,

as there are some clear-cut cases of human persons, e.g., Mickey

12

Mantle, Margaret Thatcher, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ella Fitzgerald,
me, you, and the common "man on the street". 'IWo troublesome cases
are fetuses and those in a state of irreversible coma--biologically
human, no doubt, but persons? we will encounter a number of
proposals for placing these cases in what might be called the human
nonperson category. This will amount to something analogous to
nonhuman nonperson status in that life—rights will be denied though
a great deal of ‘moral concern will be expected of us toward those
individuals seen as appropriately categorized in this way.

I think the human nonperson category will be thought by many to
be strictly empty, something impossible. For many people, the terms
"human" and ”person" are singularly interchangeable. This may be
due to the fact that, at least in western cultures, humans and
persons have been thought to be locally coextensive. However,
something of a revolution (in the Kuhnian sense) in the thinking
about personhood has been taking shape over the past decade which
disallows the synonomy of these terms.<8> One line of argument here
might be that though the fetus is human, with a human genetic code,
since it does not possess apy of the conditions for being a person,
here and now, such as self-consciousness and rationality, it cannot
be considered a person with a serious right to life. Hence, a
seemingly clear-cut case of a human nonperson. An analogous
argument is made regarding those individuals in irreversible coma,
the paradigm instance being that of Karen Quinlan.<9> In my

judgment, the argument for the nonpersonhood of the irreversibly

13

comatose is stronger by far than the similar argument as applied to
the fetus. This is so, since it is important to point out that
those in the former set geye£_will_[again] possess the conditions
for personhood, whereas it seems that what is truly problematic in
the case of the status of the fetus is the potential it possesses
for acquiring the attributes requisite for personhood. Chapter 5
will treat this subject matter and argument in detail.

But the "human nonperson" is not the only "shocking" category
derivable from. the various combinations of 'human' and 'person'.

Let us consider the dolphin (Delphinidae). Studies are lending mone

 

credence to the belief that this cetaceous mammal is quite
intelligent, and it is not inconceivable that the mental capacies of
one of these adult creatures are greater and more sophisticated than
a normal adolescent human person. If the dolphin we£e_shown to have
the capacity for rationality, self-consciounsess, the adoption and
reciprocation of an attitude of moral concern for another being, in
short, if the dolphin were shown to possess all of the relevant
conditions for personhood, i.e., all the qualities we consider
relevant for ascribing personhood to oursevles, we would be open to
the charge of speciesism and/or self-contradiction if we
intentionally failed to recognize them as persons. And so our
fourth category, that of nonhuman persons, not only becomes
initially plausible, but something over which our thoughts might
linger for a richer understanding of how'we View some of the "lower"
ferms of animal life.

14

It is not difficult to understand how a person immersed in
Western culture could find the concepts of human nonpersons and
nonhuman persons unnatural and quite confusing. As we are weaned on
the ideas that pain is to be avoided for the most part, and that
human life is precious, our thoughts rarely stray, outside
philosophy, from the seeming interchangeability of ' human' and
'person'. Humans are persons and persons are humans; that's the way
it is and that's the way it will be. Unless, of course, we change

things. And that is what much of this dissertation explores.

The significance of the primary question with which this project
is concerned, i.e. , "What is a person?", does not lie with the fact
that the topic of personhood is currently in vogue. Nor does it lie
with the fact that many important philosophers, theologians,
legalists, physicians, and even scientists have and are addressing
the question. Its fundamental importance seems to me to be that the
entire notion of what it is to be a person is presupposed in the
area of moral philosophy.

The common treatise on ethics generally examines a number of
essential questions, e.g. , "Under what conditions is an agent said
to be morally responsible?" Each writer will have her/his own
answers to questions such as this, and will, more often than not,
provide an answer that either avoids direct considerations of the
conditions of moral agency, or speaks to the issue in some wholly a_d_

_ho_c manner. This may seem to be a very minor infraction if we take

15

the View that it is pretty clear to us who are considered/ought to
be considered moral agents. People are moral agents, we say, and
there are clear-cut examples of people, as I mentioned. We just
seem to know who are persons. We see them when we go walking, when
we get out into the world, when we look in mirrors. But, in fact,
this is precisely what is in question—--—our conception of just who
the person is, our conception of what a being must be like if we are
to recognize her/him/it as a member of our m community. We take
more seriously these days the idea that underlying the notions of
praise and blame, of rights and responsibilities, there are entities
to which those concepts apply and entities to which they do not
apply. In short, the importance of this project, as I see it, lies
in the fact that it attempts to get clear on the concept of who is
to count as a person, a concept which serves as a foundation for all
ethical theories.

Chapter 2 will comprise a discussion of conditions of
personhood that have been previously entertained as necessary and/ or
sufficient. These conditions are the qualities , attributes , or
characteristics a being must possess in order to be considered a
person. Among the writers I shall have cause to examine are Harry
Frankfurt, Daniel Barnett, Baruch Brody, Michael Tooley, Peter
French, and Daniel Callahan.

'Person' , as I shall use the term throughout this dissertation,
has moral connotations . There is no escaping, however , the

metaphysical side of the question. And it seems to me just here,

16

where the conditions of personhood are centered upon, that the moral
and. metaphysical features of being a person converge and become
nearly indistinguishable. For example, Frankfurt posits "second-
order volitions" as an essential trait of persons. This is, without
doubt, an ontological claim, intended, at least in part, to draW'a
line between creatures that do and creatures that do not have
certain rights, where 'rights' is a moral and not a legal term.

The important question, as I see it, is whether any of the
ontological claims made by writers concerned with the conditions of
personhood have some sort of logical relation to the concept of
being a person in the moral sense of the term. .My initial guess is
that some do and some do not; that while, for instance, Dennett's
criterion of "verbal communication" is neither necessary nor
sufficient for our conferring personhood upon a being, Tooley's
special requirement of self-consciousness does seem essential for
moral personhood. And again, while the ability for self-control, as
treated by' Joseph Fletcher,<10> does seem.quite important, time-
consciousness and a sense of the past (memory) appear less
convincing and.somewhat problematic regarding their significance for
gmpgal,personhood.

In Chapter 3 I will treat the question.whether personhood is to
be discovered or rather decided upon. That is, is X.a person
because X possesses certain specific characteristics that determine
personhood independent of any decision that those, and not others,

are the relevant characteristics? Or, rather, is x.a person because

17
we (whoever 'we' turns out to pick out) have decided that X is a
person? Again, are the criteria for personhood objective or
subjective; rigid and fixed once for all, or dependent upon the
mood, will, and whim of those currently regarded as persons? Are
the conditions of personhood open to serious modification?

I shall contend that the conditions of moral personhood are not
open to alteration on the basis of mere decision (arbitrary), but
that, as more is learned through science, and perhaps technology, as
well as through research in the humanities and the behavioural and
social sciences, informed, reflective and critical decisions (based
upon these discoveries) will be necessary. Still, the question
remains as to who is to make these decisions.

My major focus in this chapter will center on the views of
Virgil Aldrich and Richard Rorty. Their claims add up to this; that
certain creatures just don't have the right sort of face for being
considered persons, don't have the right sort for Talking, and that
humans have humanoid faces. I View this as a paradigm of arbitrary
decision making regarding this most important issue. Rorty further
states that there is a sort of community feeling uniting us with
anything humanoid. Pigs don't writhe in just the right way, when
their throats are slit, to make us uncomfortable, to get us to
imagine them asking for help. But koala bears have faces more
resembling our own. Hence, we slaughter the former and protect the
latter . Aldrich notes that there can be no speculation in tl'e

lion's eyes. The face isn't right for that-—the jaw and mouth

l8
protrude much too far out front and seemed designed for killing and
eating. I expect to take liberal exception to these views.

Essentially, I shall oppose the view, to paraphrase Bennett,
that "those who are persons are all and only those who can get
themselves considered .persons by others who consider themselves
pegsons." I shall further argue that Rorty's position leads to
ethical relativism in the pejorative sense.

In Chapter 4 I will present and defend my own position on who is
to count as a person. I shall weave the moral and metaphysical
aspects of personhood into a whole. The position to be defended is
this: consciousness, rationality, free will, and self—consciousness
(not a brand so complex as Tboley's) will be taken to be necessary
conditions for personhood. The capacity for moral consciousness
will be defended as a necessary and sufficient condition for moral
personhood. The sufficient condition will be seen to embody and
define each of the necessary conditions. Seen in this light, a
metaphysically prior condition (consciousness) is conjoined.with a
moral feature of personhood (being conscsious ‘9: rights and
responsibilities, right and. wrong, etc., in however rudimentary a
fashion). This sufficient condition for personhood is not to be
found, so far as I can tell, in the current literature. I shall be
defending' my position, therefore, without the benefit of having
established arguments or authorities to which I can appeal for
support.

The subject of Chapter 5 will be the problem of potential

19

persons. Some writers have maintained that fetuses, for example,
and infants up to a certain age, are merely potential persons and,
hence, are not bearers of the right to life. The major proponent of
this View is Michael Tooley. Daniel Callahan, however, stresses the
importance of "potentialities and capacities" for any adequate
definition of human life, although one never finds him speaking out
for the fetus as a person.

Then we come to the extreme conservatives, such as John Neonan
and Robert Jche, who, though they in many cases appear to mean
'person' 'when using 'human', seem. to identify having a right to
life and being a person, while at the same time assert that
potential persons do have a right to live. Something is surely out
of sorts here, for if a person is a being with a right to life, and
if a fetus is a potential person, then ex hypgthesi, fetuses are not
persons and have no (clear) right to live. we see here the
importance of distinguishing 'human' and 'person' in some, if not
all, instances, for it certainly is not the case that Jche, say,
would refer to the fetus as a potential human.

By far, the topic most associated with potential and personhood
is abortion and the status of the fetus, with infanticide now
enjoying an increasing amount of attention, as is the status of
mental retardation ‘with regard to personhood. I propose, in this
chapter, to argue that while the fetus is not a person strictly,
there is as good a reason to protect its life as there is the strict

person's life. I shall draw an analogy between the fetus (and also

20
the neonate) and a sleeping adult human being, i.e., one who is a
person but is not currently displaying any of the characteristics so
prized for personhood. I shall maintain that there is an essential
element of potential linked to the capacity a sleeping person has
for waking and displaying the traits of personhood. I shall
maintain further that the potential a fetus possesses for becoming a
strict person is quite indistinguishable from the potential of a

sleeping person. This will apply, mutatis mutandis, to the neonate

 

and infant.

FUrther, I will sketch out a program for the consideration of a
duty—based :morality in cooperation with the rights-based morality
usually applied to fetuses and neonates. This will yield the
conclusion that even if we feel forced to consider the fetus, say,
as neither a person nor a bearer of any rights, we may still have
the duty to protect their lives because of the kinds of creatures
they are and will become. This may be an alternative way of looking
at sleeping adult humans as well, since it will be maintained that
there is no morally significant distinction between a sleeping

"person" and a fetus.

Chapter 2

Perspectives on the Conditions of Personhood

The topic of this chapter has to do with the many and various
conditions for personhood that have been advanced by some of the
most important writers on this topic. These views will be exposed
and, at times, critically discussed. It will be noticed that
certain practical moral issues ‘will be addressed in what follows.
The purpose of this chapter is neither to provide alternate
solutions to these problems, nor is it to categorize the authors
mentioned as belonging to any one of the many camps associated.with
solutions to the problems.

The trouble arises out of the very nature of the problem of
personhood. "Person" is a practical as well as a theoretical term.
If anyone wants to explore the meaning of the term, it will be
necessary to delve not only into the lexicographical literature, but
also into the practical issues in which the team figures so
prominently. we 'will want, in part, to follow the practice of
Aristotle and ask, How is 'person' used? The problem here is that
the usage of the term is currently in transition. As mentioned, we
have always thought that humans were persons and vice-versa, and
that that was the end of the matter. This is called into serious
question by some of the writers we will encounter in this chapter.

I take it that the practical issues discussed by many of the

21

22
writers are used as examples to prove their cases for and against
the use of the term. And certainly many of the moral topics of
today will be reworked in light of any essentially new way of using
'person' . But, before we can apply the term to these problems, we
must get clear on the term itself . Even though the issues come in
mid-way between asking about persons and using the term in some
practical way, it is not the issues that concern me here, in any

other than a peripheral manner .

In Daniel Callahan's work on abortion, we find an awareness
that seems to be lacking in too many writers concerned with the
aspects of personhood.<ll> It is that human beings are more than
biologically unique entities , endowed with certain moral value in
virtue of this uniqueness. Human adults are more than merely
capable of self-motivated action and complex communication, and
possessed of an opposable thumb. Humans are physical,
psychological , and cultural creatures , and it is the unity of these
areas of our existence which ought to be shaping our thoughts and
decisions when questions in medicine, law, and morality are
confronted.

Callahan's initial question is: When does human life begin?
But in some sense, he says, we clearly know. We really couldn't
even ask such a question, using the operative terms ”human" and
"life” , without at least knowing how we normally use these terms,

and further , without at least knowing what we generally mean by

23

them. However, the intimation that we already know what we mean by,
and how we etploy, 'human' seems only as much as to say that we have
some clear, perhaps obvious and paradigm, examples of human beings,
viz., "fully developed men and women." "To be human," Callahan
writes, "means to possess those characteristics we associate with
the word 'man'".<12>

As pointed out, there is no dearth of historical material on
the essence of humankind. From Aristotle to Aquinas and Descartes
to Mead we have lists of the essential characteristics of H;
sapiens. From more recent anthropological and zoological studies we
have seen even further considered opinion on the "nature of man" .
What Callahan asks us to do, rather than pick out this or that
feature of being human as salient, is to consider the significance
of the biological , psychological , and the cultural
interrelationships ever-present in every human being. To define
'human being' strictly from a psychological vieWpoint, say, will
yield a severely impoverished theory of "man". This will be so,
moreover , no matter what single area bears the weight of the
definition.<13> If it is a definition of 'human being' we seek, one
that will be useful for reflecting upon moral questions relative not
only to the fetus, neonate, adolescent, and the aged, but to
meaningfulness and quality of life dilemmas, then only a rich,
catprehensive defintion resulting from consideration of the
innumerable cross-disciplinary worlds in which we live and find

ourselves will suffice .

24
In stark contrast to this wide-scoped vision of the nature of

humanhood, Lawrence Becker is concerned to delimit the biological

 

boundaries of human life. On the one hand, there is the
being/becoming boundary, the example of which he points to is that a
human fetus stands in roughly the same relation to a human being as
a caterpiller stands to a butterfly. The fetus is not the human
being it will become, he says. Rather, it is a human becoming. A
second consideration Becker points to is the being/has been

boundary, where,

A human organism.is dead when, for whatever reason, the system of
those reciprocally dependent processes which assimilate oxygen,
metabolize food, eliminate waste, and keep the organism in
relative homeostatis are arrested in a way which the organism
itself cannot reverse.<l4>

At both ends of the life spectrum, then, the determination as to
when the status "human being" has been achieved and lost can be made
solely on biological grounds. In what follows, I shall only concern
myself with Becker's ideas on the becoming/being boundary.

Humans don't just pop into being. One becomes human through a
process. In fact, the entry into the class just is the process.
This, I take it, is the central thesis of Becker's paper. But now,
what is this process, i.e., in what does the process consist?
Briefly, what we have here is a metamorphosis from human sperm.and
ova to fetus by at least the sixth lunar month of gestation, at

which point [approximately] the metamorphic phase of generative

25

development can be said to be at an end [conservatively]. The
metamorphic process consists in establishing the basic structures of
the organism and is complete when the organism's basic gross
anatomical form is in place egg; when the organism possesses a
complete set of histolically differentiated organs. Here, Becker is
quick to point out that these criteria are much more easily
confirmed conceptually than empirically, though I might add that,
‘with continued striking advances in medical technology, our
empirical knowledge might well overtake our conceptual certainty in
this, and related, matters.

At the end of the metamorphic phase, then, a human being
exists, while prior to its completion what we have is a creature who
is a. member of the human species but not, yet, a human being. This
is not, however , a moral divide , says Becker . For that, we need
some sort of definition of 'human being' which incorporates the
concept of personhood in a way that yields "rights to life". Merely
being a member of the human species does not produce that result.
Nor does entry into the class of human beings. With Becker, we
might ask, What morally significant distinction is captured by the
completion of the metamorphic process of generative development?
The rule against homocide, for example, seems to require either a
victhm—based or an agent-based approach, and the becoming/being
boundary does not, in itself, obviously embody the critical link

apparently essential for either of these approaches.

26

At a number of places in this dissertation, including
especially the last chapter, the notion of potentiality will be
discussed. However, I should like to take it up for a moment here,
preliminarily to discussing Michael Tooley's position on the
criteria for personhood.

mtrere anti-abortionist conservatives , of course, argue that
the fetus is a person and, contra Becker, not merely a human
becoming/being, from the moment of conception. They appeal, for the
.most part, to some sort of general principle of potentiality, such
as the following, where 'g' refers to either a sufficient condition

or a set of sufficient conditions for personhood:

All and only those creatures who either actually or potentially
possess ‘g_ ( that is, who either have 9 now or would come to have
9_ in the natural course of events) are moral persons now, fully
protected by the rule against homocide.<15>

Neither Callahan nor Becker appear to have very much sympathy
for such a rigid principle. In fact, Becker, like Tooley, would
seem to be pointing to the logic of the situation by intimating

that, ex hypothesi, a potential person is not a person, otherwise

 

there is no force in differentiating the two. For all that, the
less than crisp line between becoming and being a human being might
make us pause and return to Callahan's essay for a moment.

He writes, "To be 'human' is not just to display, here and now,

27
the full range of human characteristics".<l6> we might say the
same, of course, for persons. Human persons are rational sometimes,
irrational other times; reminiscent ESQ forgetful; sublime egg base;
conscious, unconscious, subconscious, egg. self-conscious. A
sleeping human adult, for instance, is in a state of temporary
unconsciousness. But neither does this being lose membership in the
class of human beings nor cease to be protected by the rule against
homocide. A. sleeping adult is still human and is thought to be
still a person. Human life, says Callahan, is bound up with
potentialities and capacities. To define "man", the entire career
must be accounted for, and this includes, it seems to me, what

humans have been, what we are, and.what we may become.

This interest in potentialities and capacities is taken up
quite forcefully in many of Michael Tooley's writings. The major
thesis in his most recent paper is that fetuses and newborn infants
(neonates) do not have a right to 1ife.<17> This is so even though
they have the potential to possess such a right, i.e., they are
potential persons. The main thrust of Tboley's essay is that only
those beings who can have desires and interests can have rights,

including the right to life. His argument is that,

What is in a thing's interest is a function of its present and
future desires, both those it ‘will actually have and those it
could have. In the case of an entity that is not presently
capable of any desires, its interests must be based entirely upon
the satisfaction of future desires. Then, since the satisfaction
of future desires presupposes the continued existence of the

28
entity in question, anything which has an interest which is based
upon the satisfaction of future desires must also have an
interest in its own continued existence. Therefore something
which is not presently capable of having desires at all-like a
zygote-—cannot have any interests at all unless it has an
interest in its own continued existence.<18>
It seems clear to me that this line of argument, coupled with his
polemic that a zygote cannot have an interest in its own continued
existence, yields the compelling conclusion that a zygote has no
right to life. But it speaks not only to the case of the zygote.
It indirectly refers to the fetus, the neonate, and all those who
are not, at present, capable of any desires and who have no interest
in their own continued existence. This, I suggest, leaves little
doubt as to the status of the potentiality principle, at least in
Tooley's mind. Merely having the potentiality for having desires
and interests is clearly not sufficient for possessing the right to
live.
Now, if potential persons are not persons yet, who are persons,
for Tboley? ‘What attribute(s) must a being poseess in order to be a
person? Oddly enough, he shys away from the term "person" in "In
Defense of Abortion and Infanticide". In his previous papers,
however, and in his book, he makes much of the distinction between
humans and persons, where he states that 'x is a person} means 'x
has a serious moral right to live' . Having the right to life is
conditioned by the possessing of a special sort of self-

consciousness, i.e., the being must possess a concept of a self as a

continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and it

29
must itself be such an entity, as well as believe that it is itself
such an entity. <19> The importance of the concept of a continuing
self (or mental substance) for Tooley is further established by its
centrality in a number of premises of the argument found in his
latest essay on the necessary conditions an entity must satisfy for
possession of a right to life.

The force of Tooley's arguments for abortion as well as
infanticide can now be seen. Neither fetuses nor neonates have the
above specified unique kind of self—consciousness. Hence, they do
not possess a serious moral right to life. Hence, they are not
persons. This, of course, does not bar them from membership in tie
species H_. sapiens . What Tooley' s argument seems to show is that
under one possible, and perhaps plausible , interpretation, there is
a real distinction between humans and persons. And it also seems to
show that it is morally permissible, contrary to wide public
opinion, ' to take the lives of at least some innocent human beings .
Our use of 'human being' must be altered, on Tooley's view.

Roslyn Weiss, however, in "The Perils of Personhood",<20> is
not altogether happy with the recent trend in the right-to—life
debate that advocates using 'person' rather than 'human' to denote
that which has such a "serious" right. One unfortunate problem with
this usage, she notes, is that it leads, as in the cases of Tooley
and Mary Anne Warren,<21> to taking infants as having no more life-
rights than fetuses, since neither satisfy the proposed conditions
of personhood. But more than this, even if the advocates of

30
infanticide on these grounds could somehow defend the "rights" of
sleeping adult humans and those who are temporarily comatose, weiss
thinks there is no way to "save" the permanently comatose and the
severely retarded. Whatever the advantages, then, of introducing
the concept of personhood into the debate, there may be distinct
overriding disadvantages.

If these considerations are not enough to hold back the tide
carrying the new terminology into practice, weiss' next objection
may do some sandbagging. Taking "personhood" as the basis for
having moral rights, we are left with a rights-based morality. But
this must be recognized as insufficient to account for our
conception of the importance of duties, especially in those cases
where we affirm the existence of duties which do not correspond to
anyone having rights. As an example, one might consider, contra
Tboley, that kittens have no rights whatever. Perhaps, however, we
have the duty not to cause them unnecessary pain. A.morality based
solely on rights would preclude any duty whatever to "lower" animal
life, dead people, country, and so on. And even if fetuses are not
persons, she says, their innocence might have a significant role to
play in the abortion controversy, since, "It is likely that our
duties toward noninnocents are not as great as those toward
innocents".<22>

Harry Frankfurt's essay, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of
a Person", is one of the most influential to ever appear in print on

the notion of personhood. Part of its significance lies in that

31

fact that Frankfurt points out a truly remarkable condition for
personhood. But not only is this condition remarkable, it is pgima
EEEEE. plausible that it comprises a necessary, and perhaps even a
sufficient, condition for being a person. Another point in its
favor, from an extreme liberal point of View, is that the essay
does not stipulate that only humans can be persons. While Frankfurt
does indicate that the condition he has in mind does seem to be a
peculiarly human characteristic, he also notes that what personhood
requires is not a set of attributes which is necessarily species-
specific. So, I take it that if we come to discover that the
dolphin, say, is a bearer of Frankfurt's special condition, we might
well want to ascribe personhood to this creature.

So, what is this condition? Simply, it is what he calls second—

order volitions. consider a drug addict who desires an injection of

 

heroin. The bare desire for the drug (which may or may not overtly
include other desires, e.g., the feel of the tourniquet on the arm,
the feel of the injecting of the needle, etc.), and the accompanying

state of euphoria, is what we might call a first—order desire, and

 

may be taken in the form "A desires to X". Any desire of the second-
order, however, is much more complicated, and this complexity seems
to preclude many, if not all, nonhuman animals from possessing
them. In a secondrorder desire, 'to X' directly refers to a desire
of the first order. In our example, the addict has a second-order
desire when he/she not only desires the drug, but, for whatever

reason(s), also desires not to desire the drug. The scheme it might

32

take is that "A desires (or does not desire) to desire to X". It
seems reasonable to admit, at this point, that no matter how we may
yi_e_w_ the value of our pet dogs, cats, goats, or horses, there is no
apparent good reason to think they are possessed of second-order
desires. In this case, if Frankfurt's special condition is
accepted, along with Tooley' s suggestion that persons are those
beings with the right to life, we might look to Weiss' argument that
even though rights are not assignable, duties may be .

