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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts in Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
As persons, we are importantly different from all other creatures in the universe. But in what, exactly, does this difference consist? What kinds of entities are we, and what makes each of us the same person today that we were yesterday? Could we survive having all of our memories erased and replaced with false ones? What about if our bodies were destroyed and our brains were transplanted into android bodies, or if instead our minds were simply uploaded to computers? In this engaging and accessible introduction to these important philosophical questions, Amy Kind brings together three different areas of research: the nature of personhood, theories of personal identity over time, and the constitution of self-identity. Surveying the key contemporary theories in the philosophical literature, Kind analyzes and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. As she shows, our intuitions on these issues often pull us in different directions, making it difficult to develop an adequate general theory. Throughout her discussion, Kind seamlessly interweaves a vast array of up-to-date examples drawn from both real life and popular fiction, all of which greatly help to elucidate this central topic in metaphysics. A perfect text for readers coming to these issues for the first time, Persons and Personal Identity engages with some of the deepest and most important questions about human nature and our place in the world, making it a vital resource for students and researchers alike.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
1: The Nature of Persons
1.1 Notions of Personhood
1.2 Metaphysical Personhood
1.3 Case Studies: Dolphins and the Great Apes
Further Reading
2: The Psychological Approach to Personal Identity
2.1 Locke's Memory Theory
2.2 Senility and Sleep
2.3 The Problem of Circularity
2.4 The Psychological Theory
2.5 Transplants, Avatars, and Teleportation
2.6 The Method of Thought Experiments
Further Reading
3: The Problem of Reduplication
3.1 The Case of the Transporter Malfunction
3.2 The Non-Branching Requirement
3.3 Identity Doesn't Matter
3.4 Fusion and Longevity
3.5 Four-Dimensionalism
Further Reading
4: The Physical Approach to Personal Identity
4.1 Undercutting Intuitions
4.2 The Bodily Theory
4.3 Animalism
4.4 The Brain Theory
4.5 The Problem of Multiplicity
Further Reading
5: From Reidentification to Characterization
5.1 The Further Fact View
5.2 Hybrid Views
5.3 What Are We looking For From a Theory of Personal Identity?
5.4 The Characterization Question
Further Reading
6: Narrative Identity
6.1 Narrative Structure
6.2 The Self-Narrative View
6.3 The Case in Favor
6.4 The Case Against
6.5 Summing Up
Further Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Series page
Key Concepts in Philosophy
Guy Axtell,
Objectivity
Heather Battaly,
Virtue
Lisa Bortolotti,
Irrationality
Joseph Keim Campbell,
Free Will
Roy T. Cook,
Paradoxes
Douglas Edwards,
Properties
Ian Evans and Nicholas D. Smith
, Knowledge
Bryan Frances,
Disagreement
Douglas Kutach,
Causation
Carolyn Price,
Emotion
Darrell P. Rowbottom,
Probability
Daniel Speak,
The Problem of Evil
Matthew Talbert,
Moral Responsibility
Deborah Perron Tollefsen,
Groups as Agents
Joshua Weisberg,
Consciousness
Chase Wrenn,
Truth
Copyright page
Copyright © Amy Kind 2015
The right of Amy Kind to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5431-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5432-4 (pb)
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kind, Amy.
Persons and personal identity / Amy Kind.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-5431-7 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-5432-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Individualism. 2. Persons. 3. Identity (Psychology) I. Title.
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Acknowledgements
I was first seriously introduced to issues about personal identity as an undergraduate in a class taught by Jyl Gentzler. As a graduate student, my thinking about persons and personal identity was further shaped by various classes and helpful conversations with professors such as Robert Adams, Joseph Almog, Keith Donnellan, Kit Fine, and Seana Shiffrin. I am grateful to all of them.
The Berger Institute at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) provided me with a summer research grant that facilitated some of my early work on this project. I greatly appreciate their support.
One of the joys of teaching at CMC has been to get to work closely with our excellent students. My thinking about persons and personal identity has been shaped over the years by students in various classes, perhaps most notably in the sections that I've taught of Metaphysics, Metaphysics of Persons, and Philosophy through Science Fiction. I am especially indebted to two CMC students in particular. First, this book would not have been possible without the help of my undergraduate research assistant Sara Stern. Not only did she conduct an extensive literature search for me at an early stage of this project, but she also synthesized her results in several insightful and beautifully compiled reports. Chapter 6 in particular was greatly influenced by her work. More recently, this book has benefitted from the careful comments and bibliographic attention provided by my undergraduate research assistant Jared Goldberg.
This book has been significantly improved by all of the feedback I've received along the way. Thanks go to my colleague Eric Yang for providing helpful comments on the entire draft manuscript. Thanks also go to the three anonymous referees who reviewed and made suggestions on my original proposal, and the two anonymous referees who reviewed the draft manuscript. I am especially grateful for the support of the Polity editorial team – and particularly Emma Hutchinson and Pascal Porcheron – throughout this project.
