henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 2:59 pm
If personhood is natural, innate, and real what are the parameters of personhood? It is not attached to being a biped as birds and some dinosaurs are were bipeds
seems to me: persons possess a certain kind of physical complexity, a peculiar & particular structure, a capacity for self-reference, a capacity for self-awareness, a capacity for self-direction, a capacity for imagining, a capacity for reason, and capacities for a whole whack of other things I'm too lazy to suss out and list
Well, hang on: that's actually not a definition of "person." It's only a definition of "human." Unless we already know that all
humans, and nothing but humans, qualify as
persons, the definition doesn't provide us with any help.
However, historically, women, slaves, pre-born babies, infants and underage children, the comatose, the handicapped, various minorities, non-citizens of this or that state, and so on have, at one time or another, been granted to be human but have been denied full personhood.
For instance, nobody ever doubted that women were human; that's pretty obvious, given the mating cycle of human beings. But until the last century, they were not granted status as "persons" under the law...because they were deemed not to be capable of managing property, voting, or having full citizenship. So they were treated as humans...but not equal persons. In some countries, they still are not recognized as persons.
On the other side are some lunatics who want to include animals as "persons," meaning as bearers of full rights and equal consideration. The head of PETA once wrote, "A dog is a pig is a rat is a boy." Ethicist Peter Singer holds to that kind of a view, since he maintains that a low-functioning child might be ethically equivalent to, or inferior to high-functioning animals, and, he thinks deserve more rights therefore, and even greater immunity from being euthanized.
So to identify what a human is does not give us warrant for determining the limitations or parameters of "personhood." That is because "person" isn't just a
biological category...it's a
moral-relational one. If someone is a "person," then the implication is that they ought to receive the same rights and privileges as any other "person." We "owe" them something.
However, that isn't even the deepest problem. The real problem is this: even if we locate the group of entities we want to grant "personhood", how do we know that being a "person" actually DESERVES any special moral status?
I mean, from a purely secular point of view, all animals and human beings too are nothing but the detritus of an accidental cosmic process. Why should one kind of accidental collocation of cosmic dust get some special status that does not get accorded to another speck of cosmic dust? Where is it written that
that must be done? And if it's written nowhere, then what is this nonsense about "persons"?
If that's true, then NOTHING has special status...not even "persons," even if we can find a way to identify them.
).