The final point I should like to make about Frankfurt's second-
order desires is that it links up with another seemingly essential
condition for personhood, i.e., freedom of the will. It appears to
Frankfurt that true freedom of the will is had by an agent whose
second—order desires have become effective, that is, where desires
of the second order move the agent "all the way to action" . Where
someone merely has a second-order desire, but where that desire is
not sufficient to initiate action, we cannot say that the individual
has true freedom of the will. Conversely, where someone has second-
order desires and wants those desires to be her/his will, Frankfurt
terms them "second-order volitions" , which indicate motivation to
act via freedom of the will. For Frankfurt, a person is a being
with second-order volitions .

Daniel Bennett, in "Conditions of Personhood" , speaks directly
to a question we've been skirting, but never laying out fully, i.e.,
whether all and only humans are persons. (23) He says that infant

human beings and humans who have been declared insane are denied

33

many crucial elements of personhood. On the other hand, he writes,
while humans are the only persons we recognize right now, and while
the terms "humanity" and "persons" seem to be locally coextensive,
we can easily contemplate beings from other planets, who are
biologically nonhuman, as persons. This might be reasonable, I take
it, if these creatures displayed the sorts of attributes we count as
significant, even essential, for conferring personhood upon
ourselves.

Bennett lists six conditions for personhood, all of which he
takes to be plausible candidates for necessary conditions on some

interpretation or other . They are: rationality, consciousness , the

 

capecity ‘pe. take e. personhood attitude/stance toward the being ip.

 

question, the ability' pe_reciprocate such ep_attitude, the ability

 

 

 

 

 

to eyege Q verbal communication, and self-consciousness. He is

 

 

concerned to argue for three basic theses in his essay. First, how,
on his interpretation, the conditions for personhood are dependent
on each other; second, in what sense they are necessary conditions;
and third, the difficulty of showing that the conditions are,
jointly, sufficient conditions for moral personhood.

Bennett makes one very interesting distinction in his paper.
He says there are at least two interconnected notions of personhood,
viz., the moral and the metaphysical. The latter is roughly the
idea, "...of an intelligent, conscious, feeling agent...", while the
former is the notion "...of an agent who is accountable, who has

both rights and responsibilities".<24> The question arises, of

34
course, for Bennett, as to whether these two concepts of the person
coincide. That is, what is the connection between being a person in
the metaphysical sense and being one in the moral sense? Is being
one a necessary and/or sufficient condition for being the other?<25>

Of the six conditions listed, three are unique. While most
writers on personhood acknowledge the importance of sore sort of
ability to engage in complex cormunication, Bennett is alone in
advocating yergl communication. It is not clear to me whether he
would be entirely happy with interpreting this condition as
requiring vocalization. The adult human, for example, whose vocal
chords have been severed, but who retains all the other necessary
conditions for personhood, must surely be viewed as a person, at
least in the moral sense. But if vocal communication is really
meant and intended by Bennett here, then perhaps this human ceases
to be a person in the metaphysical sense. In that case, the moral
and metaphysical senses of personhood do appear more distinct than
we might otherwise believe; certainly more distinct than Bennett
would have it.

The other two urlcomron conditions in Bennett' 3 set are the
adopting and reciprocating a certain attitude toward an entity. I
had previously construed this attribute as one involving the idea of
personhood itself, whereby a person is a person in virtue of other
persons treating her/him as a person. This seems to me now to be
not only begging the entire question of the conditions for
personhood, but just plainly contrary to fact. Think of your Aunt

35
Penny‘ who sets a place for her pet Siamese cat at the dinner table.
Think of the countless persons in history who were treated "like
dogs". Think of the Jewish population during world war II and the
practice of apartheid in South Africa today. There is a certain
dignity which goes along with being a person that treating or not
treating in certain ways cannot touch.

For all that, I do think Bennett hits the mark squarely in
positing the ability to reciprocate such treatment (though perhaps
we might entertain the notion that the treatment in.question be of a
morally relevant nature), as a necessary, if not a sufficient
condition. I can imagine some §§e£_Tpe5_creature too hideous to
look at. If this being could adopt a moral attitude toward fellow
creatures, I think I would be willingly constrained to count it, and
to treat it, as a person. In fact, as will be seen in Chapter 4, I
contend that. moral consciousness ie_ a necessary and sufficient
condition for personhood.

In the end, Bennett embraces a cautiously skeptical position on
ever finding epe_necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood,
even though, as he admits, the concept of the person may be, "...in
some sense an ineliminable part of our conceptual scheie".<26>
Why? Because the notion is inescapably normative, where any
decision to include or exclude this or that sort of being into the
cotmmmity of persons is at least partially arbitrary. It is,
finally, just impossible to discover the objectively satisfiable

sufficient conditions for taking any being to be either conscious or

36
rational. And this is a major point, since consciousness and
rationality are almost universally affirmed as at least necessary
conditions for personhood.

Tristram. Engelhardt's essay, "Medicine and the Concept of
Person",<27> takes up a number of themes previously encountered
here. On the one hand, he echoes Callahan's injunction that we take
human beings not merely as biological entities when he (Engelhardt)
says that biological life can be distinguished from.personal life.
On the other hand, he seems to agree with Tooley that self-
consciousness might be necessary for moral order to exist (though
Tooley doesn't put it in just this way). On yet another hand,
Engelhardt, like Bennett, distinguishes two senses of the concept of
the person, albeit there are many more, in Engelhardt' 3 opinion.

This latter point seems to me the essential thrust of the
essay. The first sense of the person is used in reference to
entities who are self-conscious and rational. It is termed, by
Engelhardt, "strict" personhood, and applies to beings who are
identified as moral agents, who are, "...individual, living bearers
of rights and duties".<28> The second sense, "social" personhood,
is applied to those instances of human biological life who are
treated as though they are persons when, in fact, they do not meet
the conditions for strict personhood. The example used by
Engelhardt is that of the mother—child relationship, where the
infant, who is neither rational nor self-conscious, and hence not a

person strictly, is treated as a person. The infant is socialized,

37
and treated ee _i_f_ it had wants and desires, where its cries are
interpreted in ways actually appropriate only for strict persons.
The social sense of the person applies equally well to those who are
senile, severely retarded, and the mentally infirm, who cannot be
taken to be persons in the strict, moral sense.

Notwithstanding my contents on Bennett's third condition, I
concur with Engelhardt's reasons for positing the social sense of
the person. While Tooley' s logic for not counting fetuses and
infants as persons seems impeccable, there is still an extremely
uncomfortable feeling that attends accepting, even theoretically,
the moral permissibility of infanticide. Our realization of the
importance of the social role infants play seems essential for the
retention of the moral fabric of the communities in which we find
ourselves.

But more than this, as Engelhardt says, we find infants already
playing the role of persons. It is true that young children do live
in and through their families, at least for the most part. But it
is also true that they do, at times, see themselves as themselves;
not of course with the advanced self-consciousness of adults
perhaps , but with the primitive mind of one who is learning to do
so. Perhaps there is no longer any doubt that young children,
infants, and neonates are not strict persons. But if we find the
line between nonperson and person not as sharp as we would like,
perhaps Engelhardt' 3 social sense of the person has a place not only

in our conceptual schete , but in our practical lives , as strict

38

persons, as well. I suspect that my conception of the duties we
have to nonpersons is :more or less equivalent to Engelhardt's
category of social personhood in that I will advocate treating some,
but not all, nonpersons ee_i§ they were persons strictly. My thesis
will be stronger, however, than Engelhardt's, for I will offer a
prescriptive rather than descriptive account of our actions toward
such beings.

WLR. Carter's paper, "Once and Future Persons",<29> seems to me
to take off with a notion that was only implicit in Engelhardt. An
infant is a social person, according to the latter, but not a strict
person. Essentially, an infant is sort of a person and sort of a
nonperson, caught in the grey area of our own decidophobia. They
are not, on Tboley's account, strictly protected by the rule against
homocide, but, on Engelhardt's View, they deserve to be taken into
our moral/social community. The focus of the essay by Carter has to
do with degrees of personhood.

The basic thesis of the work is that since personhood is

closely connected. with the notion of having some certain capacities

 

(perhaps rationality, self—consciousness, and secondrorder
volitions), and certain gigpge. (perhaps the right to life), and
since it seems reasonable to say that these capacities do not all
come to be had at once, and.neither does any one capacity exist from
its inception in its final form, we can conclude three things.
First, there are no such things as essential persons. Second, the

line between being and not being a person is not arbitrary. And

39

third, there are such things as marginal persons. Now each one of
these claims can be seen to be important for our own understanding
of the concept of personhood. Where nothing can be said to be an
essential person, we have to rethink the notion of "I" . If there
was a time when Goodman did not possess the conditions for
personhood, and if there will likely be a future similar time, what
is Goodman? Further, if the right to live is intimately bound up
with being a person, as Tooley says, and if I am not py _n__at_ure a
person, whatever right to live I now possess is not an inalienable
right. In other words, I can still b_e_, and be HE! and possess, at
the same time, no right to live.

The second point, about the arbitrariness of being or not being
a person, i.e., the line to be drawn shall not be arbitrary, seems
to hinge on being able to discover when an entity possesses the
relevant conditions for strict personhood to a sufficient degree.
This presents problems in itself, since it is not clear whether
personhood is sotething to be actually discovered or merely decided
upon by a consensus of the members of any one given community.
(hrter clearly sees that if being a person is to be based on
arbitrary decisions, lines may/will be drawn differently in New
York, Moscow, and CapeTown.

The thesis that there may be such things as marginal persons,

though prima facie plausible , solves some problems and creates

 

others. me question that won't arise is whether marginal persons

are persons . They are persons, though not strict persons.

40

(Contrast this with the logic of the personhood of potential
persons.) As persons, however, marginal persons, while they will
carry at least gage moral weight, will not be on a par with strict
persons, in terms of moral status. Hence, in any question of who
has a greater right to scarce medical resources, say, or exotic
treatment in whatever mode, the claim of the strict person overrides
that of the marginal person. Moreover, since marginal persons are
persons, and since the obligation of persons toward persons
overrides person' s obligations to nonpersons , the decision to save
the life of the marginal person rather than even a beloved pet dog
will not be difficult to make.

The one most troublesome problem arising from positing degrees
of personhood seems to me to be that of determining just who are
marginal, and to what degree . The clinical situations , real and
imagined, that would benefit from such a determination are
innumerable. What degree of brain function, for example, is to be
considered sufficient for ascribing more than marginal personhood?
ms Karen Quinlan, in the last months prior to her death, who was in
a state of irreversible coma, but with lower brain activity, a
marginal person or a nonperson? It is not clear that there is much
we can do to discover answers to these, and other, questions. But,
like Carter, I shy away from the arbitrariness of merely decieg' .

If Tooley can be seen to have taken on a radical position
regarding personhood, allowing infanticide, and if Carter and

Engelhardt are seen as no less extrere in their polemics, what

41
Robert Joyce has to offer in his essay, "Personhood and the
conception Event",<30> matches each of these writer's immoderate
stance on what sort of being will count as a person. The essential
difference is that Joyce argues for the personhood of human zygotes
from the moment of conception, a position known as extrete
conservatism.

Most people who agree with Joyce's central thesis make use of
some kind of principle of potentiality. This is not necessarily so,
however, for those who advocate some version of ensoubment
criterion, where an entity becomes a person at the moment of
possession of a soul.<3l> But Jche's thesis does not involve the
notion of ensoulment. Rather, he makes use of an idea of
potentiality that embodies actuality. In short, the capacity
(potential) to engage in a certain practice (action) that one is not
at present engaged in is an actual potential, or, a functional
capacity. Since I have the ability to ride a surfboard, but am.not
presently doing so, we say I actually have the capacity to surf.
This was not so when I was, say, two years old. At that time, I had
the capacity to learn to surf rather than the capacity to surf.

But now consider various previously proposed conditions for
personhood. Certainly a zygote does not possess the actual capacity
for reasoning or self-consciousness. At this point Jche makes a
crucial distinction regarding capacities, citing Callahan as well as

Roe vs. Wade as taking the "developmentalist" position on the

 

beginning of the human person. This View, i.e., the

42
developmentalist, is that a person is an entity that has a developed
capacity for such things as reasoning, ‘willing, desiring, etc.
Joyce remarks that a person is not someone who has already developed
the abilities "required" for personhood, but is one who has the
natural capacities, whether they are ever developed or not.

I suggest that this attitude is not without some support from
other writers we have encountered, but who would not accept the
personhood of the conceptus. For example, Engelhardt does say that
it is perfectly plausible that one might take a fetus to be a social
person at viability. And Bennett's third condition, adopting a
personal attitude with respect to the being in question, seems to
allow for us treating a being as a person whether it can reason at
the present ‘moment or not. Further, Jche does not violate the
logic of adopting any version of the potentiality principle by
referring to the conceptus as a potential person and also as a
person. As mentioned, a potential person is, strictly by
hypothesis, a nonperson. Perhaps with that in mind, Jche refers to
these beings as prenatal persons and prebirth children, all the
while implicitly arguing for the actual natural potentiality of the
fetus to achieve the functional capacities to display the
"conditions" of personhood.

With Sissela Bdk's essay, "Who Shall Count as a Human
Being",<32> we need to shift gears. It seems to me that the notion
of humanity, so used by Bok, has, given way to what I want to refer

to as the "current notion of the person", i.e., a being with a right

43
to life in the :moral sense, or, in law, a being protected by the
rule against homocide.
One very interesting aspect of Bok's paper, for my purpose, is
the application she makes of the reasons for protecting life to the

case of prenatal life. Her reasons for protecting life are:

1. Killing can be seen as the greatest of dangers for the
victhm.
2. Killing brutalizes and criminalizes the killer.
3. Killing can cause grief and a sense of loss for the victim's
family and others.

4. Society has a stake in the protection of life.

In applying these principles to prenatal life, we contrast the
zygote, embryo, and fetus with the adult human being, a clear
person. Where each of the stated reasons for protecting the lives
of persons does have instances of occurrance, the case of abortion,
desired by both parents, lacks certain crucial factors required for
protecting the fetus' life. I think some of these factors have to
do with the differences between human fetuses and human adults. As
Bok points out, a zygote cannot fear its own destruction; it has not
yet begun to experience its own life and it could not be conscious
of any interruption of its life. we might say that there is no "for
its own sake" here, no "for the victim" as there certainly is in the
case where a fully conscious, knowing, human adult faces her/his own
annihilation.

44

This is not, of course, to say that there may not be other
sound reasons for protecting the lives of fetuses . We can easily
see that (2), (3) and (4) above might carry some weight in certain
situations , e .g. , where the practice of abortion, at whatever stage
of fetal development, becotes merely a method of birth control. It
will be agreed, I trust, that Bok's point is well taken that even if
the fetus is a human, or a person, that factor alone cannot
establish a moral imperative to protect its life in e_vefl
situation. Other people, and their desires, wills, and reasons, are
always involved.

Baruch Brody' 3 paper, "On the Humanity of the Fetus" ,<33> ought
to be read, perhaps, by every freshling in every course on
contemporary moral issues . The problem is the humanity of the fetus
and when it canbesaidtobeamemberofourmoralcommmity. As
with Bok's essay, I think we could replace 'human' with 'person' and
the loss would be negligible. In fact, some insight might be gained
since, as I mentioned, current writers on the topic need not, and
some certainly do not, take 'human' as a term denoting a being with
a right to life, whereas everyone seems to take 'person' as having
this normative connotation.

Brody examines the various stages of fetal development to
determine when, if at all, the fetus becores human. He lists no
less than twelve arguments , each advocating a different stage for
fetal humanity, from conception, when a human genetic code exists ,

to sole time after birth, when the possibility of interaction with

45
other human beings exists. Finally, with all but one argument
rejected, Brody fixes on "the essence of humanity", i.e., that
attribute/property which no human being can lose without going out
of existence——brain activity. Used as a criterion for humanity,
Brody concludes that it alone is the essential feature of all living
humans, including, obviously, the fetus .

The position Brody adopts here has some clear relevancies for
Carter's marginal person and Engelhardt's social person. Or perhaps
it's the other may around. According to Brody, it may well be the
case that the six-week fetus is fully human, endowed with all the
rights and privileges accompanying such status , including a claim to
life equal to the claim of its mother. And erg; is a person in the
strict, nonmarginal sense of the term.

Edvard Langerak, in his essay "Abortion: Listening to the
Middle",<34> has a number of interesting points for us to consider.
In the first place , he advocates a version of the potentiality
principle that makes abortion at the very least morally problematic;
not as prohibitive as Joyce would have it, of course, because
Langerak does not argue for the personhood of the fetus . Rather,
there is sotething about the fetus , as a living human being, though

a potential person, that makes it morally problematic to take its

 

life. This something is the potential a fetus has for attaining

actual personhood, where an actual person is an entity possessing,

 

"...a sufficient condition (whatever that may be) for personhood and
thereby has as strong a claim to life as normal adult human

beings" . <35)

46
Second, Langerak makes a number of distinctions between
different kinds of persons and nonpersons . The two types of person

mentioned are the actual person and those who have a capacity for

 

personhood. As an instance of the latter , sleeping adult humans

 

are persons , he says , in virtue of having reached a stage of
development where they _cp_el_d display the conditions for personhood,
even though they are not at present doing so. As examples of
nonpersons, Langerak lists the human fetus as a potential person and

a human sperm or egg as what he calls a possible person, i.e., a

 

being that might, "under certain causally possible conditions" ,
achieve actual personhood. <36) This distinction between potential
and possible persons is indeed an important one, for Langerak goes
on to argue that while the former have a claim to life, the latter
do not.

This is an interesting thesis to me, that is, that a nonperson
might have a claim to life, because throughout this chapter, and in
the introduction, I have been making what I take to be a logical
point, namely, that since potential persons are not yet persons , and
since only persons can claim a right to live, potential persons
cannot claim such a right . Langerak bases his argument on the
notion that there is some intimate relationship between future
claims of an entity and present claims . This point , he says , rests
on the fact that we generally view humans in terms of their
temporality, in terms of projecting ourselves into the future from

the placesweareatnow. Andthefactthatweputsomuchstockin

47
these temporal projections might legitimately lead us to respect
humans for their potential. This seems to me a plausible thesis for
arguing that a society concerned with the future and the potential
of its subjects/citizens might/ ought to confer at least a pr_im_a_
gag claim to life on potential persons, even with the stipulation
that they are actually nonpersons .

I am corpelled to argue a different thesis, however, one that
seems to me to be more in line with the logic of the matter. Why
confer lifehrights on a being that is of a different sort from those
beings who possess rights by virtue of the sort of beings they are?
Tb do so, which is what I take to be Langerak's position, seems to
be an illicit ed M move designed to avoid some problem cases that
may arise from our confuting the logic of the locution "potential
person". It seems much more preferrable to simply deny any and all
rights to nonpersons and admit that we may/do have some moral duty
to perform (or to refrain from performing) certain actions in
circumstances relating to these nonpersons .

Roland Puccetti's "The Life of a Person" opens with a
fascinating tale.<37> A genie appears to you and says that, if you
want, he will expand your brain in such a way that you will have an
IQ of 400. You will become an Einstein, a Picasso, or a Pasteur.
There is, however , one drawback. At the moment of brain expansion,
your conscious experience will cease forever. Your brain will be
programmed to achieve great things but, as Puccetti puts it, you
will be nothing more than an "automaton". The question is, Would

-4:

48
you accept the genie's offer? Well, perhaps as an altruistic act
that might result in your discovering a long needed cure for some
dread disease , one just may consider it. But, Puccetti suspects
that the loss of consciousness would be the one dominant factor in
many people's rejection of the proposal. (And anyway, it wouldn't
really be m making the discoveries.)

I think Puccetti's central point is this; that the "I" of a
person is thought to disappear with consciousness . And if I
disappear, if I go out of existence, surely the person I gee also
ceases to exist. It seems absurd, then, the argument continues, to
extend personhood to beings who have lost the capacity for
consciousness . And no less absurd to confer personhood on beings
who have not yet attained conscious experience. In just this way,
Puccetti seeks to exclude early fetuses (because of their lack of
neurolgical hardware) and those who are irreversibly comatose
(because of their loss of personal life) from the set of persons.

Puccetti goes on to argue that many people do confuse
nonpersons with persons and, like Langerak, he makes some important
distinctions between Essible, mtential, peg’ulipg, and %
persons. As we've dealt at length with the other categories, the
one that might interest us here is beginning persons . ' Person'
being coextensive with 'moral agent' , Puccetti places human children
in the class of beginning persons. He does so since children are
moral objects, much like other forms of "higher" animal life, but
they are only potential moral subjects. A child, then, is sort of a

49

marginal person, at least in the sense that it has come to be
considered as part of the moral community. This is not sufficient,
however, for ascribing actual/strict personhood. In the end,
Puccetti admits to sharing Bennett ' s skepticism about ever being
able to set out an exhaustive list of necessary and sufficient
conditions for personhood. For all that, it seems he has given a
reasoned argument that consciousness will be on that list, perhaps
everyone ' s , sorewhere .

Peter French, in "Kinds and Persons", asks the following
question: Is 'person' a natural kind term?<38> The answer is a
complicated "no". Briefly, natural kinds are best seen as instances
of set membership based on sameness of structure and function
relative to sets of natural laws. "Water" , on this view, is a
natural kind. So is "mallard" and "human being". However, our
cormonsense uses of 'person' , based in large measure on a coherent
set of empirical observations and genralizations , does not lead us
to affirm it as a natural kind term.

French's essay is a departure from most of the others I have
referred to here. He is not concerned with the decision of Roe vs.
thine, or the status of the fetus, infants, or young children. He is
at pains, however, to show that the term "person" is not necessarily
coextensive with the term "human being". If some "man" were to land
on earth in a spaceship from a destructing planet far away, and if
this being looked and acted like us, especially with respect to

intentionality in the widest sense of that term, then even though

50
his biological structure was completely different from our own, we
would, naturally, call this being a person. We would include him in
our community, moral and otherwise .
But French goes beyond the conception that even various sorts
of nonhuman animals might be considered persons. He makes a Lime
_f_ac£ reasonable case, I think, for taking 'persons' as applicable

to very sophisticated corputers/machines, e.g., Hal in 2001: A gaace

 

O_dys_s_ey, and even business corporations . The crucial reasoning
behind these ideas is that deciding that sore entity is a person is,
at very least, to judge that it makes sense to describe some aspects
of its behavior in terms of intentionality on the part of the entity
itself . Genuine intentional systems , then, whoever/whatever they
turn out to be, are, for French, persons.

Robert Brungs, in "Human Life vs. Human Personhood",<39) seers
to me to display a certain anger and sadness that many writers on

personhood share . The majority opinion in Roe vs . Wade

 

distinguished between human life and human personhood. As a result,
"In the name of reproductive freedom we have embarked on an

essentially totalitarian estimate of the human being" ,<40> with the

 

state/ society now deciding who is to be considered a person,
protected by the law, and who is not. Brungs' deep sorrow and
indignation stem, at least in part, from the fact that the unborn
child can now be treated in an entirely arbitrary manner, since it
is not considered a legal person with any rights whatever.

Due largely to striking advances in science, technology and

51

industry, the world has changed radically. In the past, Brungs
says , the changes wrought were for our betterment, and without doubt
many efforts to make human life better have been wholly successful.
However, since the coring of age of the biological sciences we have
embarked on an adventure that will ultimately make-over the human
body and psyche in such fashion that the day will arrive when humans
themselves will be the most important of artifacts. With tie
enormous advances in medicine, for example, that have already taken
place, we can look forward to even greater achieverents , not the
least of which will be the possibility of "enhancing" our genetic
inheritance through eugenics . And at that stage of the game, We
thetselves will/could begin to change radically.

We might worry here about two things . First, we would hope
that the new sciences and technologies will always have in mind the
good of the species , not to mention the environment in the broadest
sense. But what seems to be presupposed here is that we know what
is good for ourselves—our species . For instance, we can imagine
the proponent of eugenic research arguing that in the end we will
have "better" human beings. We would naturally ask, Better than
what, in what respects, and to what degree? The fact is, we don't
pretend to know what a "good" human being is, and especially not in
the sense in which the art/science of eugenics might be useful. If
we don't know what a good human/person is now, how is it that we
could presume to be moving into a future where somehow that will be
achieved?

