Personhood

Quick Preface : To philosophers, ‘personhood’ is a technical term. ‘Person’ doesn’t equal ‘human.’ “Human” is a biological term, you’re human if you have human DNA. But ‘person’ is a moral term. For a philosopher, persons are part of our moral community and thus they deserve moral consideration. The argument about personhood explains why we disagree about abortion, and euthanasia, and capital punishment.

6 theories about personhood :

Our first theory comes from an American legal scholar named John Noonan, he calls it the calls it the genetic criterion. This view says you are a person if you have human DNA, and you are not a person if you don’t. But if all you need to be a person is human DNA, then cells are persons and so are corpses. None of our favourite androids like R2-D2 nor does it include Chewie, Gimli (a dwarf), the list is endless. Even though they seem more person than corpses.

The second theory is from American philosopher Mary Ann Warren, she offers five criteria that she believes, together, constitute personhood: consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity to communicate, and self-awareness. This definitely rules out fetuses but it also rules out young children who don't become self-aware until 18 months.

The third theory is that of social criterion. It says that you matter, morally, when you matter to someone. It allows for society’s understanding of a person to change over time, which seems good when we’re thinking about something like expanding rights to protect primates, for example. Although it also means that, if no one happens to care for a particular being, that being simply isn’t a person. It would mean that fully rational, healthy, functioning adult human beings might not have personhood just because no one happens to care about them.

The fourth theory come from contemporary Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, who says that the key to personhood is sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain. This criterion ignores the whole idea of species altogether, and instead looks at a being’s capacity to suffer.This view says it’s wrong to cause unnecessary pain to anything that can feel, but if it can’t feel, well, we do no harm by excluding it from the group of beings that matter. So, fetuses younger than at least 23 weeks are not persons, nor are humans in persistent vegetative states. But any animal with a developed central nervous system is a person.

The fifth theory, states that personhood is a right, a sort of ticket to the moral community that you forfeit when you violate the laws of society in a major way. In this view, you can surrender your own personhood through grossly inhumane actions. This line of reasoning is one way that people justify capital punishment.

The last (and in my opinion most valid) theory:

So far we’ve been talking about personhood like it’s a switch. But a more nuanced option is the gradient theory of personhood, which says it’s not all or nothing it’s more like a dimmer switch. In this view, a fetus would slowly grow in personhood throughout pregnancy, as cognition develops.

For instance, you might think a fetus has some degree of personhood, and so deserves moral consideration. But when the fetus is compared with its mother, a being with far more personhood, then the mother becomes the priority. This doesn’t deny the personhood of either being, but it allows that some beings have more personhood than others.

- Juliette