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Person
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The term person in common usage means an individual human being. In the fields of law, philosophy, medicine, and others, the term also has specialised context-specific meanings.
In many jurisdictions, for example, a corporation is considered a legal person with standing to sue or be sued in court. In philosophy and medicine, person may mean only humans who are capable of certain kinds of thought, and thus exclude embryos, early fetuses, or adults with certain types of brain damage.
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Encyclopedia
The term person in common usage means an individual human being. In the fields of law, philosophy, medicine, and others, the term also has specialised context-specific meanings.
In many jurisdictions, for example, a corporation is considered a legal person with standing to sue or be sued in court. In philosophy and medicine, person may mean only humans who are capable of certain kinds of thought, and thus exclude embryos, early fetuses, or adults with certain types of brain damage. This could also extend to late fetuses and neonates, dependent on what level of thought is required.
Personhood in theology
Person and personhood were used in concepts in the early Christian theological tradition, during the first centuries A.D. by the Church Fathers. The very concept of person (prosopon in Greek) was the result of a theological dispute, how God, according to the Christian (Orthodox) teaching, can be One and three at the same time. Further explication of the problem let to the formulation that there is one substance (or being) and three persons (hypostases): God Father, God Son and God Holy Spirit, but still just one God, not three. This theological concept of the person as something that has a specific identity and holds the fullness of being, was applied to the human being as well. The Church Fathers interpreted the "icon of God" in man as human ability to exist as a person, having his/her own unique identity in communion with other persons. Later in the West the concept was translated into Latin as persona and was explained by Boethius and St. Augustine as something characterized by rational capacities.
Scientific approach
As an application of Social Psychology. and other disciplines, phenomena such as the perception and attribution of personhood have been scientifically studied. Typical questions addressed in Social Psychology are the accuracy of attribution, processes of perception and the formation of bias. Various other scientific/medical disciplines address the myriad of issues in the development of personality.
Individual rights and responsibility
Closely related to the debate on the definition of personhood is the relationship between persons', individual rights, and ethical responsibility. Many philosophers would agree that all and only people are expected to be ethically responsible, and that all people deserve a varying degree of individual rights. There is less consensus on whether only people deserve individual rights and whether people deserve greater individual rights than non-people. The rights of animals are an example of contention on this issue.
Who is a person?
- Human beings - In contemporary global thought, once human beings are born, personhood is considered automatic.
- Exceptions: - Exceptions to this are often emotive and controversial. Some people have given opinions that fetuses, the disabled, the profoundly and long term brain damaged, those in coma or other persistent vegetative states, may be dubious as regards personhood. Such views are strongly debated from both sides. Historically, personhood has been denied to women, perceived other races, the mentally disabled, and in many tribal societies, all people not from the tribe.
- Animals - Some philosophers and those involved in animal welfare, ethology, animal rights and related subjects, consider that certain animals should also be granted personhood. Commonly named species in this context include the Great Apes and possibly cetaceans or elephants, due to the acknowledged intelligence and intricate societies of such species. In animistic religion, animals, plants, and other entities may be persons or dieties.
- Certain societal constructs - certain social entities, are considered legally as persons, for example some corporations and other legal entities. This is known as legal, or corporate, personhood.
In addition speculatively, there are three other likely categories of beings where personhood might be at issue:
- Unknown intelligent life-forms - for example, should alien life be found to exist, under what circumstances would they be counted as 'persons'?
- Artificial life - at what point might human-created life be considered to have achieved personhood?
- Artificial intelligence - assuming the eventual creation of an intelligent and self-aware system of hardware and software, what criteria would be used to confer or withhold the status of person?
- Modified living beings, cyborgs - for example, how much of a human being can be replaced by artificial parts before personhood is lost?
- Further, if the brain is the reason people are considered persons, then if the human brain and all its thought patterns, memories and other attributes could also in future be transposed faithfully into some form of artificial device (for example to avoid illness such as brain cancer) would the patient still be considered a 'person' after the operation?
- If the person (or "individual") could go back in time and relate to his/her earlier self. Would it then be two persons yet the same being. Or one person in two bodies?
- Are the surgical separations of Siamese twins cases more complicated, challenging and controversial than abortion?
- Do we have to consider whatever "willing and communicative (capable to register its own will) autonomous body" in the universe, no matter about races, an individual (a person)? Do they deserve equal rights with the human race?
Such questions are used by philosophers to clarify thinking concerning what it means to be human, or living, or a person, or an individual.
Implications of the person/non-person debate
The personhood theory has become a pivotal issue in the interdisciplinary field of bioethics. While historically most humans did not enjoy full legal protection as persons (women, children, non-landowners, minorities, slaves, etc.), from the late 18th through the late 20th century, being born as a member of the human species gradually became secular grounds for the basic rights of liberty, freedom from persecution, and humanitarian care.
Since modern movements emerged to oppose animal cruelty (and advocate vegan philosophy) and theorists like Turing have recognized the possibility of artificial minds with human-level competence, the identification of personhood protections exclusively with human species membership has been challenged. On the other hand, some proponents of human exceptionalism (also referred to by its critics as speciesism) have countered that we must institute a strict demarcation of personhood based on species membership in order to avoid the horrors of genocide (based on propaganda dehumanizing one or more ethnicities) or the injustices of forced sterilization (as occurred in many countries to people with low I.Q. scores and prisoners).
While the former advocates tend to be comfortable constraining personhood status within the human species based on basic capacities (e.g. excluding human stem cells, fetuses, and bodies that cannot recover awareness), the latter often wish to include all these forms of human bodies even if they have never had awareness (which some would call pre-people) or had awareness, but could never have awareness again due to massive and irrecoverable brain damage (some would call these post-people). The Vatican has recently been advancing a human exceptionalist understanding of personhood theory, while other communities, such as Christian Evangelicals in the U.S. have sometimes rejected the personhood theory as biased against human exceptionalism. Of course, many religious communities (of many traditions) view the other versions of the personhood theory perfectly compatible with their faith, as do the majority of modern Humanists.
The theoretical landscape of the personhood theory has been altered recently by controversy in the bioethics community concerning an emerging community of scholars, researchers, and activists identifying with an explicitly Transhumanist position, which supports morphological freedom, even if a person changed so much as to no longer be considered a member of the human species (by whatever standard is used to determine that).
Nonhuman sentient beings as persons
The idea of extending personhood to all animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, and animal law courses are now taught in 92 out of 180 law schools in the United States. On May 9, 2008, Columbia University Press will publish by Professor Gary L. Francione of Rutgers University School of Law, a collection of writings that summarizes his work to date and makes the case for non-human animals as persons.
There are also hypothetical persons, sentient non-human persons such as sentient extraterrestrial life and self aware machines. The novel and animated series Ghost in the Shell touch on the potential of inorganic sentience, while classical works of fiction and fantasy regarding extraterrestrials have challenged people to reconsider long held traditional definitions.
See also
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