52

Second, where science and technology advance to a point of
"deep" research on human beings (if this is not already happening),
there is the fear that humans, and hence sore persons, will become
objects, used as mere means instead of ends in themselves. This
will involve another radical shift, viz. , in the thinking of these
research scientists, as well as technologists, who are, incidently,
human persons themselves. The question is, of course, What happens
to the concept of the person, and the person her/himself, when

humans become objects in this way?

As can be seen, the shared concerns, and the differences of
view of the person, run deep. It is at once paradoxical and proper
that it is persons who ask the question, What is a person? It is
fitting that persons concern thetselves with not only themselves but
the worlds in which they are intimately a part. It is not enough
anymore to merely count ourselves as essentially human, endowed with
intrinsic worth, moral worth. There is a new term on the lips of
philosophers, theologians, politicians, and scientists that is
beginning to compete with 'human being' for a privileged place in
our thinking about ourselves and others. That there is no general
agreerent on either the sense(s) in which 'person' can or ought to
be taken, or its extension, ought not trouble us at present. As
Rorty would say, the conversation has been taken up, and our
greatest hope is for its continuance.

The directions the conversation will run, and the voices with

53
which it will be promulgated cannot be forseen at this juncture. We
can see, however, that, given the fact and nature of cultural
relativism, there is much to be done in terms of getting clear ,
between one another, about what we mean, how we propose to use, and
the extension of the word "person" . The practical moral problems,
e.g. , abortion, suicide, eugenics, and infanticide, detand solutions
now. It is only with this shared goal in mind that much can be done

that matters .

Chapter 3
Deciding on Persons :

Rorty, Personhood, Relativism

I

The richness and scope of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the

 

Mirror of Nature<4l> will very likely keep the philosophic community

 

occupied for quite sore time. With its superabundance of theres ,
its criticisms of "traditional" philosophy and epistemology, its
descent into fantasy and fiction, and its well wrought vision of the
nature and future of philosophy, the reader is presented with a
plethora of ideas for research programs/projects.

In what follows I will treat an issue of which Rorty makes only
cursory and rare mention. The topic is the problem of personhood.
The problem can be expressed, for the purposes of this chapter, by
asking the specific question, What is the extension of 'person' ? I
have adopted Quine's definition that "The class of all entities of
which a general term is true is called the extension of the
term".<42> Put in just this way, I am not supposing that there
indeed is a class of entities in the world to be picked out as 123
"class of persons". In fact, this is just the point in question.
Persons cannot, for Rorty, be simply picked out from among the many
varieties of creatures inhabiting the world and universe . Rather ,

personhood is a matter of being one of us, of fitting into the

54

55
community, of being accepted as a fellow in what he calls the
"conversation of mankind" .

The crucial reasoning behind my devoting an entire chapter to
Richard Rorty' 3 work in this area is that underlying his conception
of who is to count as a person is the notion that persons are to be
decided upon rather than discovered. That is , as will become clear ,
it is persons who will dec_i_d_e_ what sort of beings will count as
persons . It is not the case that those beings who are persons will
somehow be discovered to be persons. This is an important thesis

because it appears, prima facie, to leave the gate wide open for any

 

body of persons, that is, beings who are considered persons here and
now, simply making arbitrary decisions about who is to count as a
person, here and there, now and in the future.

As might be guessed, my central thesis is that Rorty's position
on the question of personhood is essentially relativistic in the
negative (pejorative) sense. Using the concept of a person espoused
by Rorty, I will maintain that it is impossible for him to make
cross-cultural moral judgments that can have any force whatever from
either an historical or an anthropological perspective . The
relationship between Rorty' s conception of how personhood is to be
determined and his moral relativism rests on my contention that one
crucial feature of ethical theories in general is that we have a
clear notion about who is to count as a moral agent. Moral agency

is bound up, in large measure, with such things as duties, rights,

56
rewards and punishments, and so on, and it seems agreed on all hands
that persons are moral agents and that nonpersons are not. The
natural question arising from this consideration is, Who shall count
as a person, if anyone?

In Section I, three ways (there are certainly more) of
approaching the problem of personhood are presented. Various
proponents of each approach are contrasted and Rorty' 3 position is
outlined. Section II will corprise a critical exposition of his
position, concentrating on his conceptions of what a person is and
how our criteria are [to be] determined. In Section III, I will
explore the sense(s) of moral relativism implicit in Rorty' 5

position.

II
Three possible ways people of differing positions might

approach the problem of personhood and ask the question, What is a
Person? , can thelselves be presented as questions:

(1) How should persons decide who is within their (the) community
of persons?

(2) What are the characteristics of a being in virtue of which we
attribute moral agency to it?

(3) What are the necessary and sufficient conditions which

distinguish persons from other kinds of beings?

57
Question (1) is roughly equivalent to asking what sort of being
will be considered a person by those beings who are already
considered persons. This carries with it the idea that perhaps the
entire conception of the person will be/could be altered at some
future time. Question (2) is roughly equivalent to asking about the
moral proprieties regarding question (1). It will be noticed that I
ask such a question in Chapter 5, where the notion of potentiality
will be invoked to answer just this sort of question. Question (2)
is also a logical question. It may be construed as rhetorical in the
sense that those beings who are similar in all the relevant respects
to those beings considered persons now are to be considered
persons. Question (3) is roughly equivalent to directly asking what
a being must be like to be a person. In this sense, it affirms what
Rorty, and others, deny, i.e., that there is some determinate
discoverable property, or set of properties, that is possessed by
all and only persons. (3), like (2), is a logical question as
well. There is, further, something mandated by (3); that who are
persons is not merely a matter of arbitrary decision, but something
to be discovered, perhaps by everyday experience, or in conjunction
with the tools of science and technology, or whatever.
Philosophers such as Rorty and Hilary Putnam: might ask
(l).<43> The answer they would presumably give is that ascriptions
of personhood are a matter of decision, not a.matter of discovery.

As mentioned, Rorty remarks that personhood is "...a matter of

58
decision rather than knowledge , an acceptance of another being into
fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence".<44>
Putnam, on the other hand, might also ask (2), given the

preference he exemplifies in the following passage:

If we are to make a decision, it seems preferable to me to
extend our concept so that robots e_r_e_ conscious—for
"discrimination" based on the "softness" or "hardness" of bodily
parts of a synthetic "organism" seems as silly as discriminatory
treatment of hurmans on the basis of skin color.<45>

An argument from this in favor of asking (2) might run as
follows: Given the lack of relevant reasons for discriminatory
treatment of human beings solely on the basis of skin color, if it
has been decided that human color-group X is corprised of persons,
then members of human color—group Y should also be considered to be
persons.<46> Who M count as persons, then? Clearly, any being
who displays those qualities which have been relevant to our
decision of who counts as a person. No doubt Rorty would add, "at
least here and now" .

Harry Frankfurt, in his previously mentioned excellent paper
"Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", is a prime
example of one who would ask (2). In his talk of the person,
Frankfurt is concerned to show that in its most interesting
philosophical sense, the term "person" can be, but has not been,
used to "distinguish the members of our own species from members of
other species".<47> Recall that a person, for Frankfurt, will be a

being able to form "second-order volitions". To review, in the most

59

simple terms, a secondeorder desire is a desire not to have a
certain first-order desire for something. For example, if Ken wants
to smoke a cigarette because, say, he thinks it will steady his 59
nerves, then a second-order desire Ken might have is the desire to
want to not smoke because, perhaps, whenever he smokes, he gets
short of breath.<48>

Second—order desires are, for Frankfurt, a particularly human
characteristic. As such, humans, i.e., those able to form.these
special volitions, are persons. YOung children and wantons (see
Frankfurt, p.10ff) should not be counted as persons in the full
sense of the team just precisely because they are not at a suitable
level of ‘mental capacity in the first case, and simply don't care
about their will/desires in the second.

Putnam and Frankfurt both start out with basic assumptions,
i.e., respectively that most humans are conscious and.most humans
are persons. Humanity is the measure here. ‘What we are to do is
discover how like humans robots are, e.g., whether or not their
behavior is indistinguishable from human behavior, or, in another
case, whether dolphins have the requisite second—order volitions,
and then adopt, or rather decide to adopt, the attitude to treat
them! accordingly. Of crucial import here is that it has already
been decided who are clear—cut instances of persons. So far as I
can detect, this has been done either arbitrarily or on the view
that the way we see ourselves, as persons, is just "...an

ineliminable part of our conceptual scheme".<49>

60

Those who are somewhat more dogmatic about personhood will be
inclined to approach the problem by asking the third question (Who
Ell—SE count as a person?) I am thinking of such religious
philosophers as Jehn Neonan and Jeseph Fletcher.<50> While it is
the case that both these writers take humanity to be the starting
point, they would argue that further ascriptions of personhood are
neither matters of decision nor weak prescriptions of what actions
should be taken. Fletcher argues that our "inventory of personhood"
must be carried out on the basis of humaneness and rationality. On
the other hand, Noonan argues for the humanity of the fetus from
traditional Roman Catholic historical grounds, writing, "In the
weighing, the fetus was always given a value greater than zero,
always a value separate and independent from. its parents".<51>
There is a certain necessity here for treating the fetus as a
person, and that is why I suppose Neonan and Fletcher to be
approaching personhood by asking (3) rather than (1) or (2). This
is so even though their criteria for, and conceptions of, personhood
are so very different.

If the presentation of these ways of characterizing various
approaches to the problem of personhood is to be at all fruitful, as
I think it can be, then the analysis ought to shed some light on
how the concept of the person is, and has been, viewed in the past.
The one seemingly indispensable feature of the ‘many ways of
characterizing the problem of personhood is that the starting point,

the paradigm, is humanity. This seems always to have been.presumei

61

by previous writers, and Rorty is no deviant here. E are the ones
looking at the world, describing behavior , predicting and
controlling, forming societies, communities and groups. And ye
cannot get out of our own skins . These are simply platitudinous
matters of feet. The problem is, of course, which part of humanity,
which set of humans, is to serve as t_h_e_ paradigm of personhood? All
human beings? Adult human beings? These questions illustrate a
main bone of contention in the recently f ired—up debate on
personhood.

Where I think Rorty differs from other more recent thinkers on
this point, however, is on how far we are to extend the importance
of humanity as the paradigm of who will count as a person. It sees
that, given personhood based on [human] decision, the decision egu___l_d__
be made that even humans themselves, or at least the majority, are
not persons strictly. The reason I feel confident making this claim
is that Rorty never seriously outlines specific decision processes,
and certainly not for decisions on who persons are and will be.
Something called "the conversation of mankind", and its
continuation, is what is sought by him. Personhood, then, will be
decided upon within this ongoing conversation. But although humans,
at least for now, are the "speakers" in this conversation, it does
not follow with logical necessity that we will continue to be
convinced of our own personhood. The existence of persons is only
logically entailed by a conversation of ma;_nkind if it is logically

impossible for there to be humans who are not, at the same time,

62

persons. Considering much of the current writing on, for example,
animal rights, genetic engineering, abortion, and so forth, it seems
clear that there in fact e£e_ humans who are not [considered]
persons. The perfect example of this kind of being is Frankfurt's
wanton. ‘We ‘may want to consider the sociopath in this category as
well. The "conversation", then, could well continue ‘without
persons, even without presuming that all those beings now considered
persons will become wantons or sociopaths.

It seems to me that Rorty's vision of the future does not
necessarily include humanity as a measure of anything. I realize
that he is, in part at least, attempting to give renewed credence to
the sophist dictum. that. "man is the measure of all things".
waever, given the ongoing conversation, there is no logical
contradiction involved in the idea that humans will, or could, cease
to consider humanity 'ee the measure. we (humanity) are part of it
all, part of the constantly occurring redistribution of the world,
part of that which is predicted, explained, and controlled. we are
not separated from all that is. ‘we are neither on the inside
looking out, nor the outside in. Actually, the inside-outside
metaphor would. make no literal sense for Rorty. Rather, without
becoming unjustifiably ontological, there are just things in the
world; perhaps beliefs, desires, as well as libraries, dinner
plates, and so on, and the conversation is about all these things,
one and another, in combinations, relations, and modes. All the

items of the world/universe hang together in various ways-awe see

63

it all as hanging together in our own ways-~«and the conversation
itself is also part of all that hangs together.<52>

The fact remains, for all that, that we e£e_the ones who will
decide who shall count as persons in Rorty's view. This is so at
least for now. It would.make no sense for him to ask who ppee_be
persons. And it is only in a very weak sense, I think, that we
could imagine him. asking who epeele_be persons. For the sake of
consistency, he might argue that if it has been decided that X is a
person, then if Y is similar to X in every way which was relevant
for the decision on X's personhood, then Y should count as a person
as well. But again, since Rorty has not fastened onto any specific
decision process, except "conversation", it is at least conceivable
that rational consistency holds no special place in the conversation
of the future. This is as much as to say that it is uncertain how
the conversation.will really continue, its direction, its bases, and

its biases.

III

Throughout Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and in various

 

papers recently collected to form Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty

 

has argued that we have no special ability to get out of ourselves
for discovering the Truth about things. He follows JOhn Dewey and
Riliiaml James in the thought that truth will consist in."warranted
assertibility" and "what it is better for us to believe", rather

than the "accurate representation of reality". It will follow,

64

then, on this View, that what we decide about, say, persons, will be
true, but not True. 'True', with the lower case 't', will be
understood to mean something such as "that which is agreed upon as
true by a consensus of the informed participants of a language—
game" . For the Rortean pragmatic program, there would be agreerent
with James that "...ideas becote true just insofar as they help us
to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our
experience" .<53>

With this conception of truth in mind, and the idea that
persons are somehow "decided upon", I want to take an excursion into
Rorty's notion of what a person is and how our criteria for
personhood are to be determined under that notion. There are a
number of passages found in various places that may bring his views
to light.

We can dig in our heels and say that terms like 'person' ,
'belief' , 'desire' , and 'language' are ultimately as token-
reflexive as 'here' and 'now'or 'morally right' , so that in each
case essential reference is made to where 1e are. But that will
be the only way of ruling out the Galactic [as a person; as a
being with beliefs, desires and a language, etc.], and thus the
only way of ruling out the butterfly.<54>

Babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with
"having feelings" rather than (like photoelectric cells and
animals which no one feels sentimental about—-e.g. , flounders
and spiders) "merely responding to stimulus" . This is to be
explained on the basis of that sort of community feeling which
unites us with anything humanoid. To be humanoid is to have a
hman face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth
which we can imagine uttering sentences in synchrony with
appropriate expressions of the face as a whole.<55>

65

Here Rorty cites an interesting paper by Virgil Aldrich, "On
what it is Like to be a.Man".<56> Aldrich is lauding Wittgenstein's
view that the human body is the best picture of the human soul, and
he (Aldrich) takes up the idea that for a mouth to £215! it must be
in the right place. And for such talk to be meaningful, in the
full, "thick" sense, it must come from a rightly placed mouth. The
following passage from Aldrich's paper is quite similar to some of

Rorty' s own more direct staterents on personhood. Aldrich writes ,

But I should say that to be looking at and listening to someone
speak, in the intimacy of understanding him, is to perceive
an_o__ther human body-as-subject, another Erson. In this rapport,
what the speaker feels, thinks, intends to do and why, is
'bodied forth' in the complex gesture that speaking is,
including learned verbalization as the central part. This
essential relation between mental and bodily performance
conditions the sense that is made with the language . So , again,
we run into the notion that the place of saying has to be right
if a strain is not to be put on understanding what is said, in
the thick or full sense of saying sotething. The form of the
body must be right for this. A piano-shaped animal —- to use
James Thurber's picture - with a hole in the side, out of which
come sounds that are like English words in grarmatical order
simply cannot be taken to 'mean what it says' , since it cannot
be taken to be capable of a total speech act. The form of the
body - including the stuff -- is wrong for that. It is not a
body-as—subject. If you corplain that you do understand the
sentence formed out of the hole in the side of the piano-shaped
animal, you can only mean that you know how to use the sentence,
not that you understand what the animal—like piano means by it
or what it says .

 

A lion's producing the same sounds may seem to put a little less
strain on understanding what it says because it does have the
form of an inanimate thing, and it does have a mouth. But the
mouth protrudes too far out in front, leaving the eyes behind
and too subservient to the function of killing and eating.
There can be no speculation in eyes like that. So such notions
as its 'thinking what it intends to say' collapse. The face is
not right for that.<57>

66

Recalling Rorty's decision maxim, it is ye_who will decide what
sort of face is right for talking in the thick sense. This disturbs
me somewhat.

we had a dog named Sparky once. Sometimes when the family
would go camping in YOsemite or along the NOrthern California
Redwood Coast, Sparky would come along. He did not always "get" to
go. It seemed clear to us, then, that he "knew" whether or not he
was going, and knew by the ways we would treat him. If he was
going, we would say such things as, "Hey Spark, want to go
camping?" He would jump up, twirl around--sort of act excited.
What I mean is that he acted like I think I would act if I had his
body and was excited about going camping, with new birds and
squirrels to chase, and so on. When he wasn't going with us, we
would say things like, "Sorry Sparky, not this time". He would put
his head down, walk away slowly, and "mope". I now think to myself,
in light of the Aldrich-Rorty view of the right sort of face for
talking, that if perchance the dog had uttered, just once, the
words, "I really ‘would like to see those Redwoods again", I most
certainly' would not have replied, "Sparky, stop it, you don't have
the right sort of face for talking". And it is questionable whether
my initial astonishment would have been the result of my idea that
"dogs just don't talk" , or rather from the fact that Sparky could,
after all, .Eéli! Children seem to think of their pets in special
ways. They are their friends and vice—versa, or so it seems. You

talk to your friends and you care about them. It seems to me that

67
it would be much less surprising to a child than to adults that dogs
might talk.

In any case, if we do in fact decide who shall count as
persons, what will 'the right sort of face' mean? .A human, Jeff,
for example, gets his nose shot off in Vietnam, comes bore and files
for Social Security Disability Insurance. The government agent,
Alfred, says, "Sorry Jeff, you just don't have the right sort of
face for it". The agent, at this point, might take serious measures
to insure that pie_ face remains of the right sort. The fighting
attitude Jeff might take in this circumstance can best be explicated
by reducing it to the question, "HOW’iS what I look like relevant to
what my’ rights are?" I suggest, hoping explanation is unnecessary,
that this is certainly a rhetorical question.

‘When Rorty talks about being humanoid as requiring a human
face, I think. we can be quite misled. we ‘most certainly do
recognize humans by their bodies, including the shapes and textures
of their faces. But, lest Rorty's text refute him on this point,
though his Antipodeans were outwardly indistinguishable from.Terrans
(earthlings, humans, persons), it is not clear that they (the
Antipodeans) were humanoid. He refers to them. as "beings like
ourselves", "featherless bipeds", "people", "persons", and "the new
race of intelligent beings". He says that only members of their
species were treated as persons. What he does ppe_say is that they
were human. I think a reasonable case might be made for the view

that, given their existence in such a remte part of the universe,

68

and given that they were not some "distant" relations of the
Terrans, i.e. , having core from earth and traveled to their own
planet, that they were of a distinct species from our own, and
should be referred to as Antipodeanoid and not Humanoid. In the
long run this cannot be much of a bother for Rorty, since a crucial
point in his scenario is captured by the title of the chapter in
which the Antipodeans make their appearance, i.e. , "Persons Without
Minds".<58> The essential feature of their being used at all by
Rorty is that they were like us in all respects except in having
what we would call "minds". ‘Like us in all respects' has onerous
duty, for it is intended to include the idea that the Antipodeans
were persons . I want to suggest that even though these Galactics
were like us in all outward appearances, they were not humanoid,
that is, in the sense of having sprung from human, earthling
parents, with human, earthling genetic codes.<59> Hence, 'to be
humanoid is having a human face' is either tautologous, and is at
best uninteresting, or is sheer nonsense, given the case of the
Antipodeans and John Noonan' s polemic on genetic coding as one
crucial determinant of species .

But Rorty goes on to maintain an even more questionable
position. The hint here is that even morality is to be decided
upon, rather than discovered, by the "relevant community of language
users", based on a unity of sentiment within the cormunity. He

writes ,

69

The moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community
based on the imagined possibility of conversation, and the
attribution of feelings is little more than a reminder of these
prohibitions. This can be seen by noticing that nobody except
philosophers of mind cares whether the raw feel of pain or
redness is different for koalas than for us, but we all care
quite a bit about a koala when we see it writhing about. This
fact does not mean that our or the koala's pain "is nothing but
its behavior"; it just means that writhing is more important to
our ability to imagine the koala asking us for help than what is
going on inside the koala. Pigs rate much higher than koalas on
intelligence tests, but pigs don't writhe in quite the right
humanoid way, and the pig's face is the wrong shape for the
facial expressions which go with ordinary conversation. So we
send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for
the protection of koalas. This is not "irrational", any more
than it is irrational to extend or deny civil rights to the
moronic (or fetuses, or aboriginal tribes, or Martians).
Rationality when viewed as the formation of syllogisms based on
discovery of "the facts" and the application of such principles
as "Pain should be minimized" or "Intelligent life is always
more valuable than beautiful unintelligent beings", is a myth.
Only the Platonic urge to say that every moral sentiment, and
indeed every emotion of any sort, should be based on the
recognition of an objective quality in the recipient makes us
think that our treatment of koalas or whites or Martians is a
"matter of moral principle". For the "facts" which must be
discovered to apply the principles are, in the case of the
koala's or the white's "feelings", not discoverable
independently of sentiment. The emotions we have toward
borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imaginations
and conversely.<60>

Rorty's relativism is clear, I presume, from.this passage.
JUst what §2£E. and how extensive it is will be discussed in the
following section. What I would like to concentrate on for the
moment is the idea that attributing moral rights to beings is a
matter of sentiment insofar as it depends on how human-like the

creature is, or, better, on how humanelike ye_decide the creature

is, based on our perception of the potential the creature has for

70
being "like us". I shall pick out three points which seem to me to
present particular difficulties for accepting the claims Rorty
makes.

(1) The Problem pf Sentiment. Rorty is, at least in part,

 

presenting a sociological account of how we go about conferring
rights upon beings . According to him we don't have the same
feelings for pigs as we do for koalas. Pigs don't move (writhe) in
the way that makes us uncomfortable. We strain our imaginations
when we try to conceive of carrying on an ordinary conversation with
a pig, because the pig ' 3 face simply doesn ' t have the right shape
for the "expressions which go with ordinary conversation" . We
cannot imagine the pig asking us for help, but we can imagine the
koala doing so. Hence, we slaughter the former while we protect the

latter . The description is certainly correct. Whoever heard of

 

"sweet-and-sour koala" , or "koala-and-Swiss on rye"? However ,
considered solely as a source of food, it is not clear to me that
simply feeling a certain sort of [sentimental] way about an animal
is sufficient to keep the product from appearing in the consumer
marketplace. We are becoring increasingly aware that killing fish,
cows, pigs, dolphins, sheep, etc. , causes/can cause them physical
pain, not to mention the possibility of stress created by the
conditions under which many animals are bred and raised. Whether
they writhe about in just the right sort of humanoid way when their
throats are slit seets to me completely irrelevant for determining

how we either should or should not treat such creatures .

 

7l

Emotions have been notoriously problematic in the history of
intellectual inquiry, and especially so for philosophy, theology,
psychology, and sociology. The jury is etill_ out on just what
emotions are, their reliability, and how seriously to attend to Umam
at any given time. For instance, a young couple wants to marry
because they "love one another". Is love what they're feeling?
Should they trust their emotions now, or wait awhile? Ie_lpye_ep
emotion EE. ell3_ These are hard questions, not to be considered
lightly simply because they "feel" a certain way.

It strikes me that opt feelings for, or against, certain human
and nonhuman beings is much the same. In fact, rather than solving
some age—old problets , an appeal to emtions seers to generate sote
problems of its own. For example, the murders comitted by Charles
.Manson and his followers were grotesque; certainly for some they
were inhuman. Many people have very specific feelings about Manson
as a human being and.would no doubt advocate punishment demanded by
a capital crime, which does not, in some eyes, necessarily preclude
torture. New, at the same time as we recognize these "feelings"
about .Manson, we also recognize that the desired objectivity of a
judge obviates the judge's having an emotional prejudice, one way or
another, regarding the case to be adjudicated. If anything, we ask
that the judge have a bias toward justice. we would have the judge
pronouce a sentence reflective of the consensus of the community,
and it is not at all clear that any community becomes united in.a

consensus on the basis of shared feelings rather than shared need,

72

or sole other shared phenomena. In the case of Rorty, then, the
shared feelings we have about himan as well as nonhuman beings , even
though perchance based on the "imagined possibility of
conversation" , does not yield a resolution of our dilemma concerning
how we think such beings _s_hp_u_l_<_i_, in the end, he treated. It can
only multiply and cotplicate our problems when our sentiments are
hypostatized in a way which determines how we should go about making
decisions on moral issues.

(2) Imagined Possibility gf_ Conversation. When Rorty writes

 

 

 

that, ". . .moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community
based on the imagined possibility of conversation. . .", I get tl‘e
distinct feeling that he is toying with us to see if we're paying
attention. Can '"don't beat that dog! " ' really be an expression of
our feeling of community with a dog insofar as we can imagine
carrying on an ordinary conversation with it? I think not, but not
because I can ' t imagine having a conversation with a dog, nor
because I think there is no sense of community to be had with a
beaten dog. In fact, the latter point seems of the utmost
importance here. 'Bon't beat that dog! ' is uttered at least
partially because we recognize that the animal is in pain. The dog
is somehow a member of the community of "pain-feelers", of which we
also are members. This is at once a metaphysical _a_nd a moral
community. That the dogindeedieperceived byustobeamemberof
this community accounts, in sore measure, for our sense of community

with the dog.

73

It seems that Rorty is making a false claim when he says that
our sense of community is based on our ability to imagine having a
conversation with some creature. It may well be the case that being
able to commmicate with a being _ie good reason to treat it as
having some rights, perhaps even for treating it as a person. But
it does not logically follow that 29E being capable of
commmicating, here and now, with sore being automatically precludes
our treating it as a member of the/our moral community, or even as a
person, if certain necessary though insufficient conditions for
personhood were displayed by the creature. I think Rorty' 3 false
claim is based on false sociology. We don't set up societies for
the protection of bald eagles, koala bears, whales, baby seals, and
so on, because we can imagine having a conversation with them.
There are other reasons for "saving" them, e.g., insuring the
survival of species, seeing to it that pain is not inflicted
Imnecessarily, and providing continuing aesthetic pleasure for
ourselves by just having them around to be with.

(3) _LiJ_c_e_ fie; Rorty's main point in his poletics about
personhood centers on the fact that we shall decide who shall count
as persons on the basis of how like us the creatures are that we're
deciding about. 'Like us' means something having to do with how
these creatures move, and also about the shape(s) of their bodies.
Pigs don' t have the right sort of faces for talking. But koalas
do? Pigs don't writhe very well. But koalas do? If we recall

Aldrich ' 3 statement that there can be no speculation in the lion ' s

74

eyes, our natural question is, "Why can't there be?" Why can there
be no epeeep_ from the pig's mouth? we can certainly imagine these
things. What would our bedtime stories be without porridge-eating
bears, house—building pigs, and wolves in grandmother's clothing,
all of which EélE: It is all fantasy, yes. But still we imagine
it. Perhaps, finally, the eyes of the lion portray a brand of
speculation forgotten by us during the long expanse of continuing
conversation, or perhaps it is merely speculation of a kind wholly
and perchance forever unknown to us. Perhaps, again, it is simply
speculation unlike our own, or even no speculation at all. To say,
however, that the face just isn't right, or isn't sufficiently like
pep. faces for us to give serious thought to the possibility of our
having moral prohibitions against "mistreating" it, seems not only
speciesist on Rorty's and Aldrich's part, but inconsiderate of the
facts regarding our societies for "animal" protection. The
California Condor, on this view, is just not enough li5e_pe_to
warrant protection, and certainly not for its own sake.

I am. not advocating treating condors as persons. But I am
urging that we rethink our conception of personhood to allow for the
possibility that even beings quite pplike ourselves may demand a
measure of moral concern from us. I am also exhorting the attitude
that being "like us" is not the only, or even the most appropriate,
criterion for personhood we might consider. Pigawrithing, that is,
the way they move when their throats are slit, which is still a

common practice in slaughterhouses, should cause us concern, but not

75
because of how' ye_would feel if pp£_throats were slit, not because
we can or cannot imagine the pig asking us for help, not because of
the shapes of their faces, including the positions and locations of
their mouths.

So far as I can determine, then, the extension of 'person', for
Rorty, will be the class of human beings. There are "hard cases"
though, such as fetuses, the moronic, as well as aboriginal tribes
and Martians. In borderline instances, as much as in the more
straightforward circumstances, e.g., the cases of koalas and whites,
the discoverable "facts" concerning who shall count as a person, a)
will be based on how human the creature seems, and b) are not

discoverable independently of sentiment.<6l>

IV
The relativism of Richard Rorty' 3 position has been mentioned
previously, and now that it is clear what his general criteria for
personhood are, as well as who shall count as persons, I shall move
to a discussion of this relativism, as I perceive it. .My point of
departure will be a passage from a paper by Richard Bernstein,<62>
who attempts to clarify and defend the senses of Rorty's
relativism. Bernstein writes,
If by relativism. we mean that there is no truth, objectivity,
and standards for judging better or worse arguments or moral
positions, then Rorty is certainly ppe_a relativist, and [Rorty]
suggests that such a relativism has become something of a straw
man. for philosophers to attack. Rorty's aim is not to deny or

denigrate "truth" and "objectivity" but to demystify these
"honorific" labels. If by relativism we mean epistemological

76

behaviorism, that there is no other way to justify knowledge
claims or claims to truth than by appealing to those social
practices which have been hammered out in the course of human
history and are the forms of inquiry within which we distinguish
what is true and false, what is objective and idiosyncratic,
then Rorty advocates such a relativism. But this does not mean
that "anything goes".<63>

 

let us now examine the concept of per sonhood in light of
Bernstein's interpretation of Rorty ' s relativism. Given
epistemological behaviorism, a person will be, for Rorty, a being
which E have decided is a person, based on our social practices,
appealing to gup human history.

First question: What is the extension of 'we'? Where 'we'
refers to the class of all humans, an imrediate problem presents
itself. Conflicts between, say, Europeans and South Africans on who
shall count as a person will be quite irresolvable given each
culture' 3 distinct histories, social practices, and "hammerings
out" . If we can only resort to appeals to these diverse histories
and practices to justify our conception(s) of personhood, then it is
not inconceivable that slavery, say, may be right (intentional lower
case "r" on 'right') in one part of the world and wrong ("w") in
another. It is beyond me how Rorty can deny this relativism.
Further , as mentioned at the outset, no cross-cultural moral
judgments will be possible within this framework, and all that would
be left is "conversation", it %.

On the other hand, if 'we' refers to Rorty's community, within
which pe carries on, and contributes to, h_i_§_ part in the

conversation, then it will be equally quite impossible to make

77

cross—cultural value judgments, and perhaps even just as impossible
to talk at all meaningfully about other practices, let alone
carrying on a conversation with the people immersed in those
cultures. (11 either interpretation of 'we ' , then, there could be no
force whatever to our condemnations of other people's practices,
beliefs, desires, and so on, such as the current practice of
apartheid in the Republic of South Africa.

Second question: What can Bernstein mean by saying that it is
not the case that "anything goes"? The traditional position on this
would be that there are some propositions that are True, some
actions that are Right and some that are Wrong, quite independent of
our histories, cultures, and social practices, i.e. , wholly
exclusive of how we perceive the world. This is as much as to say
that there are universal truths, absolute moral values, and so on.
This is to lay claim to specific foundations for going about things
in the Correct manner , no matter how any one individual , or culture,
or nation interprets perceptions of the world. Rorty is very clear
in his full rejection of this traditional stance. Again and again
in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he denies that epistemology,
philosophy, and morality have any foundations whatever , i . e . , Truths
to which everyone, at all times, can appeal.

A further point the foundationalist might make is that if we
give up the search for that which is True, Good, and Just, we will
be driven to chaos. We will have no firm ground upon which to get a
foothold; our systems will be built upon loose gravel and will

78

topple the moment disagreement approaches; no one will be able ever
to lay claim to have finally gotten it all right. This last point
is just where Rorty comes in. He would say that there can be very
little sense in claiming ever to have finally gotten it all right .
That is not what we're about . No one ever pa_s gotten it right,
using foundations , and no one could honestly expect such results .
So, let's give up the search (stop beating a dead horse?) for Truth,
Beauty, and Goodness and simply admit that what we've got, here and
now, is all we could reasonably expect to have, here and now. What
we must do is continue the conversation , learning from one another ,
without appeals to the Absolute , without sore permanent, neutral ,
ahistorical framework with which to guide ourselves.

In light of this, I suspect that 'it is not the case that
anything goes ' is to mean that since we know nothing better than
what we have here and now, and since what we have now comends and
endorses some practices and condemns and rejects other practices ,

there are prima facie grounds for making judgments. Part of the

 

meaning of this is that conversation must be opened up with those
whose practices we disapprove of and an attetpt must be made to
either educate or be educated . In this way, "normal" discourse
becomes laced with "abnormal" discourse and new knowledge is
acquired. In this way things change, hopefully for the better, and
we change as well, since we continue the process of redescribing
ourselves as we form new descriptions of the world within which the

conversation is formed and takes place.

79
Now, what has Rorty to say about relativism? It should core as
no surprise that he has quite a number of things to say. First, he
denies that anyone is a relativist in the traditional sense of
holding the position that " . . .every belief on a certain topic, or
perhaps about _a_ny topic, is as good as every other".<64> But this
is, in fact, exactly the sort of relativism to which my charge
refers. Second, Rorty writes,
Relativism certainly is self-refuting, but there is a difference
between saying that every community is as good as every other
and saying that we have to work out from the networks we are,
from the communities with which we presently identify.<65>
I stated my primary thesis at the outset, i.e., that Rorty's
position on the question of who shall count as a person is
essentially relativistic. Now, if we take his first statement in
the above paragraph as true, then it logically follows that he is no
relativist, at least in the "traditional" sense. However, on his
view of the traditional sense of relativism, terms such as "truth" ,

"goodness", as well as "beauty" deserve, _i;n_ that sense, capital

 

first letters, yielding 'Truth' , 'Goodness' , and 'Beauty' . We
might, then, acquiesce in Bernstein's defense of Rorty's relativism
by admitting that we really cannot get out of our own skins and
somehow discover The Truth about Goodness , or Beauty, or perhaps
even about [P]ersonhood. At most we can simply detail and describe
the necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood as we have

come to understand these concepts, here and now, from pug; past

experiences .

80
And if we should discover other cultures wherein different sets
of criteria for personhood are employed, th§n_what? The answer must
be that we engage the members of these commmities in conversation
in order that each curious member might understand each of the
others. And let's say we converse with such seriousness that we
reach a point where we think we understand one another, but still

disagree on who shall count as a person? ‘What then?

 

According to Rorty, the conversation must continue. But more
than this, I think, for understanding is just not the ultimate goal
of conversation; neither is it consensus or agreement between
conversants. Success is not to be judged as having finally gotten it
Right about personhood (not even right); success is achieved if, and

only if, the conversation continues.

The pragmatists tell us that the conversation which it is our
moral duty to continue is merely our project, the European
intellectual's fonm of life. It has no’ metaphysical nor
epistemological guarantee of success. Further, and this is the
crucial point, we_ g9_not know what "success" would mean except
simply "continuance." we are not conversing because we have a
goal, but because Socratic conversation is an activity which is
its gen goal.<66>

 

On one point, at least, Rorty is correct, viz., we are
searching, must search, for a new sort of success. HOwever, the
semi-circular success of merely continuing the conversation, while
admittedly a [g]ood thing, is just not enough success. What is
wanted is agreement on certain topics within the conversation: Some

will want a final solution to the problems of nuclear armament,

81
others will seek solutions to the problem of treatment or
termination of infants with birth defects, while still others will
desire a final resolution to apartheid. And everyone will decry the
continuation of the conversation fl [S]uccess unless these "little"
successes are achieved .

This is precisely where I think Rorty's relativism is most
evident, that is, though he doesn't come right out and say it, it
follows from his thesis that success between conversing parties,
nations , and individuals who disagree on the moral status of
apartheid, say, is contingent upon only keeping the conversation
going. Success wouldn' t be had by the achievement of freedom or
equality for Black people in South Africa (who are, incidently, part
of the conversation), but by continuance. My assertion remains :
Rorty cannot make cross-cultural moral judgments without violating
the thesis that we cannot get out of our own skins to discover some
truth about the world. The same can be said for getting out of our
skins to become members of a community so vastly at variance with
our own original. And since there is no such thing as the "world
community" , we are stuck with understanding only a minute portion of
the conversation.

I cautiously embrace Bernstein's characterization of
conversation as he writes, "It means turning away from the obsession
'to get things right ' and turning our attention to coping with the
contingencies of human life" .<67> One of these contingencies is

that people from different cultures might veherently disagree with

82
one another on vital moral questions. At most, Rorty could assert
that apartheid is wrong in _h_i§ community, in that sub—conversation
with which he is most intimately connected. Given this, I think
Rorty is relativistic, since he will be forced into the position of
affirming just what he holds no one (except the cooperative
freshling) affirms, viz., that every community is as good (not
'Good') as every other on the view that they have each arisen from
their own unique historical backgrounds . And even if truth becomes
that which it is better for us to believe, it does not logically
follow that the sheer continuance of the conversation will lead
necessarily in that direction. But Rorty surely can not hope for

this, for this is not success. Continuance is success. And if, in

 

the continuing conversation, the apartheidist is brought around to
the belief that Black humans are persons, fine. And if not, fine.
At least the conversation continues.

It is still far from. clear that it is not the case that
anything goes in Rorty's program. One feature of the utter
openmindedness in the characterization of the conversation is that
it might be possible, for example, that the South African proponent
of apartheid .EEElQ. bring .us around to apartheid. If the "facts"
about personhood are to be decided upon rather than discovered, and
if there are no principles that can withstand. the pressure of
abnormal discourse, then in fact anything may be penmissible at one
time or another, past, present, and future. But more than this, if

we are openminded enough to seriously entertain the possibility of

83
our minds being changed by the apartheidist, then our
closedmindedness and dogmatism will show if we condem racial
segregation and discrimination against Blacks rather than listen to
and engage in ongoing conversation with the advocates of this
practice.

If we cannot condemn apartheid outright , without any further
conversation, then anything goes . If we cannot prohibit, on moral
grounds, the clubbing of baby seals, the methods of factory farming
in current use, and the many instances of discriminatory treatment
of human persons, here and now, and from all time, then it seems to
me that anything goes. And if we E condemn these practices here
and now, but leave open the possibility of their being permissible
at some future time , given further knowledge via conversation,
again, our condemnations will lack the necessary force for making
our world better, and anything goes.

Chapter 4

What is a Person?

I

In this chapter, I will be concerned with a number of ideas.
It is intended primarily as a presentation and defense of my oxm
conception of the person. I take the term "person" to have at least
two distinct senses, viz., the metaphysical and the moral. As we
have seen, Daniel Dennett delimits each of these senses by roughly
equating the metaphysical notion with the notion of an intelligent,
conscious , feeling agent , and by roughly equating the moral notion
of 'person' with "the notion of an agent who is accountable, who has
both rights and responsibilities". We will see that Locke's
conception of the person encompasses overtly the metaphysical sense ,
covertly the moral sense, and introduces the legal sense, which may
or may not be construed as involving the moral sense. The primary
focus of the present chapter, however, is moral personhood.

I divide the essay into a number of brief sections. Section 1
will lay out Locke's definition of 'person' and will argue against
an interpretation under which Locke is presumed to have laid the
foundation for the recent and current opinions of _mo_ra_l_ personhood.
In Section 2 I will show that the metaphysical sense of 'person' ,
deriving from Locke, captures what is an essential condition for

moral personhood. It will be seen that this characteristic is a

84

85
necessary as well as a sufficient condition for moral personhood.
Section, 3 will augment the concept of the person set out in Section
2 by showing that much of the recent literature on personhood, when
'person' is taken in the moral sense, has failed to give a
comprehensive account of moral personhood in terms of the ordinary

ideas we have about it.

II
JOhn Locke is the great ancestor of all thinkers attempting to

define the word "person". He writes,

This being premised to find.wherein personal identity consists,
we must consider what Person stands for; which, I think, is a
thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and
can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in
different times and places; which it does only by that
consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it
seems to me essential to it...<68>

 

 

The question might be posed, How far have we come, since Locke,
in our definition(s) of 'person'? While it is true that Locke was
attempting to lay out a solution to the problem of personal
identity, which is not our present problem, it seems to me that we
can locate in Locke's definition the core of what has been recently
written about the person. On the above definition, we see that a
person. must be conscious, self-conscious, and rational. And these
three qualities are viewed by every one of the writers surveyed in
Chapter 2 as at least necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for

personhood.

86

Certainly Daniel Dennett would say that they are all necessary,
though, given his skepticism. about ever finding a/the set of
sufficient conditions, he would disallow ‘what Michael Tooley has
written about self—consciousness being the sufficient condition for
having a serious moral right to life, and hence, for being a
person. Harry Frankfurt, on the other hand, would View these
conditions as embodied in, or entailed by, his notion of second-
order volitions, which is itself proposed, I think, as a sufficient
condition. The one person, not on our list, who overtly speaks of
self-consciousness and rationality as the relevant characteristics
for personhood is Peter Singer, as when he says, "...I propose to
use 'person' in the sense of a rational and self-conscious being, to
capture those elements of the popular sense of 'human being' whidh

are not covered by"member of the species homo sapiens'."<69> What

 

Singer calls the "popular" sense of person generally includes the
idea that persons typically have the following characteristics: self-
control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, self-awareness,
concern for others, curiosity, the ability to communicate, the
ability to empathize with others, and so on.<70>

I want to suggest that, looking through Kant, who doesn't seem
to have progressed in his conception of the person far beyond Locke,
what we have experienced in 20th century thought on the nature of
the person is merely a reworking of the Lockean notion of personhood
applied to some contemporary moral issues . I think that taking
Locke's definition of 'person' and using it the way it has been used

87
recently is really a type of category mistake in the Rylean
vein.<7l>
I've :mentioned that when one is interested in the current
conceptions of personhood, one usually brings up the problem.of the
status of the fetus as the paradigm hard case. One also thinks of
the person in relation to such topics as animal rights, euthanasia,
abortion, infonmed consent, corporate responsibility, and so on.
All of these issues involve a conception of :moral personhood
inasmuch as they are all :moral issues. Perhaps it just seems
natural for us to appeal to a sense of personhood that might lend
itself to solving some of the problems associated with these
topics. But this is not so for Locke. 'Person', for Locke, is at
once a. metaphysical and a forensic tenm. He uses it in its
metaphysical sense, for example, when he writes of the self as being
identical with the person, as follows,
Fbr since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and 'tis
that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby
distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this
alone consists personal Identity, i.e., the sameness of a
rational Being; And as far as consciousness can be extended
backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the
Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and

'tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on
it, that that Action was done.<72>

 

 

Locke thus uses the problem of personal identity to establish
the idea of "sameness of self" as one of the essential criteria for
being a person. So, we see that there are very good grounds, that
is, at least an, historical basis, for our taking 'person' in a

metaphysical sense.

88
But there is also the sense in which Locke uses 'person' as a
legal (forensic) term.that must be considered. He writes,
ngggn, as I take it, is the name for this self, Where-ever a
Ivan finds, what he calls himself, there I think another may say
is the same Pegggg, It is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions
and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents
capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery. This personality
extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by
consciousness-—awhereby it becomes concerned and accountable.<73>
Persons are going to be those beings capable of acting under
the consciousness of there being a law' to which the action is
applicable or inapplicable. One of its primary usages, then, is as
a legal tenm, for Locke. A.point I will speak to later is that it is
not clear what sort of law'we're talking about here, whether legal,
(moral, divine, or each of these. At this juncture, I am concerned
with the legal notion of law.
we must not overlook the terml"merit" in the passage above,
however. For this just might be construed as a1moral indicator.
That is, one might well interpret Iocke to mean that the merit any
action has , or fails to have, is moral merit, whereby one is morally
accountable for the action. I think this is an unnecessary though
perhaps not a mistaken interpretation, if we concentrate merely on
the word "merit". For even. where he writes with an eye towards
deservedness, which is in our own day primarily a moral term, he is
certainly applying the motion to "Laws" as given by God, the
breaking of which will deserve punishment on "the Great Day". What

Locke fails to do is give an eXplicit statement of 'person' used in

89

the moral sense, unless we interpret 'person', used as forensic
term, to include also the moral sense. I am inclined to think this
is what Locke had in.mind to do, but the fact that he doesn't causes
concern. Furthenmore, the .merit any action has or fails to have
ought, on the interpretation of 'person' as a strictly legal term,
to be construed as legal merit, i.e., as action which is in accord
with (applicable to), or out of accord with (inapplicable to), a
legal law. we should say of Locke, then, that it is a
misinterpretation to posit him.as having used the term "person" in
a strictly moral way in which we are accustomed to seeing it used in
the literature today.

There is a sense, however, in which I think we may_legitimately
construe Iocke ' s staterents on persons to include the moral sense .
This concerns the cement that the person (personality) "extends
itself. . . [and] becomes concerned and accountable" . The notions of
concern and accountability seem.to me pretty securely moral notions,
whatever else they connote. we should say of any being that if it
is concerned, it "fits" into the (our) moral community. Of course,
it has to be moral concern, else none of this will make the least
sense. At the same time, there is the useful idea of "accountability
under the law" , which may or may not include moral accountability,
since I believe there may be legal laws that do not necessarily
invoke any’ moral laws whatsoever. For example, there is a town in
Southern California called Rancho Santa Fe. In that town, it is

illegal to construct a building with any other architectural design

90
than Spanish. Anyone attempting to do so will be held legally
accountable, but surely it would be far afield of rationality to say
the person had done something immoral.

The whole trouble with distinguishing moral from legal persons
is that there seems to be little, if any, difference in the notion
of accountability for law and morality. The idea of "agency" in the
laW' and in morality do not require different analyses. The contents
of law' and. morality are clearly not identical, but that does not
entail a different notion of angency, or person. I would be
inclined, at this stage, to want to deny a difference between moral
and legal personhood, relying on the notion of accountability to do
the work in both senses. The dual ideas of person in the
metaphysical and moral senses retain their importance for me,
however. Locke fails to adequately distinguish the moral and
metaphysical senses of personhood. He attempts to use the notion of
personhood for the metaphysical issue of personal identity as well
as the moral and legal issue of accountability, or personal
responsibility in law and morality.

I would contend that to use Locke's definition of 'person', but
mean by it something that goes beyond. what Locke himself made
explicit reference to, is to designate) persons as members of a
category in which, by the given definition, they do not obviously
belong. ‘we certainly do use 'person' in the metaphysical sense
today, as can be well established by considering the recent

literature on personal identity.<74> we also use 'person' as a

9l

forensic term, as when we speculate on the legal status of such
entities as business and professional corporations, ranging from
relatively small medical, dental, and legal organizations to massive
business conglomerates of such fame as IBM, AT&T, and Gulf Oil. In
the legal sense, and.perhaps in the moral sense, these corporations
are persons, but in the metaphysical sense this can be denied, I
think, with equanimity.

As I have said, the one sense in which I think Locke does not
explicitly use the term "person" is the moral sense, although he
can be interpreted as meaning as much. But this i§_the sense in
which many of the writers today have adopted as "inescapable", as
"an ineliminable part of our conceptual scheme"; and.with good
reason, because though it is not drawn out in extensive
argumentation in Locke, we do take persons to be morally responsibLe
(accountable) for their actions, and not simply legally responsible
or responsible in the sense that justice will be meted out by a
Supreme Being in.some future time.

The answer to the question, HOw far have we come since Looke in
our definition of the person?, has to be, Tbo far! It is a grave
mistake, I think, to try to take Locke's definition of the person in
the metaphysical sense as necessarily applicable to 'person' in the
moral sense. Frankfurt's example of the wanton, as one who may be
conscious, self-conscious, rational, and so on, but who does not
have the capacity to (or chooses not to) care about her/his will,

strikes me as a perfect example of a person in the metaphysical but

92

not the moral sense. Another example may be the oft referred to
individual, the sociopath, who cannot make out the difference
between right and wrong; who, in fact, is unable to understand, even
after great amounts of training and instruction, the concept of
doing something because it would be morally right to do it, or not
do it because it would be morally wrong; in short, the individual
who simply has no idea what those concepts mean and entail. This,
I think is the perfect instance of amorality.

The sociopath, to take another example, may indeed be, to all
outward appearances, a full, strict person, exhibiting a high degree
of reasoning ability, complex communication, self-consciousness,
self-control, and so on, including even some complex sort of
freedom of the will. From this point of view we might locate the
sociopath, like Frankfurt's wanton, in the class of metaphysical
persons. But this cannot have any bearing on establishing grounds
for calling this individual a "moral" person, with all the rights
and responsibilities that go along with such a designation. I
suggest that there are no grounds for calling a sociopath a moral
person. In fact, just the opposite is true, and that is what makes
the case of the sociopath so philosophically interesting and
problematic.

As promised, I would say a word or two about laws, legal, moral
and divine. Where human legal laws are in force, there may be
disagreetent as to whether any one involves the legislation of

morality. And though there may or may not be such disagreetent

93
where divine laws are said to exist, it is certainly not one of the
outstanding assumptions of our century that any of the laws of
nations invoke, or are intended to invoke , divine laws overtly .
Even if Locke _wag of the opinion that where God's laws are in force,
there also are moral laws in force, that does not lead to the
conclusion either that all human laws are divine laws or that all
human laws are moral laws . What wants establishing is that there
really are such encumbrances as divine laws . In the face of our
inability to prove such a thing, we lean to the idea that there are
such things as moral laws as well as human (legal) laws. And though
perhaps these are neither mutually exclusive nor coextensive, there
are certainly many instances where we would want to say that so and
so may have breached a legal sanction but be neither moral nor

immoral in having done so, and vice-versa.

III

That a being might possess all the characteristics requisite
for inclusion in the class of metaphysical persons, but fail to meet
the requiretents for moral personhood may strike some people as
odd. Even those who agree with Dennett in holding that metaphysical
personhood is a necessary condition for moral personhood may
disagree that it is not a sufficient condition. The first two such
people that come to mind are Harry Franlcfurt and Michael Tooley,
each of which holds that a certain metaphysical property (second-

order volitions and self-consciousness, respectively) is an

94

essential condition for moral personhood. I think the truth of it
is that metaphysical personhood is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for moral personhood, which is in close agreexent with
Dennett, but that moral personhood is a sufficient condition,
although not a necessary condition, for metaphysical personhood. It
would be well, at this point, to analyze the conditions that have
been proposed for metaphysical and moral personhood, to see whether
any one or more actually does entail moral personhood.

The list of conditions for personhood to be treated will be
standard, I trust, most being cited by Dennett, Warren, and
Frankfurt.<75> Each of the conditions is [to be] viewed as a
quality or attribute or characteristic possessed by all and only
those beings regarded, and those beings to be regarded, as persons ,
i ,e, as a necessary or sufficient condition for personhood. The
initial proposed conditions are : l) consciousness , 2) rationality,
3) a personal attitude taken toward the being in question, 4) the
ability to reciprocate the attitude , 5) the ability for complex
communication, 6) self-consciousness. This list is certainly
incomplete , for other writers have proposed other conditions that

seem, prima facie, important for any study of the nature of the

 

person. We can extend our list at least by two: 7) the ability for
self-motivated activity, and 8) freedom of the will. The general
consensus seems to be that this list comprises at least the overt
necessary conditions for metaphysical personhood. I concur here,
with the special reservation that the concept of self motivated

95

activity be construed as somehow linked with the notion of having a
life-plan, i.e. , having an idea of what the future may or may not
hold in store for oneself as well as the idea that there is
possibility for influencing the events in that future that pertain
to this self and its continuance. This condition must also be
amended in such a way that it does not delete from personhood all
those actual persons who are physically incapable of initiating any
but the slightest action, to wit, quadraplegics and other severely
disabled persons . The manner and mode of physical capacity seems to
me completely irrelevant to the notion of moral per sonhood, except
in the circumstance where this capacity is directly related to the
individual ' s incapacity for moral responsibility for an action. But
then, in that case, where action was in fact taken, a life-plan
would have been proved.

The question that I am interested in, at this point, is, "Could
any being possess any one or more, or all, of the conditions for
personhood above and still not be a moral person?" My answer is
affirmative. My answer is that there is one condition for moral
personhood that all writers on personhood have failed to pick out
explicitly, and this condition is not only necessary but sufficient.

I will take each of the proposed conditions (l)-(8) in turn. I
will show that none of the conditions , taken in themselves , or taken
together , elbody qualities that imply moral personhood. To begin,
then, if I am correct, an individual could be conscious and still

not be a moral person. The typical domestic house cat is certainly

96

conscious, but few would take these creatures to be moral in the
sense of having [many, if any] rights and being morally responsible
for [many, if any, of] their actions.<76> The very concept of
consciousness, in and of itself, or the having of consciousness
itself, then, does not entail there being any involverent in the
concept of morality. Consciousness is a necessary condition for
moral personhood, but it is not a sufficient condition. In short, a
conscious being is not necessarily a moral being.

But now consider an example of very complex thinking, including
reasoning, on the part of another nonhuman animal . The story is
retold in Dennett's "Conditions of Personhood", and goes like this.
The owner of thedogis sittinginthe onlychair inwhichthedog
is allowed to sleep. The dog is indicating to the owner that she
"wants" to get in the chair . The owner pays no attention for
awhile . Finally, the dog goes to the door , thus giving the owner
the impression that she wants to go outside. The owner gets up from
the chair, goes to the door to let the dog out. As the owner
reaches the door, the dog goes back to the chair and climbs in. If
one thinks about it, one will readily admit that this is quite
sophisticated behavior for a dog. Not only is there a plan, there
is , to all outward appearances , intentioral deception, which
involves reasoning at a level commensurate with that of perhaps a
four or five year-old human child. The reasoning might have taken a
form such as: "I want to get in the chair. If my owner gets out of
the chair, I will be able to get in the chair. If I pretend to want

97
to go outside, my owner get out of the chair and will come to the
door to let me outside. When my owner goes to the door, I will be
able to get in the chair".

It is impossible, of course, to claim that the dog has any
concept of "I", or "wanting", or "pretending". It is equally
impossible to say just what form the dog's reasoning took, whether
it has a concept of conditional propositions, and so on. The
pattern of reasoning may have taken a form that we humans would not
immediately recognize. But that there is reasoning taking place
here, in whatever form and to whatever degree, seems to me too
obvious to deny.

Now, the point at issue is whether a being who possesses the
faculty of rationality is necessarily a moral being (as should be
clear by now, I am not using the term "moral" in a commendatory
sense). Put another way, is rationality itself somehow implicative
of morality? From the example of the dog, the answer has to be
negative. Even if the dog is acutely aware of what she intends,
reasons out and actually carries out the plan, we still have no
sense that there is any mindfulness, on the dog's part, that the
action is either good or bad, right or wrong, valuable or
disvaluable. I think, furthermore, that we would be quite unable to
hold the dog morally responsible, for just this reason. The
conclusion I draw from all of this is that even if it is claimed,
for some being, that that being has the capacity for rationality, it
does not follow that that being is thereby to be considered a moral

98
being in the sense of being held morally responsible for its
actions. Hence, a being gan_ possess one or more (i.e., if
rationality entails both consciousness as well as self-
consciousness), of the necessary conditions for metaphysical
personhood, but fail to satisfy the criteria for moral personhood.

Number three on our list above amounts to this: a being who is
considered to be a person by another person is a person. That is,
if X is a person, and if x.adopts a personal attitude toward Y,
where X. and Y are not identical, then Y is a person. There is a
great deal to be said of this condition. First, it seems that if Z
is not considered to be a person by any person in 2's community,
including Z (let Z be the kind of individual who is not much given
11) metaphysical or moral speculation), then on this condition Z
would be a nonperson. This looks quite like the thesis that
"thinking makes it so". would it follow, then, that "thinking it not
so :makes it not so"? That hardly seems likely, since we deny as
much to the Afrikaner who might well deny the personhood of Black
South Africans.

But further, both theses, i.e., "thinking makes it so" and
"thinking it not so makes it not so", necessarily lead to the kind
of relativism. I rejected as implicit in the position of Richard
Rorty in Chapter 3. This is so since if one person takes the
"personhood stance" toward some individual while another person
intentionally neglects to do just that, it seems we would have a

person who was a nonperson. We realize that when our Aunt Penny

99
sets a place for her cat at the dinner table, when she speaks to her
cat, asking it whether it would like fish or chicken, or saying,
"what a smart little kitty you are for not crossing the street",
when she speaks about her cat saying, "she just knows I don't like
her to sharpen her claws on the seat of my Chippendale chair", when
Penny dies and leaves one hundred shares of 3M Corporation stock to
the feline, she is treating the cat as a person, or, at least, as if
it were a person. Penny exhibits a great deal of care and concern
for her cat. we all seem to do the same for our pets. What Penny
does that we don't, certainly not everyone does anyway, is ascribe
attributes of mind and action to it. What Penny does is treat her
cat the way we treat persons, one of these ways involving having
moral concern for her cat. But treating a being with moral concern
is not to make it a person. While it is certainly true that Penny's
cat does exhibit at least some of the necessary conditions for moral
personhood, e.g., consciousness and being treated as an object of
great moral concern by Penny, these aspects in themselves do not

make it a ‘moral person. ‘we never affirm that, just because Penny

 

thinks of her cat as a person, her cat is therefore necessarily a
person. 'we may never mention it to Penny at all; we ourselves may
treat her cat.with kindness, and even keep our thoughts to ourselves
when. we're disgruntled or incredulous at having to sit at table with
a cat. Our silence, however, is not to be construed as

acquiescence.

100

Now, through all this reasoning, what is there to indicate that
the personal attitude adopted by a person toward another being
necessarily involves the idea that the individual is a person in the
moral sense? None whatsoever. In fact, quite the contrary, for it
may well be that if X adopts a personal attitude toward Y at all,
the attitude might embody nothing more than taking Y to be a
metaphysical person, as in the case of Aunt Penny's cat. This would
not preclude taking Y as a moral person, but it also would not
necessarily include it either. Hence, the mere adoption of some
sort of personal attitude toward an individual does not entail the
ascription of moral per sonhood .

The fourth item on the list of conditions for personhood, i.e.,
the ability to reciprocate the personal stance referred to in the
third condition, seems to me also to be without moral connotations .
We might characterize this fourth condition as a state of mind an
individual may be in where he/ she has the ability to respond to
another individual as a person. I think what this condition amounts
to is the ability to reciprocate an attitude toward another being g
a m. The claim is that any being who can view, or treat,
another being as a person is a person. But this is surely false
when, as now, by 'person' we mean 'moral person'. For X might
consider Y a person in a strictly legal (or metaphysical) sense of
the term and not in the moral sense. X might think of Y's
personhood as applying to aspects of metaphysics , or ontological

qualities, and not as applying to features of morality. In short, X

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just may not have any sort of moral consciousness whatever . Hence,
Y might take the "personal" attitude with respect to X, E
metaphysical person, and X might be capable of reciprocating the
like attitude precisely. That would not establish X, or Y for that
matter, as a moral person.

It flld follow, if 'person' had merely one sense, i.e., the
moral , that the individual who adopted the personal stance would
then be a moral person, because by the simple fact of thinking of
the other individual as a moral person, the reciprocator will have
engaged in a certain form of consciousness which explicitly assigns
moral rights and responsibilities to the other being, and
presumably, to her/himself as well. I would say that assigning moral
rights and responsibilities to another being, and to oneself , would
be a corollary of moral personhood. We would say, in that
instance, tlat the reciprocator has an awareness of there being ways
of treating the person that are morally acceptable and ways that are
unacceptable; also ways of being treated that are moral, and others
that are not. This reasoning is moot, however, for there are more
than just one or two senses of 'person'. And it seems clear to me
that merely and simply referring to someone as a person, or thinking
of someone that he/she is a person, is quite insufficient to
establish the relevant moral claim or connotation arising from that
reference and/or consciousness .

The fifth proposed condition for personhood is the ability for

complex communication. It does not concern me here whether the form

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of communication is verbal, vocalized, written, signed, or what have
you. The critical issue is whether any form of complex
communication entails a moral claim, or, whether any being is a
person in the moral sense solely because that being has "the
capacity to communicate , by whatever means , messages of an
indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite
number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible
topics".<77>

It might be guessed that my analysis of this condition will be
much like my analyses of the third and fourth conditions above. The
hunch is correct, for I am persuaded that a generic interpretation
of 'communication' results in our being able to think of a fair
number of instances of beings, many of whom are indeed persons, who
would be quite able to communicate, and hence have an at least
rudimentary awareness of the concept of "meaning what one says" , but
who would not, from that reason alone, be described as being moral
persons. For example, Alice says to Bernice, "I've balanced the
checkbook, computed the amount of our ready cash, and have
determined that we have just enough for the trip to Vancouver and
the World's Fair". If we use our imagination, I think we could find
some aspect of this example of communication that has moral
connotations . For instance, by Alice including Bernice in the
travel plans , we might construe her intent as somehow implying
concern, i.e. , moral concern, for Bernice. My intention, however,

is to interpret what is communicated as strictly informative. What

103
is wanted, by this perspective, is an interpretation of what is
communicated that will not render the example absurd.

Notwithstanding the sheer possibility of there being a

 

different construal from mine of the Alice's intent, we have a case
of fairly complex communication here (though certainly not as
complex as could be had). And while we might well admit that for
Alice to have made such an utterance she would have had to be
conscious , rational , and able to adopt and reciprocate a personal
attitude towards Bernice, it does not follow from all of this that
her action connotes any explicit, or , for that matter even any
implicit, moral implications . And this conclusion seems
necessitated by the fact that none of the above mentioned conditions
for personhood, in and of themselves, carry any moral weight. The
ability for communication, or even the overt act of communicating,
then, in whatever form, does not itself, or even when combined with
rationality, consciousness , and the ability to adopt and reciprocate
a personal stance toward another being, lead one to ascribe moral
personhood to the bearer.
Self-consciousness is the sixth proposed condition for
personhood. Michael Tooley writes ,
In order for something to have a right to life it must now be the
case, or it must have beenthe case atsometimeinthepast,
that the organism possesses the concept of a self as a continuing

subject of experiences and other mental states, that it is such
an entity, and that it believes that it is such an entity.<78>

That a person is a being with a right to life is affirmed by

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Tooley. But more than merely affirmed, it is assumed. I find no
m in Tooley's writing for this identification, and perhaps
none is needed, for he is, and we are, using 'person', and searching
for the meaning of 'person' , as a normative term.

However this may be, I find no reason to think that Tooley's
overly complex definition of self-consciousness speaks directly to
the normative concept of personhood. I believe I can, if I try hard
enough, form a rather crude idea of myself as an enduring self,
subject to many and various types of experiences, including mental
experiences, such as forming an idea of myself as an enduring
entity. I. also believe that I believe, mostly dispositionally I
think, that I am such a continuing entity. Now, subsequent to this
vainglorious mental callisthenic, do I find a moral person at the
core? Yes, but not solely on the account of my ability for Toolean
self-consciousness. What I do find is a further aspect of myself
considered as a metaphysical person, or, as a being who possesses
another quality mysteriously linked to the capacity to get along in
the multi-faceted world of work and play. I find that self-
consciousness is another of my apparently intrinsic ontological

characteristics. I also find that it is associated with my

 

personhood as a moral agent, to presume, but not that it itself is
imbued with the critical ability to render all self-conscious
beings, including myself, moral persons.

It must be admitted, I think, that self-consciousness is a

necessary condition for moral personhood, and hence, a necessary

105

condition for the possession of rights. But now what could
establish it as a sufficient condition for either? There ought to
be, but there isn't, some connecting idea from self-consciousness to
that of rights, say, if self-consciousness is to be a sufficient
condition. There ought to be some clear path from "x is self-
conscious" to "x is a person in the moral sense", or to "x has
rights" . But there isn ' t . Self -consciousness entails
consciousness, rationality, and, I think, the ability to adopt a
personal attitude , at least with respect to oneself . But , where
each of these has no necessary connection with moral personhood, the
moral person, strictly a being with rights and responsibilities,
does not somehow pop into existence when self-consciousness is added
to the list.

What I find so difficult to accomplish here is to offer a real-
life example of a being who obviously possesses self—consciousness,
yet is not considered a person in the moral sense, nor is commonly
considered a being with rights. The two examples I would like to
point to would seem to be rather controversial for what I want to
say. These examples are Frankfurt ' s wanton and the sociOpath. Even
if I could get a consensus about each of these individual ' s
nonpersonhood, I think the onslaught of criticism would be
terrifying on the point of their having no rights. But that is
precisely what I would argue, i.e. , that barring some quality that
endow. the sociopath with, say, the right not to be killed during

sleep, this being does not possess that right. (This is far from

106
saying that there would be no wrongdoing were someone to actually
kill this being during sleep, however. I will take up the issue
further below in Section 3 and again in Chapter 5.)

The ability to engage in self—motivated activity is the seventh
proposed condition for personhood. .Mary Anne warren places some
limitations on this condition that are worth noting. She refers to
selfqmotivated activity as "activity which is relatively independent
of either genetic or direct external control".<79> This idea of
control echoes Joseph Fletcher's notions of two necessary conditions
for personhood/humanhood, viz., self-control and the control of
one's existence. He writes,

If an individual is not only not controllable by others (unless
by force) but not controllable by the individual himself or
herself, a low level of life is reached about on a par with that
of a peramecium. If the condition cannot be rectified.medically,
so that means—ends behavior is out of the question, the
individual is not a person, not ethically, and certainly not in
the eyes of the lawe—just as a fetus is not legally a person.

It is of the nature of man that he is not helplessly subject to
the blind workings of physical or physiological nature. He has
only finite knowledge, freedom.and initiative, but what he has of
it is real and effective. Invincible ignorance and total
helplessness are the antithesis of humanness, and to the degree
that a 'man lacks control he is not responsible, and to be
irresponsible is to be subpersonal.<80>

Though warren does not expand on thehmeaning of control or
responsibility regarding self-motivated activity, it should be clear
that there is a sense that the individual who possesses this
characteristic is a moral being, but again, not in a commendatory

sense. In the way Fletcher talks about control, we find that it is

107

a necessary condition for being held responsible for an action, but
not, and this is the essential point of my analysis, a sufficient
condition. I may be highly motivated to drive down to Dagwood's for
dinner. Further, the :motivation. may not be the digegt_result of
either genetic or extrinsic factors. And though I may very well be
held responsible, and rightly so I think, for the action I take, it
does not follow that any action I do take consequent to this
motivation is necessarily a moral, rather than nonmoral, action. If
I do take conscious, intentional moral action, then, ex hypgthesi, I
am.:morally responsible, and may and should be held accountable. It
could only be under the assumption that all action is moral action
that the condition of self motivated activity could be taken to
involve ‘moral personhood as anything more than a necessary
condition. Unless we are willing to embrace that assumption, and I
am. not, we may deny, 'without uneasiness, the claim that self-
motivated activity is directly indicative of moral personhood.

Freedom of the will is the last proposed condition of
personhood to be considered here. It.might be said that any being
who possessed freedom of the will would necessarily be a moral
person. Certainly, free will is a necessary condition for moral
personhood, otherwise no one could be counted as moral or immoral,
as responsible for their actions in the moral sense of being
responsible. It is equally certain that having free will would
entail being rational, conscious, and perhaps even self-conscious.

But if the latter three are not sufficient conditions for moral

108

personhood, what is added by freedom of the will to reach that end?
Nothing, either on the interpretation of free will as "being able to
do otherwise" or on Frankfurt's construal of free will as making
one' s second—order volitions effective. First, one could have the
concept of "doing otherwise", and actually be able to "do
otherwise", and still fail to reason to the conclusion of, or be
conscious of, there being value or disvalue, or goodness or
evil/badness in actually "doing otherwise" .

Second, on Frankfurt' s characterization of second-order
volitions, one could desire to not have a specific desire for any
number of reasons . I might desire to want to not smoke cigarettes,
for instance, because I will probably live longer if I quit. On the
other hand, I might desire to want to not use cigarettes because
smoke causes an unpleasant odor in my office, or because I know that
stoke is harmful to the operation of my computer . None of these
desires seems to me to involve, necessarily, any moral claim, which
is the heart of the matter . Hence, I could have a second-order
desire which had virtually nothing to do with my being a person in
the moral sense. While to have a second-order intention is to have a
standard for f irst—order intentions , I find no necessary connection
between having a standard and the standard being a moral, as opposed
to an aesthetic, religious, scientific, or secular standard. Hence,
freedom of the will, even in Frankfurt's sense, does not, in and of
itself , embody a conception of normative personhood. But that is

what we're looking for in the moral person, i.e., attributes that

109

give the being the moral status of having rights and

responsibilities .
The necessary conclusion I arrive at from this is that there
just might be an individual who was conscious , self-conscious ,
rational , able to communicate in various complex ways , able to
engage in self motivated activity, able to act freely, able to adopt
a personal attitude toward a being and reciprocate the same
attitude but still be unable to conceive actions , events , or other
individuals from a moral perspective. But hidden in this conclusion
is what I think i_s a necessary and sufficient condition for moral
personhood. It is nothing other than having the capacity for moral
consciousness, i.e., having a concept of right and wrong, or, what I
would argue amounts to the same thing, the ability to act from a
belief that something (or other) is right or wrong. I think it will
be readily seen that none of the other conditions for personhood,
nor the set of conditions together , makes any overt claim to somehow
involve moral consciousness. And this is crucial, since it is only
on the condition that an individual is aware that the action taken
was wrong that that individual is held to be morally blameworthy.
Conversely, when someone does something we deem morally
praiseworthy, but we later find out that that person had certain
Other nonmoral reasons for doing the act, we are inclined to
Withhold our praise. Much like Kant, we would say perhaps that the
person was acting neither morally nor immorally. It ' 3 almost as if
we would exclude the person from the moral community itself in such

instances .

110

It seems like such a simple claim to have been overlooked by so
many people, that moral personhood requires moral consciousness,
i.e. that moral personhood necessitates and is necessitated by moral
consciousnsss. But what else could it be? How could one get from
being rational, self—conscious, able to communicate, etc. , to being
morally responsible for one' s actions? Only if one is conscious of
one's actions as being either morally good or bad, morally valuable
or disvaluable, right or wrong, can one be held morally responsible
for them.

Similarly, how could one proceed from consciousness,
rationality, self-consciousness , and so on, to having rights? Like
Tooley, Dennett, Warren, and a host of others, I conceive self-
consciousness as a necessary condition for the possession of
rights. I also believe that it is not a sufficient condition. This
is because I take the term "person" in a strict sense, as Dennett
does, as referring to an individual who has rights fl
responsibilities. Conversely, any being that is not a person has
neither rights nor responsibilities . I see rights and
responsibilities as bound together , and the possession of moral
consciousness seems to me a necessary and sufficient condition for
having rights as well as responsibilities.

The argument is this: Being a person is a necessary axxi
sufficient condition for being a being with rights and
responsibilities . Moral consciousness is a necessary and sufficient

condition for being a person. Hence, moral consciousness is a

 

lll
necessary and sufficient condition for having rights and
responsibilities.
Symbolically: (x) (Px <-—> Rx)

(x) (Mx <-> Px)

 

(x) (Mx <—-> Rx)
where 'P' = 'is a person'; 'R' = 'is a being with rights and
responsibilities'; 'M" = 'has moral consciousness'. The argument
itself is formally valid. And I think the premises are true.

In the long run, it won't matter that we've reasoned to the
conclusion, albeit indirectly, that the young child, say, i.e., one
who has no moral sense/Consciousness, is a nonperson with no rights
or responsibilities. we have long recognized that there are
responsibilities many times where no rights exist, and I see no harm
in admitting that we shouldn't cause the young child unnecessary
pain. But not because he/she is the bearer of rights. Rather,
because he/She is a sentient creature, as are cats, dogs, dolphins,
chickens, etc. Only persons have rights and responsibilities and,

hence, it is persons who must look out for all sentient nonpersons.

By characterizing persons and nonpersons as I have, it seems to
me that I've applied Ockham's Razor to the problem. What I have
done is shave off a horde of unnecessary entities, i.e., rights of
nonpersons, with nothing having been added to the list of
entities. For, before, when we were under the delusion that the cat

had the right not to be tortured, for instance, we still had the

112

duty not to torture it. Now, however, though I say the cat has no
right not to be tortured, and the young child has no right not to be
caused unnecessary pain, I retain the duties we have, gua_persons,
not to torture cats and to refrain from causing young children
unnecessary pain. Hence, from. a purely practical perspective,
responsibilities of persons do all the work now that the rights of
nonpersons and the duties of persons did before.

From what I have said, it can be seen that moral consciousness
entails certain features analogous to some of the metaphysical
conditions for personhood. Being morally conscious entails being
rational, being conscious and self—conscious, being able to
communicate, at least with oneself, or having the concept of
"meaning" applicable to intentional action. Also, Dennett's
condition about adopting a personal attitude toward a being and
reciprocating such an attitude is explicitly entailed by having
moral consciousness. And. while actual freedom.to "act otherwise"
is not entailed by having a moral consciousnsss, having a concept of
acting freely, i.e, being able to do otherwise, at least, if not
Frankfurt's special case of second—order volitions, i§_entailed. ‘we
see, then, that the proposed necessary conditions for personhood
really a£§_ necessary for personhood, but only in the sense that the
sufficient condition entails each of the necessary conditions.
Moral consciousness, then, is the necessary and sufficient condition
for moral personhood.

I think there is some hidden evidence in the literature for the

113
idea that there just might be such a being as a metaphysical person
who is not, at the same time, a moral person. We might point to
Frankfurt's wanton as one example. Another is Bernard Williams'
"amoralist" ,<8l> who might possess each of the common conditions for
personhood, but fail in two crucial areas, which I would
characterize as fitting my idea of moral consciousness: (a) a care,
or concern for others, i.e. , that there are right and wrong things
to do to (for) others, and (b) a willingness to generalize from
oneself to others, i.e., if it's right for me it must be right for

others . Williams writes ,

We might ask [the amoralist] first what motivations he does
have. He is indifferent to moral considerations, but there are
things that he cares about, and he has some real preferences and
aims. They might be, presumably, pleasure or power; or they
might be something much odder , such as some passion for
collecting things. Now these ends in themselves do not exclude
some acknowledgerent of morality; what do we have to leave out to
represent him as paying no such acknowledgment? Presumably such
things as his caring about other people' 3 interests, having any
inclination to tell the truth or keep promises if it does not
suit him to do so, being disposed to reject courses of action on
the ground that they are unfair or dishonorable or selfish.
These are some of the substantial materials of morality. We
should perhaps also leave out a more formal aspect of morality,
namely any disposition on his part to stand back and have the
thought that if it is 'all right' for him to act in these ways,
it must be 'all right' for others to act similarly against him.
For if he is prepared to take this stance, we might be able to
take a step towards saying that he was not a man without
morality, but a man with a peculiar one.<82>

If the amoralist is not the perfect example of metaphysical
personhood failing to coincide with moral personhood, then I fear my

battle is lost on this point. The following extended list of

conditions for personhood seems to me almost exhaustive. I would

114
argue that‘Williams' amoralist could well be conceived as possessing

each one of these aspects of metaphysical personhood.

(1) the capacity to experience pleasure and/or pain;

(2) the capacity for having desires;

(3) the capacity for remembering past events;

(4) the capacity for having expectations with respect to future
events;

(5) an awareness of the passage of time;

(6) the property of being a continuing, conscious self, or
subject of mental states, construed, in a minimal way, as nothing
more than a construct out of appropriately related mental states;
(7) the property of being a continuing, conscious self, construed
as a pure ego, that is, as an entity that is distinct from the
experiences and other mental states that it has;

(8) the capacity for self—consciousness, that is, for awareness
of the fact that one is a continuing, conscious subject of mental
states;

(9) the property of having mental states that involve prop-
ositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires;

(10) the capacity for having thought episodes, that is, states of
consciousness involving intentionality;

(11) the capacity for reasoning;

(12) problem solving ability;

(13) the property of being autonomous, that is, of having the
capacity for making decisions based upon an evaluation of
relevant considerations;

(14) the capacity for using language;

(15) the ability to interact socially with others.<83>

It ‘will be noticed that none of the above fifteen possible
conditions makes mention of .moral consciousness. The closest is
#15, though it certainly won't fit the bill, since interacting
socially is one of the things even the sociopath or the wanton
might accomplish without a wisp of the awareness necessary for us to
ascribe moral agency. It might look as if #4 is a suitable
candidate for involving a moral claim also, but this can't be, for
there are all sorts of expectations we have about future events that

are completely devoid of ethical content.

115

If I am correct in thinking that moral consciousness is a
necessary and sufficient condition for personhood, then if each of
the above suggested capacities actually i_s at least a necessary,
though certainly not a sufficient, condition for moral personhood,
anyone who has this sort of consciousness must also have each of the
above suggested capacities. While I think this is so, i.e. , that
strict moral persons do possess each of the above, to some degree or
other, I don't know how to prove it. In fact, it's worse than that;
I don't even know what would count as a proof. Presumably I would
need to cite some extensive psychological evidence to the effect
that the majority of individuals we take to be persons do, in
reality, possess those capacities . However , what that would show,
at best, is that some; moral persons possess them. It would not show
that all do, or that all must. I suppose I must embrace a kind of
skepticism about this; something along the lines of Dennett's and
Puccetti ' s doubts regarding the conditions for per sonhood
themselves.

The essential point I want to make clear at this juncture is
thatwhenwerunover the fifteeninourminds,whatwecomeup
with, when applied to some individual or other, is a person in a
distinctly metaphysical sense i.e. the amoralist. Where could the
individual, as moral person, be located here? As I look at them one
by one, as I combine them this way and that, e.g., take numbers 2
and 8, I find qualities that a being might possess as ontological
particulars, if you will. What I do not find is the moral person,

116
the one to be praised, say, for sharing her/his lunch with a
workmate ; the one to be blamed for knowingly keeping the seventy-
five cents the clerk gives in over—change. Any being who possesses
each of the above characteristics certainly is a highly complex
information processing organism, capable of many activities in the
world. However, unless this individual also has the consciousness
that at least some of her/his actions may be either morally right,
or morally wrong, this being lacks what is necessary as well as
sufficient for being taken for a morally responsible person. To
move from the metaphysical to the moral solely from the possession
of metaphysical properties is surely a categorial as well as a

logical mistake .

IV

We find the great majority of the literature on personhood,
especially in the last fifteen to twenty years, riddled with the
notion of rights . Many have written as though a person is just a
bundle of rights, as is so in the case of Michael Tooley, who,
identifies persons with those that have a serious moral right to
live, but who also does not deny that persons have other rights as
well. And we do typically think of persons as having more rights
than just the right to live, e.g. , the rights to freedom of speech,
to practice religion as one chooses , or no religion at all , the
right to privacy, and so on. In fact, if I am not mistaken, there

is one thing for which many people would almost unthinkingly lay

117

down their lives, namely, their freedom from enslavetent, which
most would affirm as a primary, or perhaps even a natural, right.
It is an odd occurence that no one has proposed possession of the
concept of freedom as a necessary condition for personhood. This
possible "person-making quality" might be embodied in having a sense
of futurity, though I don't recall any writer pointing this out
explicitly. To make it a plausible necessary condition for
personhood would only involve establishing that this special kind of
consciousness is important for having the capacity for exercising
the right to the freedom itself. It would be on a par with self-
consciousness as well as moral consciousness, other special sorts of
consciousness.

There are perhaps thousands of rights that have been and are
claimed by various individuals in various parts of the world, some
of which have been denied even by those in the same community. For
example, there has been a great appeal to the people of this and
other countries that the people of the starving nations around the
globe have a right to a minimal daily amount of nourishing food and
drink. These people, it is claimed, also have the right to medical
supplies, facilities , and personnel in proportion to their need.
Again, the Klamath and Hoopa Indians of the Pacific Northwest are
said to have a right to retain their cultural heritages even in tie
rapidly changing environment in which they find themselves competing
for places in schools and in the labor market. And again, the

unexployed single parent of four children can claim, as a right,

118

food stamps and AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). We
claim rights to information, health care, adequate legal defense,
free trade, equal consideration, and so on and so on. And even
though it has always been persons who have claimed these rights, or
so it seems, they have sometimes been claimed on behalf, if we are
to believe such people as Peter Singer , Mary Anne Warren, and
Michael Tooley, of _sgme; nonpersons.

But, persons are more than merely bearers of rights, as Daniel
Callahan has pointed out. Persons have rights, that is true, but
they also have responsibilities, moral responsibilities. I will
maintain, along with Singer, Warren, and Tooley, that fetuses and
infants have no right to life. But much more, even, than this. I
will maintain that they have no rights whatever , not even the right
not to be tortured. And so with common domestic cats, dogs,
turtles , parakeets , and goldfish; the severely mentally retarded,
the irreversibly comatose, children up to around the age of two
years old,<84> all wild animals (human as well as nonhuman),
wantons, and sociopaths. In short, I maintain that any being that
does not have the capacity for moral consciousness is not a bearer
of rights and responsibilities. And since I think Tooley is quite
mistaken that our ordinary notion of the person is simply as a
bearer of rights, and especially the right to life, any of the above
mentioned examples will be moral nonpersons unless they can be
legitimle taken to have moral responsibilities . On the other

hand, any being that does have the capacity for moral consciousness ,

119
who can have moral responsibilities , whether a human or nonhuman,
whether Terran, Antipodean, Venusian, or any other Extragalactic , I
would argue to be a moral person in the full, thick, and strict
sense of that term.
Roslyn Weiss is one person who has argued forcefully for the
importance of duties in connection with the personhood debate. <85)
We would be severely limited with only a rights-based morality with
which to guide our actions . A mean must be reached between a rights-
based and a duty-based (or agent-based) morality, the result of
which ought to yield a morality more in line with our ordinary
sensibilities . Relying solely on a rights-based morality would
force us into the very uncomfortable position of saying that anyone
who was not a person could be killed, or tortured, or deprivediof
food and water, at our own discretion. But this surely goes ME
at least our sentimental sensibilities, as well as our sense of
rationality. Weiss , discussing the notion of rights, says,
Is it in facto _o__y wrong to violate rights? On Tooley' 3 view, or
any View in which rights form the sole basis of morality, this is
indeed the case. It must turn out that unless kittens have tl'e
right not to be tortured there is nothing wrong with torturing
them, and unless fetuses, infants, kittens, the permanently
comatose, the severely retarded (and others?) have the right to
life, it is not wrong to kill them at will.<86>

But we do not think we can treat beings that we would typically deny

inclusion in the class of persons (metaphysical, legal, or moral) in

just any way. We set responsibilities for ourselves , as when we

give back the seventy-five cents over-change, or as when we think

120

better of leaving our dog in the car on a hot day with the windows
closed, or as when a physician seeks to truly inform an unconscious
patient' 3 advocates about the nature of her/his medical condition in
order to determine what that individual's wishes might be for
treatment, care, maintainance, etc. In each of these cases, and in
thousands of others, it is not clear to me that we much consider (or
need to) whether and what moral rights the individual in question
possesses. we take ourselves to have certain responsibilities
toward persons as well as some nonpersons, I think, irrespective of
their individual rights, if we think they indeed have any. And.many
times we may consider their rights, if they are viewed as having
any, only after we come» to a confusion about what our
responsibilities are in the situation.

Some will say, perhaps, that I am guilty here of committing the
fallacy of hasty generalization. Whereas I may see myself as having
responsibilities to many, that may not be a universal
characteristic. Now, if I were merely giving a psychological
account of hOW’ we generally think about our responsibilities, the
charge of fallacious reasoning would surely be in order. However,
this is not what I intend. What I want to establish is that we
certainly’ do have good grounds for not treating many nonpersons any
way' we .might like, but not because we think they have any rights
whatsoever.

I kneW' a boy once who liked to torment the cats in our

neighborhood. This same boy also had a penchant for pouring lighter

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fluid on snails and setting them on fire.<87> Now, given that I do
not believe that cats and snails have any rights at all, since cats
are nonpersons strictly and snails lack even the minimal essential
necessary conditions for personhood (metaphysical _an_d moral),
including the mental capacity for having interests, <88> I must
either say that the boy does no wrong by bouncing stones off the
cat's head and setting the snail on fire, or admit that these
actions offend my sense of morality. I do admit it, and think it
does so precisely because I think we have a duty to the cat and
snail not to cause them unecessary pain. That does not transfer
into the claim that, therefore, the cat and snail have the right not
to be tortured. For if they did, then what would be the reason(s)
for spending so much time and effort delineating the list of
metaphysical and moral conditions for personhood? There would be no
practical or theoretical reasons , for the examples of the cat and
the snail would have destroyed the very purpose of setting out the
conditions in the first place, since we would have at least two
beings on our hands which satisfied at most two or three of the
conditions (capacity to feel pain, consciousness) but would be said
to have rights. I conclude, then, that if it is wrong to torture
cats and snails, then if they have no rights, it must be wrong
because we have a responsibility to the cat and the snail to not
torture them.

The entire point at issue here is with the limited criteria for

judging acts as moral or immoral that has been prevalent in the

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recent writing on moral personhood. Adopting a rights-based
morality to the exclusion of the importance of duties would
obviously leave us with problematic cases. I take it, then, that we
cannot get away with the lopsided view of characterizing persons as
merely bearers of rights. The only plausible alternative is to say
that persons are beings that have rights ang_responsibilities.

I think weiss, even in her biting attack of the Toolean program
for thinking about persons, has missed this crucial point. She
makes it clear that mixing the rights-based. with a agent-based
morality is much to be preferred to either one alone. But she
doesn't draw' the conclusion that persons are to be seen as
possessing rights and duties and not just as bearers of rights, as
we find in.most of the literature. Rather, she argues that getting
seriously clear about the concept of a person is not all it's
cradked up to be, i.e., in terms of settling some of the moral
problems we continuously encounter, such as the moral status of the
fetus. 'Person' can't do such a big job by itself, she claims.

Her argument seems sound to me. In fact, my last chapter will
attempt to show that whether or not the fetus is a person has no
bearing on whether or not it is morally permissible to discontinue
its existence. But now, if we take person to be a being with rights
and_ responsibilities, then we're not constrained to make 'person'
the deciding concept in :moral disputes. Instead, we have the
timeworn concepts of rights and responsibilities themselves to do

the double duty. It's almost as if we're back to the beginning of

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all serious moral inquiry, since we will continue to ask after the
nature of these two concepts. What has been accomplished, with all
the talk, from Locke, Reid, and Kant to Callahan, NOonan, and
Puccetti in the present day, about the conditions or qualities or
attributes a being must possess in order to be a person, is a
distinct clarity about the nature of any being that claims, is
claimed, can be claimed, to have rights and responsibilities. This,
in itself, seems to :me a wholly worthwhile endeavor to have been

undertaken for so many centuries.

Chapter 5

Personhood and Potential<89>

I

This last chapter is somewhat of a departure from the subject
matter of the previous four. That is, my major concern has been
with the conditions of personhood and not with the various practical
moral issues in which the concept of the person figures so
significantly. (When I use "person", I mean "person in the moral
sense" unless otherwise indicated.) But, now that I have addressed
those manifold proposed conditions, and have added my own, I should
like, in this chapter, to discuss a topic that is at the periphery
of the conditions themselves as well as the issues, viz. , tlre
concept of potentiality as applied to persons and nonpersons alike.

I will make some brief disclamatory cements regarding a
variety of beings who are seemingly at the edges of personhood. The
bulk of this chapter will then be given over to a discussion of the
status of the fetus, fl potential person. I conceive this
treatment to be exetplary of the idea that the term "person" is not
at the heart of [many of] our moral dilemas, as I mentioned at the
close of Chapter 4. And this is to be considered the primary
purpose of the present chapter .

For all that, the "problem" of the status of the fetus will
not be solved here, i.e. , if this problem is conceived as having to
do with the fetus' actual place in the moral scheme of things, or if

124

125
the problem is seen as having to do with how fetuses ought to be
treated in this or that circumstance. That is not the point, or the
goal . Neither will I atterpt to resolve other crucial practical
moral issues , such as abortion and the rights and responsibilities
of the mother and father, animal rights, euthanasia, etc. At most,
these topics will receive cursory mention when, in the course of the

discussion, they seem to me to want attention.

II

It will be agreed all 'round, I think, that sore nonpersons
will become persons in time, and some nonpersons will not. Of the
latter , some have been persons previously and some have not. There
is a certain range of nonpersons , however , that no one seriously
considers to be in the class of potential persons. These include
rocks, books, clocks, and almost every other nonorganic inanimate
thing. I say "almost" because there is a question concerning the
"intelligence" factor applied to some computers that quite naturally
leads us to think about the plausibility of actually referring to a
computer as a person. I believe that some people gig think it a
thesis to be seriously considered and I wonder what might
legitimately be said about the computer , fl person, as a bearer of
responsibilities as well as rights . Unhappily, interesting as they
are, the scope of this chapter will not allow for an analysis of
these notions.

I will be concerned here only with animate life forms

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considered as potential persons. Hence, the person who is now dead,
for example, does not concern me. It is not without some
puzzlement, however, that I refer to "dead persons". I take it that
the person (or self, or soul, or "I") who previously inhabited the
now lifeless body is not a candidate for potential personhood,
unless we posit some sort of "transmigration of souls" (to use an
ancient general term), or reincarnation or eternal return. But in
that case, i.e., where the person isn't really dead, but still
exists in sore form or other not detected through erpirical means, I
think the personhood of the being in question would never have been
lost, so that the question of potential would never arise. Hence,
"past persons" is either a misnomer or a non-referring term. In
either case, this subject is beyond the outline of this chapter.

NOtwithstanding, there are cases at the edges of life, human
and nonhuman, that give some trouble. There is a sense in.which an
elderly senile man, say, who slips in and out of lucid
consciousness, is only a potential person when he is in a state of
mind beyond that which would normally be taken to be adequate for
giving informed consent for medical treatment. The potential I
refer to here has to do with the man regaining lucid consciousness.
But there seems to be a real problem in this instance with respect
to the rights and responsibilities the man possesses, that is, if he
possesses any at all. On the one hand, it would not be acceptable
to many' people to simply deny him any rights whatever, for it might
be said that he has the right not to be subjected to any form of

127
treatment that he would not have consented to while in a state of
lucid consciousness . On the other hand, many, including myself ,
will simply not agree that you have a strict person on your hands
unless that being is capable, perhaps at will, where this does not
contradict the example, of attaining lucid consciousness , which tie
man, _e_x_ hypgthesi, is not.<90>

At the other end of life, we have the standard hard case,
i.e., the human fetus. This is the instance of potential personhood
I will take up directly here below in Section 2. For now, let me
say that I see no relevant difference between the potential a normal
healthy human fetus has for achieving the entire set of necessary
and sufficient conditions for strict personhood and the potential
the man above has for regaining lucid consciousness, with the
proviso, of course, that the latter is possible.

There is a middle area, between these borders on the continuum
of life, that is rather dark and unknown. Those beings whom we
find here trouble us in ways largely unspoken. They are the forever
children, the ones we shelter from harm, from the world at-large,
from themselves and others, and even, I think, from personhood.
They are the mentally retarded. I am not referring here to the
severely mentally retarded, whom I think may be classed as
nonpersons with no qualms , who have no potential whatsoever for
possession of the moral consciousness requisite for moral
personhood. Rather, I am referring to the perpetual four year old,

who has the capacity to dress, eat without assistance, draw simple

128
pictures, apparently take delight in the world that surrounds them,
and such like. Perhaps the answer here is that they are to be
viewed as potential persons. It is one of the most difficult
things, if it is not indeed impossible, to actually determine
whether someone has the capacity for moral consciousness, no matter
if that someone can use language or not. This is so when referring
even to a human adult. 'When, on the other hand, one attempts to
elicit a genuine moral response from.a nonmal child, it's worse than
getting them to eat spinach . It seems that only a being' 5 actions
can speak for their abilities in cases such as these. Taking the
mentally retarded to be potential persons, then, what I will say
about. moral rights and responsibilities as applied to fetuses and

infants will apply, mutatis mutandis, to these beings as well.

 

However, it may well be that if we could know that sore being
who was mentally retarded would never attain strict personhood, we
could count that being as a latent person, if the following
definition is adequate to characterize that category.

X is a latent person if and only if X has all, or almost all, of
the properties of a postive sort that together would be causally
sufficient to bring it about that X gives rise to a person,

together with one or more properties that will block a causal
process of the sort in question.<9l>

 

Given the degree to which latent persons possess one or more, though
not all, of the conditions for strict personhood, what I will say
regarding potential persons will hold for them as well.

The case of nonhuman animals is not unlike that of any

129

creature of whom the term "person" may or may not be applicable.
Some will attribute personhood to the dog that rescues its master
from a burning house. Some *will attribute personhood to the cat
that nuzzles up close and purrs at dinner time. Some will attribute
personhood to the chimpanzee that uses American Sign Language and
gets a banana for giving the "correct" response. Some will
attribute personhood to the bottlenosed dolphin because they play in
the waves, riding in them as a surfer rides on them. The question
here is, and always is whenever one contemplates the plausibility of
ascribing moral personhood to some creature, Does it have the
capacity for moral consciousness?

There can be no nonspeciesist reason for disallowing nonhuman
beings from inclusion in the class of moral persons when and if any
of them can be shown to possess the capacity for moral
consciousness.<92> 'Person' cannot be taken to be applicable to
only humans, any more than it can be taken to be reserved only for
white humans, or white males, or white human Greek male of the
middle to upper economic, social, or political class. Even if, as
Dennett might say, 'human' and 'person' appear to be coextensively
referenced locally, that in itself does not prove the existence of
some sacred relation between the concepts 'which are founded on
reason (human or divine), rather than on the historical perameters

of our, and other's, cultures.

130

III
With this much said, I will now proceed to defend the
following thesis: By virtue of the potential a human fetus has for

becoming a person, it must be considered, for practical purposes

 

only, as possessing as much right to life as any adult hLman being
who is considered a person strictly. The position I shall argue for
and defend is much like that which is espoused by such conservatives
as John Noonan, i.e., that the right to life of a human zygote is to
be considered as present from the moment of conception.<93> My
position is not that the fetus actually does have a right to life,
however. I cannot argue for that thesis, because I do not believe
the fetus is a person, i.e., a being whom I take to have the
capacity for moral consciousness and to have rights and
responsibilities . The guiding principle behind the contention that
we must treat the fetus as EM it had a right to life is
something like what Michael Tooley has called the "potentiality
principle" and is well formulated, though not embraced, by Joel
Feinberg as follows:
All and only those creatures who either actually or potentially
possess 9 (that is, who either have 2 now or would come to have 9
in the natural course of events) are moral persons now, fully
protected by the rule against homocide. <94)
where 'g ' refers to either a sufficient condition or the set of

sufficient conditions for personhood. I prefer this version of the

131
potentiality principle to L.E. Carrier's more strict and explicitly
speciesist account that follows:
There is some unknown property P, possessed by human fetuses and
infants such that: (1) There is a scientific law L to the effect
that any organism with P ‘will normally come to possess a
distinctively human consciousness at some later time. (2) Given
the lawlike relationship between P and a distinctively human
consciousness, anything possessing both P and a basic,
rudimentary consciousness has a right to life in the degree
possessed by an adult human. (3) If P were not related to a
distinctively human consciousness in this lawlike way, then the
possession of P itself would not suffice to give anything
possessing P a right to life. (4) Even granting the lawlike
connection between P and a distinctively human consciousness, the
possession of P alone does not suffice to grant its possessor a
right to life.<95>
Feinberg's staterent of the principle is, I believe, more
acceptable from.two further points of view; first, that it makes no
existential claim regarding the infant or fetus, whereas Carrier's
does just that, and explicitly. Second, it does not expressly refer
to the right to life of the being with the potential in question.
This may be no serious objection, given that Carrier is primarily
concerned to delimit the conditions a being must satisfy for it to
have a right to life, but it still piques one's interest whenever a
writer fails to enjoin the concept of responsibilities with talk
about rights. Feinberg, however, mentions neither rights nor
responsibilities, but rather settles on the statement that the
creature who possesses g_ is "fully protected by the rule against
homocide", which may be construed from the side of the moral subject

as well as from.that of the moral object.<96>

132

Now, I see every reason to adopt Tooley' s "vague
characterization of the range" of potential persons , even though I
disagree quite vehemently with his ultimate conclusions regarding

abortion and infanticide. His definition is,
X is a potential person if and only if X has all, or almost all,
of the properties of a positive sort that together would be
causally sufficient to bring it about that X gives rise to a

person, and there are no factors present within X that would
block the causal progress in question.<97>

 

The argument, then, is that since all normal fetuses will come
to possess one or more or perhaps all of the proposed conditions for
personhood, they, i.e., the fetuses, are E! bev—iewlefias moral
beings with a right to live from the moment this potentiality
obtains, viz., no earlier and no later than conception. And as with
all arguments, there is decisive reasoning underlying the
potentiality principle. It is maintained that since it is m
Egg wrong to kill a being who now actually possesses the

conditions for personhood, it is prima facie wrong to kill a being

 

who will, in time, come to possess these qualities.

There is a distinct advantage to accepting a position which
espouses sore form of the potentiality principle over more liberal
positions which consciously avoid embracing any form of the
potentiality principle . The conservative need not point to what
many have forcefully argued to be arbitrary stages on the continuum
from the conception of the fetus to the birth of the infant. These

stages are most typically listed as: l) implantation, 2) the

133

commencetent of brain activity, 3) quickening, 4) viability, and 5)
birth itself . <98) Various and diverse philosophers have convincingly
maintained that none of these stages is clearly person-producing,
i.e. , it is at none of these points that the fetus acquires a_ny of
the proposed conditions for personhood. In fact, the one condition
widely held to be the most significant for determining personhood,
i.e., self-consciousness, is not secured by a human being until well
_a_fteg birth. I would argue likewise for the possession of moral
consciousness.

In opting for post—birth personhood, Michael Tooley presents
what may be taken as a serious problem for anyone attetpting to base
an argument for the personhood of the fetus (or any other potential
person) on the potentiality criterion. <99) Precisely, any being who
possesses the potential for possessing 9 does not actually possess
_c_:_. The absence of 9 shows, on Tooley's view, the absence of
personhood. In effect, Etential persons are not, yet, m
persons .

By hypothesis, it is true that potential persons are not
actual persons. However , as mentioned, my argument is not intended
to establish the personhood of potential persons. Rather, my hope
is to show why potential persons must be considered and treated as
though they were persons. I am concerned to shov that the absence
of actual personhood need not (should not, in the case of the fetus)
entail the moral permissiveness of the deprivation of its continued

existence. I argue from analogy, as follows: If a potential person

134

(fetus X) has little or no life—rights, and the reason for this is
because that being is not a strict person but merely a potential
person, then since each of the conditions for personhood are only
potentially present in any given actual person (adult Y), at any
given time, then no potential or actual person has any of the
stipulated rights conditioned by per sonhood except when such
potential or actual per son displays one or more of the conditions .
This entails that actual personhood is a function of manifesting one
or more of the conditions for personhood.

For example, if the concept of an enduring self is a necessary
condition for personhood, and if Y at time 3 is not thinking of Y as
an enduring self, then Y at _t is not doing what a being must do in
order to be a person. Moreover, it is not enough to appeal to Y' 3
potential for thinking of itself as an enduring self, for even X has
this potential. The only distinction that can be made here is that
Y has had the concept of an enduring self in the past, while X has
not. (As will become clear further on, it is not obvious that this
distinction is relevant in just the right way to establish Y as a
person and X as a nonperson.) But for nov, given a healthy fetus, I
suggest that the probability differential between the fetus not
soreday having the concept of an enduring self and that Y will not
agaip have a like concept is not great enough to warrant the
decision that Y should be while X should not be treated as a
person. The distinction is seen now to rest on potential in both

cases. Indulging in a slight neologism, if neither X nor Y are

135
pegggnipg, that is, actually ‘manifesting one or more of the
conditions for personhood, then both may be seen simply as potential
persons. However, as I would have it, both must be considered
persons with all the privileges appertaining to that title,
including life-rights.<100)

It. must be borne in.mind throughout this chapter that persons
are not, however else one chooses to view them, merely beings with
rights. As was established in Chapter 4, persons are beings with
moral responsibilities as well as moral rights. Making this
distinction will be absolutely crucial for any position that refers
to the concepts of being treated like or unlike a moral person and
treating beings like or unlike moral persons. Since the fetus is
not a moral person, there is no question of its treating sole other
being like or unlike a person. HOwever, it may be treated in.ways
that are like and unlike ways that are morally appropriate only for
strict persons. There would be no sense in asking about the fetus'
moral responsibility, since it is not at a sufficient level of
mental capacity to be capable of cotmitting an act. However , the
fetus can be acted on. And it is only persons who are responsible
for acting on other persons and nonpersons. The whole idea of
considering a fetus as a person for practical moral purposes is
built on the notion that only persons can act and only persons can
have responsibilities.

Tboley, in his paper "A Defense of Abortion and

Infanticide",<101) seeks partially to overcome the above criticisms

136

regarding the conditions for actual personhood. On the surface it
even looks as if he succeeds. He introduces the concept of
dispositional states , not new to philosophers of language or mind.
Ebsentially, Tooley maintains that terporarily unconscious persons,
and those who have been manipulated in one way or another , who
either cannot exercise free will at that moment, or who have lost
self-consciousness teIporarily, are, if they have been in the past,
still persons with a serious moral right to life.

For instance, take a sleeping person, Don. We would want to
say that even though Don is not actually manifesting any of those
traits by which we judge beings to be persons, still, he has a most
serious right not to be killed while sleeping. One of the reasons
for this is that we take sleeping persons to be in dispositional
states. If Don is awakened and asked if he has any plans for the
day, the chances are good that the response will be affirmative.
While he was sleeping, he had dispositions to behave in certain
ways, i.e. , with respect to future plans, beliefs, desires, fears,
and so on.

Now let's say that Don, on January 27, 1987, has the desire,
and plans, to take the family to the zoo on January 28, 1987. We
want to say that during the night, the time transition between
January 27th and 28th, during Don's sleep, he still has those
desires and plans. In essence, he has those plans and desires even
when he is not thinking about them, such as when his mind is engaged

in other matters. (Perhaps a clearer example of a dispositional

137
state is this: I believe that two plus three is equivalent to five.
I believe it all the time, and not just when I happen to bring it to
mind or happen to be engaged in some action which expressly
manifests that belief.)

Granting that Don, while sleeping, is to be considered a being
to which the rule against homocide applies for his own protection
precisely because of the dispositional state(s) he is in, I suggest
that one characteristic of all dispositional states is that of the
mtential to behave in certain ways , which is certainly different,
and distinct, from actually behaving in those ways. It will follow
that since potential is a significant trait or eletent of
dispositional states, and since those who are in such states are
considered protected against holocide , then, fetuses , because of
their potential , are to be considered protected against homocide as
well. In one sense, we can say that, though the fetus is a
nonperson strictly, it ought to be treated as if it were a person.

Let us take an example and distinguish between three levels,

or orders , of the propositional attitude desires-that . Consider the

 

proposition,

(a) Don desires that a trip to the zoo take place at time E.

This proposition is different from

(b) Don desires, at E, that a trip to the zoo take place at g.

138
This difference gpglg_be significant, since (a) is vague about just
when Don is doing the desiring, and it may very well be important
for Don's moral status to [be able to] distinguish when Don is doing
the desiring.

At this point I am not at all sure about the significance of
the arrangelent, or sequence, or rank of the of the levels to be
discussed, and prefer to leave that an open question, since it will
have no determinable affect upon the conclusions I intend to draw
from this analysis.

I should ‘wish to say that Level Three (L—3) is generally last
in chronological order. It is the manifestation of the fulfilling
of the desire for a thing. For example, as per (a), if Don desires
that a trip to the zoo take place, then Don is at L~3 when he is,
say, driving to the zoo, or somehow bringing about the state to
which the desire refers. Merely to desire that a trip to the zoo
take place is not identical with getting to the zoo. Now, though in
this example it happens to be the case that Don had the desire prior
to its manifestation, i.e., prior to its being fulfilled, it is
conceivable, conversely, for Don to have somehow gotten to the zoo
without overtly wanting to go there, as if by accident, such as
taking the wrong freeway exit, and then, while at the zoo, to have
the desire to be there.

Level Two (Lp2) of the propositional attitude desires-that may

 

conveniently be characterized as a mental activity, involving the

actual desiring itself. This is not comprised of any physical

139

activity, save the corresponding brain state(s), if there indeed
is/are any. At Level-2 is the bare desire, i.e., the occurrent
desire, presenting itself as a state of mind. This level is not
dispositional insofar as there is action taking place, i.e., the apt
pf_ desiring. (I trust that our general lack of knowledge concerning
the actual working(s) of the mind and/Or brain is sufficient to
elicit sympathy in the reader for the necessity of this imprecise
explication of L-2.)

Level One (Lrl) is_ the dispositional level of desires—that.

 

It is the level at which no actual thinking or acting occurs
regarding that which is desired. It is a level of desire only in the
sense that when Don is at L—l, he is disppsed to behave in certain
ways. This is as much as to say that he is in a state where there
is the potential to attain L—2 and/Or LP3. There is nothing actual
about L—l, for at this level Don is neither actually desiring nor
manifesting a desire by somehow bringing about the thing to which
the desire refers. At Lel Don has the pgtential for reaching levels
two and/or three, but is at neither in any actual way.

But nOW' what about the fetus? Certainly it is at none of the
levels described above. It neither desires, acts in any intentional
manner, nor is it disposed to act in any specific way. NOnetheless,
like Don at Lrl, the fetus has the potential to attain levels two
and/or three. Hence, if Don at L—l is considered to be protected by
the rule against homocide, in virtue of his potential for attaining

L—2 or L—3, then the fetus, in virtue of its potential, is to be

140

considered as protected by the rule against homocide as well. And
if Don, at L—l, is not to be considered as protected by the rule
against homocide, then it is permissible to take Don's life at L—l.
But ‘we 99_ consider Don to be protected by this rule during sleep,
during other forms of temporary unconsciousness, when brainwashed or
drugged, and so on. Hence, to be consistent, we must also take the
fetus to be protected at the moment of conception, when the
potential for reaching L—2 and L~3 becomes actua1.<102>

I would be foolish not to be cautious regarding ways of
talking about the sleeping Don and the fetus as potential persons.
While it seems to be becoming almost natural for many people to
refer to, and think of, the fetus as a nonperson (perhaps some
version of Tooley's "argument from potential" is carrying the day),
it will strike the majority of people as a blatant absurdity to
regard any normally functioning adult human being as a nonperson.
The reason for this is clear, I think. They would ask, How can any
sense be made of the concept of the person.when said person slips
into and out of personhood merely by going to sleep and.waking up?
Sense in the following way can be made of such a nonintuitive
notion: Don joins the Navy and is stationed aboard the U.S.S. coral
Sea. Unbeknownst to everyone, including Don, is the fact that Don
is a sleepawalker. He gets up in the middle of the night, still
asleep, begins to walk.the deck, and during his stroll, punches the
Duty Officer in the nose. Now, the Department of the Navy will

discharge Don, "for his own safety". But he will not be court-

141

marshalled. There will be no retribution taken for Don's laying
hands on a superior officer. This is so because Don is seen,
rightly, as not responsible for his actions while he's walking in
his sleep. This would be so whether Don purloined the Admiral's
best bottle of scotch wiskey, whether he took unauthorized shore
leave, or even whether he killed someone. The point remains all the
while; if persons are all and only those beings who possess rights
as well as responsibilities, by virtue of their capacity for moral
consciousness, then if Don is unable to either fulfill his
responsibilities or act in a responsible manner, he is not, in the
strict sense of the term, a person.

I think that most of us have always thought that 'person' is a
stable term, i.e., a term that applies to beings as 'human' applies
to beings, where it is not possible to be human at one moment and
nonhuman the next, unless, say, you cease to exist. I have serious
doubts that 'person' is a stable term. in this sense. This may
indicate a further way of arguing, as does Peter French, that
"person" is not a natural kind term. Furthermore, I see no
ontological reason to suspect that positing that we do not.remain
persons each moment of our lives is somehow violating the fragile
use of our language. If the concept that adult human beings are not
persons when they are in states of temporary unconsciousness, such
as sleep (though not all sleep states are necessarily states of
unconsciousness), is uncommon, or jolts our sense of conceptual

propriety concerning 'person', or seems outrageous for any other

142
reason, I can only say that given the logic of the concept as
analyzed here, we will simply have to get used to it.

At this point, not wanting to accept the above argumentation,
Tooley and others, in an attexpt to salvage whatever can be of the
notion of the person as a being with the right to life, would
presmably wish to use the term "capacity" to distinguish between
the possibility of exercising sote ability already possessed and the
potential for possessing that ability. It must be admitted that in
many circumstances the capacity to perform has more cash-value than
merely the potential to have the capacity to perform. This is one
of the reasons why erployers generally have a preference for hiring
people with experience rather than people who will require extensive
training.

However, the very notion of "capacity" carries with it, at
least in part, the idea of future action. Hence, capacity involves
an eletent of potential, insofar as anyone who has the capacity to
perform see action, and who is not actually performing that action,
has the potential to perform that action. For instance, Don has the
capacity to read German, but during sleep, or when he's eating
breakfast, he is not engaged in that activity. We would not be
troubled, I think, by saying that Don has the potential to read
German. I do not deny that there is a difference between soteone
who knows how to read German, and who has the capacity it to go to
the bookshelf, pick out and read Goethe' 3 Die Leiden des jungen

 

Werthers, and soreone who has never studied the German language.

143
This difference, however, does not lie in the sort of potential each
of these beings possess, but rather in the possible ways of behaving
each is disposed towords. This is only significant from. the
perspective that the being who cannot read German cannot have the
actual disposition to go to the shelf and read Werther. This would
be where the various levels of propositional attitudes become of
extrere importance . And if it is argued here that the potential
which attaches to capacity is somehOW’ stronger than that which
attaches to coming to have that capacity, I will not object. What I
have not discovered, however, is substantial proof that this
stronger, "higher", level potential is somehow morally relevant for

determining who has a right to live.<103)

Don, awake, has rights and responsibilities. A fetus has
neither. But what could be the reasoning that establishes Don's
responsibilities towards other persons only? Any argument
forthcoming to this effect ‘will entail that. we have no
responsibilities towards certain beings whom. we have come» to
believe that, in our daily lives, we d9_have responsibilities
towards. My neighbor's dog, for example, is nothing special to me.
If I should cause this animal unnecessary pain, pain which will have
no effect on any person.(my presumption, denied by some, is that the
dog is a nonperson, i.e., a being lacking the essential qualities
for having rights and responsibilities) and if I have

responsibilities towards persons only, than I have committed no

144
violation of another ' 3 rights , nor have I shirked any of my
responsibilities .

This reasoning would be acceptable but for the one false
statelent. It is simply not true that I have no responsibility, in
this case, towards the dog. In fact, I should say that the very
idea of a social creature being sentient involves the idea of others
acting in ways properly construed as morally responsible and
irresponsible. I agree with Singer and Tooley here that the
capacity for experiencing pain (and probably pleasure) is a
sufficient condition for a being having interests . It is not that
the dog necessarily has the capacity to be conscious of what is and
is not in its own interest—“regarding pain, or pleasure , or
continuance or discontinuance of its existence-—-but rather that
persons are well equipped in many cases to make these judgments. In
fact, persons gust determine what is in the interest, or
disinterest, of any sentient nonperson to know how to act towards
it. And since many of these creatures are social, we must act
towards them in many different sorts of circumstances.

Knowing, believing, or determining just what is to the benefit
or harm of sore given sentient creature , human or nonhuman, person
or nonperson, many times seets impossible. How is one to treat a
troubled, runaway teenager? What treatment will benefit a manic-
depressive? On the other hand, we know very well, in many cases,
the benefits and harms traded-off by certain actions . Blinding

rabbits to create new and ever—more effective baby shampoo is not

145
mysterious. Neither is the method of " factory farming" in the egg-
producing industry or keeping calves penned-up so they can't move
simply to provide succulent, tender, white flesh for satisfying our
own tastes. Examples abound, of course, each one creating an ever
stronger realization that where persons act with consciousness, self-
consciousness, rationality, freedom, and a sense of morality,
persons are responsible for their actions—-and responsible to each

party effected by those actions .

The use of the potentiality principle to gain personhood
stat-.23; for the fetus has been objected to from many quarters. I
should like to briefly answer but one of these objections, and in my
mind it is the important one . The protest runs something like
this: If one posits the necessity for personal consideration of a
human zygote because of its potential for possessing certain
recessary and sufficient conditions for personhood, then one will be
forced to look backwards in time, from conception, to the material
out of which the zygote is produced, i.e., sperm and ova, and argue
for their personal consideration as well.

The answer to this objection may seem overly simply stated,
but has cotpelling force nonetheless: A sperm cell is not the _kifl
of thing that could become a person. It has no potential whatever
for personhood, since it is not equipped with the structure for
possessing any of the conditions for personhood. Understanding the

conception event/process will reveal that there is no such thing as

146
a fertilized ovum. Rather, upon fertilization, a new being comes
into existence, that is, is created, with the sperm and ovum dying
together.<lO4) There is no continuum from sperm and ovum to fetus,
infant, child, adult, etc. It is clear, then, that human life
begins at the moment of conception. What really matters , however,
is that conscious personal life begins, so far as we can determine,
soretime well after birth. But even here there is no fixed
continuum, for we soretimes act in ways that would be considered
blameworthy or praiseworthy if only we were capable of being praised

or blamed when in fact we are not.

I grant that my arguments do not establish/prove tie
personhood of either those in dispositional states or fetuses. In
fact, the question "Who shall count as a person?" sees as far from
being settled today as at any time in the past. This is due, in
part, to the "revolution" I mentioned above in Chapter 1 taking
place at present with regard to our conception of personhood in
general.<105> Peter Singer, for example, has opened the way for
animals with certain attributes to be treated as persons , and Tooley
has forcefully argued that even infants up to a certain age may not
be considered persons . <106) It does seem evident to me, however ,
that we need to rethink our concept of how to treat potential
persons to account for those times during which a_ny given being is
not actually displaying the proposed conditions for personhood.

During sleep, for instance, not one of the mental activities so

147

prized for personhood is overtly present. This is most especially
so for Harry Frankfurt' s criterion of second—order volitions, or,
true freedom of the will.<107> What I am hinting at is the idea
that unless we acknowledge the potential a being has for thinking
and acting in ways sufficient for ascribing personhood to that
being, rather than merely considering the actual displaying of those
attributes, we are left with the notion that perhaps no one is an
actual person all of the time. And this will only be considered
absurd, if we _dg think the sleeping adult human, for instance, is a
person. I suggest that our consideration now take the form of
possible action to be taken toward potential persons , whether they
be fetuses, infants, the mentally retarded, or temporarily
unconsciousness adult human beings .

This ought to be so at least on Engelhardt ' 3 account of two
concepts of personhood.<108) Recall that the "strict" concept
defines a person as a bearer of rights and duties; a self—conscious,
rational agent . And though a sleeping adult human is neither self -
conscious nor rational , this being is certainly thought to have
rights, if not duties. The "social" sense of 'person' , for
Engelhardt, establishes rights for beings who are not persons
strictly, by identifying them as having social relationships with
strict persons. While this concept seets ad hop in that its purpose
is to protect infants, the mentally retarded, the seriously mentally
infirm, and those who are senile, it has great intuitive appeal.

Even if one were to take a hard line with the sleeping adult human

148

and deny strict personhood to this being, one need only confer
social personhood to protect its life. This also saves us from the
problems of positing slippage into and out of personhood in some
random fashion; you fall asleep and you are no longer a person, you
wake up and you're a person again. Further, this conception of
personhood squares with the reasonableness of rejecting the maxim
"once a person always a person" on the grounds that humans who are
dead and perhaps those who are severely brain damaged and
irreversibly comatose, though surely once persons, lose that
appellation.

The other tack to follow is to take all those who now display
the conditions for personhood, or who have displayed personhood in
the past, as persons now and until such time as there is good
evidence to show the ascription no longer fitting. Tooley takes it
to be the case that a sleeping adult human is a person with a
serious moral right to live because, in.part, that human has been
self-conscious in the past. This previous possession of self-
consciousness is Tooley's ‘major requirement for personhood. He
argues that since the fetus has had no past self—consciousness, it
cannot be a person, yet. waever, in the first place, it is far
from clear whether this condition is necessary and/or sufficient.
What could establish either conclusion? Second, there does not seem
to be a compelling reason for consideringxpasg self-consciousness,
in and of itself, to be one of the conditions for personhood.

Again, dead humans, once persons, lose that title. Hence, since

149
past possession of the conditions for personhood gpe§_(in the actual
world) figure prominently in our ascriptions of personhood,
pptent'al for possessing these conditions must also be seriously
considered as relevant to our ascriptions. And beings who now
display potential for actualized personhood, such as sleeping adult
humans and fetuses, must be considered persons, protected by the
rule against homocide, until such time as there is good reason to

believe that that potential no longer exists.

Chapter 6

Where Do We Go From Here?

Such conclusions as have been reached in the body of this project
may have left the reader with a certain sense of discontentment.
This must only be acknowledged if the goal of the work was
conceived as having a great deal to do with the practical aspects of
the question, What is a person? I have bridged the gap between the
theoretical and practical questions of personhood to some extent,
however. For example, Chapter 3 indirectly recommends certain
courses of action relative to beings who are definitely persons (no
matter whether they look like we do or not) , viz . , Black South
Africans . Chapter 5 recommends, by implication, certain actions
towards definite nonpersons (they are nonpersons simply because they
are equipped with neither the hardware nor the software required for
"strict" personhood) . Furthermore, throughout this project I have
been arguing that we treat any being as a person who possesses the
characteristics deered relevant for our own conception of ourselves
as persons, whether we' re correct about these characteristics being
relevant or not.

I think we have gotten pretty clear about the nature of moral
personhood. The question now becomes, What do we do with our
conclusions? Now that we know what a being must be like to be a
moral person, we should be able to point to at least a few of the
practical problems that have added so much fuel to the flame of

150

151

desire to answer the questions of personhood, and also to say where
we might look for solutions to some of these problems. In short, we
need to deal with such practical moral problems as abortion,
euthanasia, mental retardation, Alzheimer's disease, informed
consent, legal rights, birth control, and infanticide in light of
the concepts of rights and responsibilities as possessed by moral
agents, i.e., persons.

Getting clear about what a being ‘must be like to be a moral
person will have been a crucial step in advancing solutions to these
and other practical moral issues. But nOW'the baton is passed over
to those who will take on the job of discovering what rights and
responsibilities themselves consist in. While we might look to Kant
for some of the initial key points regarding duties , and perhaps
W.D. Ross and John Rawls, much more must certainly be learned. To
get a clearer picture of the notion of rights, we might appeal
initially to such ‘writers as Ronald Dworkin, Alan Gewirth, JOel
Feinberg, A.I. Meldon, and Tom Regan.<109)

I would like to suggest, at this juncture, that a promising
beginning :might be made by invoking something like a Lakatosian
research program for moving towards solutions to sore of the above
problers.<110) 'Person', as defined here, would be an essential
component of the "hard core", while the notions of rights and
responsibilities might well make up at least a significant portion

of the "protective belt" . Iakatos writes,

152

All scientific research programmes may be characterized by their
'hard core' . The negative heuristic of the programme forbids us
to direct the modus tollens at this 'hard core' . Instead, we
must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent 'auxiliary
hypotheses' , which form a protective belt around this core, and
we must redirect the modus tollens to these. It is this
protective belt of the auxiliary hypotheses which has to bear the
brunt of tests and get adjusted and re—adjusted, or even
completely replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core . A
research programme is successful if all this leads to a
progressive problershift; unsuccessful if it leads to a
degenerating problemshift.<lll>

 

 

 

 

There are sore modifications of Iakatos' sketch of a research
program that are required here. First, while this model might serve
us well in attetpting to work out some practical moral issues , it
would be misleading to say that we would have, in the end, carried
out a "scientific" research program. It seems to me that one has a
scientific research program only if one applies the model to that

which is prima facie "scientific" , which is not the typical way of

 

characterizing moral philosophy.<112) Whether or not it can be
fruitful to treat practical moral problems scientifically I leave to
the researcher. For my part, I do not intend to advocate a
scientific conception of morality. This will not, I believe, effect
my borrowing Iakatos ' research program as a model .

Second, placing the concept of a person in the hard core seets
to me of paramount importance, because we want the hard core to be
immutable. As Lakatos says,

The 'core' is ' irrefutable' by the methodological decision of its
protagonists; anoralies must lead to changes only in the

'protective' belt of auxiliary, 'observational' hypothesis and
initial conditions . . . .The actual hard core of a programme does

153

not actually emerge fully armed like Athene from.the head of
Zeus. It develops slowly, by a long, preliminary process of
trial and error.<ll3)

'we may rationally decide not to allow 'refutations' to transmit
falsity to the hard core as long as the corroborated empirical
content of the protecting belt of auxiliary hypotheses
increases.<ll4>

If we take Dennett's view seriously, as I do, that the concept
of a person may well be an eliminable part of our conceptual scheme
and as inescapably normative, then the concept of a person, as a
.moral agent with rights as well as responsibilities, must be seen as
the central concept in the hard core. ‘we may defend this thesis by
iterating the platitude that all theories of morality have at their
heart, referred to implicitly or explicitly, sore concept of moral
agency, whether it is given the name "person", "human being",
"rational being", or what have you.

I would like to diverge from. Lakatos on one point here,
however. With regard to the concept of a person, it is not merely a
rational, methodological decision to place "person" in the hard
core. Rather, it seems to me, contra Rorty, to be the only place
for it in the entire schere of the research program. If we have
learned anything at all by the historical and contemporary writings
on personhood, it is that we have been groping for something
enduring, something we can get our hands on that won't slip away. I
agree that the hard core has not come into being full-blown, but has
taken centuries to refine. And as much as I would like to say that

I have given the ultimate and only defensible polemic on the concept

154

of personhood, I cannot, in conscience, do that. I say this much
more in connection with metaphysical personhood than moral
personhood, though. 'we jmay. find that there are more or other
ontological characteristics necessitated by metaphysical personhood
than we thought . This would matter to our conception of moral
personhood only to the extent that the further ontological
properties were somehow connected with moral agency. At this time,
I do not see further advances in this area, for I do believe I have
presented a conception of mggal_personhood that will stand up to all
possible attempted revisions.

That the concepts of rights and responsibilities should belong
to the "protective belt" of a research program in ethics may sound
somewhat strange, given that 'person' has been defined in terms of
these concepts, and the concept of the person is in the hard core.
I intend this: while persons, as moral agents, are bearers of rights
and responsibilities, it is often unclear just what our rights and
responsibilities are in any given circumstance. ‘With rights and
responbilities in the protective belt , they become modifiable with
ever new conceptions of moral and immoral behavior . I should never
want to give up the idea that persons have rights and
responsibilities, but I would allow that we will learn much in the
future about the when, where, how, and why of these aspects of our
moral lives.

As an example of what I have learned in this regard, let me

point to the issue of the moral status of sentient nonhuman animals,

155

considered as nonpersons. I should say that a calf has no rights or
responsibilities whatsoever; that it would be no violation of its
rights to keep it penned—up for months to be slaughtered for veal.
Also, I should say that there could be no sense in holding a cow
responsible for going into a neighbor's pasture to feed, even though
doing so might be considered a violation of the neighbor's property
rights. However, there is a reason that we should not keep a calf
penned-up as is currently practiced. The reason is that we have a
responsibility to all sentient creatures to not cause them
unnecessary pain, whether it be mental or physical.

And this is a place to start on the road to discovering
adequate solutions to many of our practical moral problems. And
while I would be willing to defend my position on our duties to
sentient nonpersons, I can remain openminded about just what those
duties are, how they are to be affected, and so one, precisely
because rights and responsibilities are located in the mutable
protective belt of the program. This is not to say that our rights
and duties ever actually change, for any given situation, but rather
that our recognition of our rights and duties will change. I had
thought for many years that fetuses have the right to live. I no
longer find this thesis true, but I now recognize that there are
:moral as well as practical features of potential persons that point
to certain responsibilities on the part of persons towards these
beings.

'Where do we go from here? To the practical moral problems

156

that generated the entire project of searching for a meaning of
'person' in the first place. This is, and has been, a contemporary
undertaking; a project that began with the first of the
technological breakthroughs in medical research; a project that has
looked backward to John Iocke and Immanuel Kant, and forward to the
possibilities of the let century in science, medicine, technology,
philosophy, theology, and law. There is, of course, no saying what
conceptual upheavals will take place in our future . The one thing
we may be confident in, however , is the continued exploration of the
myriad concepts spawned by our recent infatuation with the concept
of personhood.

Notes
1. Becker, Iawrence C. , "Human Being: The Boundaries of the

Concept", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer,

 

1975) .

2. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has much force and depth as a

 

work of fiction. I think one can gain certain insights into what we
ordinarily mean by 'human' and 'person' by reading it with this in
mind.

3. Daniel Callahan, in Abortion: Law, Choice & Morality,

 

(Maotillan, 1970) , divides the relevant criteria for the
determination of human life into the genetic, the developmental, and
the social. Albert S. Moraczewski, in "Human Personhood: A Study of

Person-alized Biology" , in Abortion and the Status of the Fetus,

 

Bondeson, et.a1., eds. , (Reidel, 1983) , criticizes the developmental
and the social. I dispense with the developmental merely for
convenience, preferring to include it in the social as an essential
eletent in history for thinking about persons and personhood.

4. Noonan, John T. Jr., "An Almost Absolute Value in History",

in The Morality of Abortion, John Noonan, ed., (Harvard, 1970).

 

5. Given the scope of this introduction, there is no space for
a detailed discussion of the notion of rights. In much of the
discussion to follow, the concept of having rights will play a major
part in the human/nonhuman and person/nonperson distinctions .

6. Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,

 

(Princeton, 1979) . See Chapter 2, "Persons Without Minds".

157

158
7. Michael Tooley has written a number of important articles on
the concept of personhood: "A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide",

in The Problem of Abortion, 2nd ed., Joel Feinberg, ed., (wadsworth,

 

1984), and "In Defense of Abortion of Infanticide", reprinted, in

part, in Moral Issues, Jan Narveson, ed., (Oxford, 1983). .My thanks

 

are due to Professor Tooley for providing :me with a copy (in

manuscript) of the latter paper in full. Tooley's book, Abortion and

 

Infanticide (Oxford, 1983), contains an interesting discussion of

 

rights and persons.

8. Michael Tooley, Ibid., and Peter Singer, in Practical Ethics

 

(Cambridge, 1970), and in other works, are leaders in this movement
away from the traditional conception of the person. I am indebted
to Martin Benjamin, Michigan State University, for the idea that the
essentially neW' ways of conceiving of the person might involve this
sort of revolution.

9. New Jersey Supreme Court, "In the Matter of Karen Quinlan,
an Alleged Incompetent", Court Opinion of Chief Justice Hughes,

reprinted, in part, in Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, 2nd ed.,

 

Tam L. Beauchamp and LeRoy walters, eds., (Wadsworth, 1982).

10. Fletcher, JOseph, Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics

 

(Prometheus, 1979), Chapter 1, "Humanness".

11. Callahan, op. cit., Chapter 10, "The 'Beginning' of Human
Life: Philosophical Considerations".

12. Ibid., 356.

13. In .Michael Tooley's influential "Abortion and Infanticide",

159

(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vbl. 2, No. 1, 1972), we have a case

 

of a single attribute being considered as a sufficient condition for
possession of what he calls a "serious moral right to life". The
attribute is self—consciousness. Harry Frankfurt opts for "second-
order volitions" as sufficient for personhood in his fine paper,

"Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", (Journal of

 

Philosophy, Vbl. LXVIII, No. 1, January 14, 1971).

 

14. Becker, op. cit., 42.

15. Feinberg, JOel, "Abortion", in Matters of Life and Death, Tom

 

Regan, ed., (Random.House, 1980), 133.

16. Callahan, op. cit., 365.

17. Tooley, "In Defense of Abortion and Infanticide", op. cit.

18. Tooley, Ibid., has some further interesting things to say
about various potentiality principles in Section III and also in

Abortion and Infanticide, op. cit.

 

19. See Tooley's "A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide", Mpgal
Isgges, Jan Narveson, ed., op. cit.

20. ‘weiss, Roslyn, "The Perils of Personhood", Ethigg, 89, October
1979).

21. See Mary Anne ‘warren's "On the .Moral and Legal Status of

 

Abortion", The Monist, 57, No. 1, January 1973.
22. weiss, op. cit., 75. I
23. Dennett, Daniel C., "Conditions of Personhood", The Identities

of Persons, A.O. Rorty, ed., (California, 1976).

 

24. Ibid., 176.

160

25. Though Dennett does not go on to present much of a detailed
account of this distinction, i.e., between the moral and
metaphysical features of personhood, there are references to it
throughout his essay. He does finally conclude that the two senses
of person are not separate or distinct. Rather, they are "unstable
resting points on the same continuum".

26. Dennett, 0p. cit., 176.

27. Engelhardt, H. Tristram, "Medicine and the Concept of Person",

Conteporary Issues in Bioethics, Beauchamp & Walters, eds. , op.

 

cit.
28. Ibid., 97. It is worth noting at this point that Dennett's
moral and metaphysical senses collapse into the " strict" sense here.
29. Carter, W.R., "Once and Future Persons", American

Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1, January 1980.

 

30. Joyce, Robert E. , "Personhood and the Conception Event", fie

New Scholasticism, 52, Winter 1978.

 

31. See Noonan's "An Almost Absolute Value in History", op. cit. ,
34ff.
32. Bok, Sissela, "Who Shall Count as a Human Being?", Abortion:

Pro and Con, Robert L. Perkins, ed., (Schenkman, 1974).

 

33. Brody, Baruch, "On the Humanity of the Fetus", Ibid.
34. Langerak, Edward A. , "Abortion: listening to the Middle" , E

Hastings Center Report, 9, October 1979.

 

35. Ibid. , 25.

36. Robert Joyce argues that the human sperm and ova are not

161
possible persons because at conception a new being is created, with
the sperm and egg being destroyed.

37. Puccetti, Roland, "The Life of a Person", Abortion and the

 

Status of the Fetus, op. cit., n. 3.

 

38. French, Peter A. , "Kinds and Persons", Philosophy and

 

Phenomenolgical Research, Vol. 44, No. 2, December 1983.

 

39. Brungs, Robert, "Human Life vs. Human Personhood", The Human

Life Review, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Summer 1982.

 

40. Ibid., 70.
41. Op. cit., n. 6. Hereafter Pig.

42. Quine, W.v.0., "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in From a logical

 

Point of View, (Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 21.

 

43. See Putnam's, "Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life",

Journal of Philosopry, Vol. LXI, No. 21, November 12, 1964. While

 

the specific question of Putnam's essay is "Are Robots Conscious?",
his treatment of this question has wide implications for what is to
be said about persons and personhood.

44. Eli, 38.

45. Putnam, op. cit., 691.

46. Putnam's hints in the above cited paper lead to this: If we
decide that robots are conscious, then the manner in which we treat
conscious beings qu_a conscious beings should be extended, at least
for the sake of consistency, to robots. It is important to note
that if it is decided that robots are conscious beings, then

consciousness, e.g., desires, beliefs, etc. , will be the basis of

162
the _ki_§_d_ of treatment they should receive. Robots will receive
treatment that "other" conscious beings receive , but not treatment
that conscious beings who also display freedom of the will, desires,
beliefs, goals, etc. , receive. (In "Could There he a Conscious
Automaton?" . Michael Arthur Simon argues that consciousness is not

something to be decided upon. See the American Philosophical

 

Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1969.)
47. Frankfurt, op. cit., 6.

48. It is well to note here that Frankfurt's characterization of
'will' denotes that which motivates one to act. An "effective
desire" is one that "moves a person all the way to action".

49. See Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms, (Cambridge, The MIT Press,

 

1978), 268.

50. See Noonan, op. cit., and Fletcher, op. cit.

51. NOonan, op. cit., 58.

52. See Rorty's introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism,
(Uhiver—sity of Minnesota Press, 1982), xiv, for a discussion of the
Sellarsian notion that philOSOphy is "an attempt to see how things,
in the broadest sense of the tenm, hang together, in the broadest
sense of the term". ngwill hereafter refer to this book.

53. James, William, Pragmatism, (New York: Iangmans Green, 1947),

 

58. also see Rorty's "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope", Q.
54. Rorty, "The World Well lost", C_P_, 10.
55. Rorty, w, 189.

56. My, Vol. 16, No. 4, Winter 1973.

163

57. Ibid., 364.

58. Rorty, PMN, 7-127.

59. See NOonan, op. cit., for further discussion of this point.
He writes, "A being with a human genetic code is man". (p. 57)

60. Rorty, PEN, 190.

61. Ibid., 191.

62. Bernstein, Richard J., "Philosophy in the Conversation of

.Mankind", Review of Metaphysics, Vbl. XXXIII, No. 4, June 1980.

 

Anyone attempting to understand some of Rorty's more subtle
distinctions in PEN 'will find Bernstein's article elucidating,
critical in a positive sense, and quite readable, the last of which
is at times not true of Rorty.

63. Ibid., 762.

64. Rorty, Richard, "Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism",

Proceedings and.Addresses of the American Philosophical Association,

 

vol. 53, No. 6, 727.
65. Rorty, Richard, "Postmodernist Bourgeouis Liberalism", Journal

of Philosophy, Vol. LXXX, No. 10, October 1983, 589.

 

66. "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism", op. cit., 734.

67. Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism,

 

(Phil-adelphia: university of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 203.

68. Locke, JOhn, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Book

 

II, Chapter XXVII, Section 9, (Oxford, 1975), 335.

69. Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, op.cit., 76.

 

70. This list of items, which in part comprises the popular sense

164
of 'human being', is made up of some of Joseph Fletcher's

"Indicators of Humanhood", found in Chapter 1 of Humanhood: Essays

 

in Biomedical Ethics, op.cit.

 

71. Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind, (Barnes & Noble Books,

 

1949). See especially Chapter 1, "Descartes' Myth", wherein Ryle
charges Descartes with committing a "category mistake" , putting both
minds and bodies in the same category of existence, which, if they
exist at all, are so very different that they certainly belong in
different categories.

72. Locke, John, op.cit.

73. Ibid., 346. Dennett merely assumes that Locke is using the
term "person" in the moral sense when he says persons are
accountable. Surely persons are accountable in other than just
moral ways, e.g., legal. As I 'will show, one can plausibly
interpret Locke as using the legal sense of person here to include a
being accountable under not only human, but divine laws. And it is
not at all clear that the legal sense of 'person' entails the moral
sense, or vice—versa.

74. There is a vast. amount of literature on the problem of

personal identity, for example, Personal Identity, John Perry, ed.,

 

(university of California Press, 1975); The Identities of Persons,

 

A.O. Rorty, ed., op. cit.; "The Concept of a Person", in The Concept

 

of a Person and Other Essays, A.J. Ayer, (Macmillan, 1963),

 

Individuals, P.F. Strawson, (Methuen, 1959); Problems of the Self,

 

Bernard ‘Williams, (Cambridge university Pr., 1973); Personal

165
Identity, by Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, (Basil
Blackwell, 1984).

75. See Dennett's "Conditions of Personhood", op.cit., Mary Anne
warren's "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion", op.cit., and
Frankfurt's "Freedom of the will and the concept of a Person",
op.cit.

76. I do not wish to haggle over the rights of animals here. I
will show further along that animals not having rights is perfectly
consistent with treating them as members of the moral comunity. No
one would wish to say that it is morally permissible to torture a
cat. But that does not prove that cats have rights. It proves at
most that we think we have some responsibilities to some sentient
creatures.

77. warren, Mary Anne, op.cit., 112.

78. "A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide", op.cit., 60-61.

79. "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion", op.cit., 112.

80. "Humanness", in Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics,

 

op.cit. p. 13 and p. 15.

81. Williams, Bernard, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics

 

(Harper & Row, 1972)
82. Ibid., p. 3.

83. Tboley, Michael, Abortion and Infanticide, op.cit., 90-91.

 

84. This is, of course, a rough guess. Another problem that
apparently won't go away is how to tell when someone is a person.

This is a different problem from determining the conditions for

166
personhood. Once we have done this, it still remains to locate
persons in the universe. But, this seems to me to be a distinctly
empirical problem and cannot have any effect on the conclusions one
draws about what a being must be like to be a person.

85. "The Perils of Personhood", op.cit.

86. Ibid., 71.

87. If this example is offensive, I think I've made the point
without even appealing to the reader's reasoning ability. If I can
now' make the logical point, I will have have achieved my desired
aim. This is also a good example, I think, that many children who
otherwise possess many of the metaphysical conditions for personhood
are not aware of the :moral entailments of many of their actions.
IVm not saying that many children light snails on fire, but am
pointing to the various things children say and do that indicate
that they are wholly unconscious of the distinct moral implications
of their actions. That is, until they are taken aside and have
these implications pointed out to them. And it is not so much that
they are Eagght_what is right or wrong here, rather than it is that
they (children) just haven't thought about it all before.

88. See Abortion and Infanticide, op.cit., 96—99, as well as "In

 

Defense of Abortion and Infanticide", op.cit., for Tooley's advocacy
of the interest principle.

89. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented
at the Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian

Philosophers, March 9, 1984, at the University of Notre Dame. I

167
wish to thank all those who commented and criticised the paper as
presented, and especially 'William Altson for asking the question I
couldn't answer.

90. I have not used the term "lucid" in connection with
consciousness before. The reason for my use of it at this point has
to do strictly with the example of the elderly man. It is not a
special sort of consciousness, like self-consciousness or moral
consciousness, but it seems to be a necessary condition for each of
these forms of consciousness. Hence, I should want to argue that
only a being with lucid consciousness could have moral consciousness
and be a moral person.

91. Tooley, Michael, Abortion and Infanticide, op. cit. 168.

 

92. Peter Singer, in Practical Ethics, op. cit., seems to me to

 

argue this point quite effectiviely.
93. Nbonan, JOhn T., "An Almost Absolute value in History", in

The Morality of Abortion, op. cit.

 

94. Feinberg, JOel, "Abortion", in Matters of Life and Death, Tam

 

Regan, ed., op. cit., p. 133. Feinberg mentions many of the more
well-known writers on personhood and abortion in his paper,
including Daniel C. Dennett, "Conditions of Personhood",

Brainstorms, (The MIT Press, 1979); Mary Anne warren, "On the Moral

 

and Legal Status of the Fetus", in Contemporaryylssues in Bioethics,

 

T.L. Beauchamp and L. ‘walters, eds., (Dickenson, 1978); Jane

English, "Abortion and the Concept of a Person", Canadian Journal of

 

Philosophy, vol. 5, 1975; JOseph Fletcher, "Humanness", in

 

168
Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics, op. cit.,; Stanley I. Benn,
"Abortion, Infanticide, and Respect for Persons", in J. Feinberg,
ed. , The Problem of Abortion, op. cit. , and Michael Tooley,
"Abortion and Infanticide" , op. cit.

95. Carrier, L.S., "Abortion and the Right to Life", M
Theory and Practice, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1975, 388-389.

96. I'm not sure whether or not Feinberg intends 'homocide' in
his version of the potentiality principle to be speciesist. If so,
then the principle needs to be reworked. At any rate, it looks
speciesist, and that is enough.

97. Tooley, Michael, Abortion and Infanticide, op. cit. , 168.

 

98. See Baruch Brody's paper, "(m the Humanity of the Fetus", in
Abortion: Pro and Con, R.L. Perkins, ed., (Schenkman Publishing Co.,
1972) , for a lengthy treatment of the moral implications of 12
stages in the development of the fetus .

99. Tooley, Michael, "Abortion and Infanticide", op. cit.

100. For a more lengthy discussion of the criticisrs made here,
see Edward Iangerak's "Abortion: Listening to the Middle" , op. cit.

101. Tooley, Michael, "A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide", 3
Problem of Abortion, Joel Feinberg, ed. , op. cit. This is a revised
version of "Abortion and Infanticide" , op. cit.

102. See Robert E. Joyce, "Personhood and the Conception Event",
The New Scholasticism, op. cit, for an insightful discussion of
"actual potential" .

103. An "ability already possessed" must be construed as some

169

action, or set of actions, the being in question has taken in the
past. To take it in any other way would defeat my purpose by making
abilities not subject to capacity, and hence, potential. That is,
if Don is an accomplished bass fisherman, then we say that he has
the ability to catch a lot of bass. When he is sleeping, however,
he possesses the ability to catch a lot of bass only under the
interpretation that he has the capacity to wake up and go fishing,
which capacity involves potential for same.

104. See Joyce's paper, Ibid., pp. 100-103.

105. This idea of a revolution in the thinking about personhood
seems to me less well defined than I had previously thought. The
writers concerned with the problem of personhood are not of like
'mind as far as the motives they each have for being concerned. The
issue of abortion is at the core of these motives, and, it seems to
me that one will choose one's definition of 'person' in accordance
with how one feels about this. I suspect this is quite true in my
own case, at least in part. I have certainly changed.my mind, over
the last three years about who are persons, but my thoughts have not
changed on abortion, or infanticide, or euthanasia, or taking
nonhuman animal life. In fact, I think.my arguments for the views I
hold have been. much strengthened by' my study of the concept of
personhood. The revolution seems to me to embody an entirely new
way of perceiving fetuses and infants. ‘While the former are, at a
certain stage, quite similar in appearance to adult human persons,

they can be seen, in my own mind largely due to the writings of

170

people like Tooley, Singer, warren, English, Fletcher, Frankfurt,
and Dennett (though I don't know of any work by Dennett on the
status of the fetus), to be essentially lacking in person—making
qualities. On the other hand, there is the infant. This cute,
innocent, helpless, inspiring creature seemingly demands a measure
of sentimentality incomensurate with its nonpersonhood when rights
and responsibilities are considered. And no matter how we may feel
about our or other's infants, in the realm of morality, these
sentiments cannot logically override its essential nonpersonhood,
and without it, its failure to be the bearer of rights and
responsibilities. For all that, however, the importance of the
definition of 'person' has not yet "caught on" to the extent that I
should have thought it would, and it has been some fifteen years
since Tooley, Thomson, Singer and Frankfurt and others have been
arguing their cases before the philosophic public.

106. Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, op. cit., and Michael

 

Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, op. cit.

 

107. Frankfurt, Harry C., "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of
a Person", op. cit.

108. Ehglehardt, H. Tristram, "Medicine and the Concept of
Person", Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, op.cit., 94-101.

109. We might begin by close studies of Dworkin's Law's Empire,

 

(Belknap/Harvard, 1986) and Taking Rights Seriouslyr (Harvard,

 

1977); Gewirth's Human. Rights and Reason and.Morality, (Chicago,

 

 

1982/1978); Feinberg's Doing? and Deservipg, (Princeton, 1970) and

 

171

Harm. to Others, (Oxford, 1984); Meldon's Human Rights, (wadsworth,

 

 

1970) and Rights and Persons, (California, 1977); and Regan's The

 

Case for Animal Rights, (Calif—ornia, 1982).
110. Lakatos, Imre, "Falsification and the Methodology of

Scientific Research Programmes", in Criticism and the Growth of

 

Knowledge, edited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, (Cambridge
university Press, 1974), 91-196.

111. Ibid., 133.

112. An interesting book along these lines is Peter Singer's The
Expandipgy Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, (New American Library,
1981).

113. Lakatos, op. cit., 133.

114. Ibid., 134.

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