I dedicate this book to the three most important persons in my life, my husband Frank Menetrez, and my two sons, Stephen and Joseph.
1The Nature of Persons
On the list of the world's most famous gorillas, King Kong probably takes the top spot. Right behind him in second place we might likely find Koko, an eastern lowland gorilla whose fame owes not to Hollywood – though she has been featured in several films – but rather to her prowess at American Sign Language. Since the age of one, Koko has been learning to sign as part of her participation in The Gorilla Language Project, a study led by developmental psychologist Francine Patterson that aims to gather information about the intelligence and linguistic capabilities of gorillas. Now in her forties, Koko reportedly has a working vocabulary of over 1,000 signs and understands approximately 2,000 spoken English words. According to her handlers, she exhibits self-awareness, a sense of humor, empathy, and a wide range of emotions. On IQ tests, she has scored between 70 and 95 (where a score of 100 is considered to be normal for humans). Demonstrating considerable linguistic creativity, Koko has created new signs, modified existing signs to extend their meanings, and combined signs in novel ways. To mention one such example that is especially interesting for our purposes here, she has referred to herself using sign language as a “fine gorilla person.”
On the face of it, Koko's self-description might seem to be a contradiction in terms. In ordinary speech, we frequently take the term “person” to mean “human being” – member of the species Homo sapiens – and there can't possibly be any such thing as a gorilla human being, fine or not. But there's another sense of the word “person,” one often employed in philosophical discussion, in which there is no contradiction in referring to a non-human individual as a person. Our interest in this chapter, and throughout this book as a whole, is in personhood in this latter sense. In the philosophical sense of personhood, the terms “person” and “human being” should not be taken to be synonymous, and it is at least conceptually possible both that there be non-human persons and that there be non-person humans. That's not yet to say that Koko is right to call herself a person – whether any existing non-humans should be considered persons (and if so, which) is a question that we'll consider later in section 1.3. But for now, what's important to note is that the issue is not settled simply as a matter of definition. Although we can specify what a human being is in biological terms, we cannot give a similar biological specification of what a person is. The nature of persons is not something that can be revealed by genetic testing or other laboratory analysis.
Our inquiry into persons and personal identity throughout this book will be a metaphysical one. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and structure of the world. It's perhaps easiest to understand the study of metaphysics by contrasting it with epistemology, another branch of philosophy. In epistemology, philosophers are concerned with the nature of knowledge and justification. We might ask, for example: What justifies the belief that God exists? Or: Can we have knowledge of God's existence? By contrast, in metaphysics, philosophers are concerned not with our knowledge of the world, but with the world itself. We thus might ask: Does God exist? Or: What is the nature of God?
There are many interesting epistemological questions about persons, prime among them the question of how an individual can know of the existence of any person other than herself. Perhaps I am the only person who exists, and the apparent persons around me are really just mindless automata. What justifies me in believing otherwise? (In philosophy of mind, questions of this sort are often discussed under the framework of the problem of other minds.) In this book, we'll put these epistemological questions aside to focus on metaphysical questions about persons. We'll focus on three questions in particular:
The identification question:
What properties must a being have to count as a person?
The reidentification question:
What makes a person the same person over time?
The characterization question:
What makes a person the person that she is?
It is probably not surprising that there is considerable philosophical disagreement about how these questions should be answered. What may be more surprising is that there is also considerable disagreement about how these questions should be properly formulated and how they are related to one another – in fact, there is even disagreement about whether they are related to one another. As we take up these questions over the course of the book, we will see how these disagreements come into play. We start, however, with the identification question.
1.1 Notions of Personhood
In exploring the properties necessary for a thing to count as a person, the target of our investigation in this first chapter is what's often referred to as metaphysical personhood. Unfortunately, this is not the only notion of personhood in play in philosophical discussion. Philosophers talk not only of metaphysical personhood but also of moral personhood, and they are not always careful to distinguish the two. Moreover, the notion of personhood plays a central role in many legal systems. Thus, before we can begin our inquiry into metaphysical personhood, we need first to disentangle these various notions.
The notion of person has always been of central importance to Western legal systems. Consider, for example, the all-important due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution: “[No State shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” To be a person before the law – to be a legal person – is to be the subject of legal rights and obligations. But who counts as a person in this sense?
First, it's clear that being human is not itself sufficient for being a legal person. At various times, and in various societies, legal personhood has been denied to classes of human beings such as women and slaves. British law prior to the middle of the nineteenth century did not recognize married women as legal persons. As explained by Sir William Blackstone in his famous eighteenth-century Commentaries on the Laws of England, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous Dred Scott case of 1857 that the US Constitution considered slaves to be property, not persons. In recent decades, the notion of legal personhood has been a hotly contested issue with respect to human fetuses. Ruling on this issue in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared that the word “person” as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to the unborn.
Second, it's also clear that being human fails to be necessary for being a legal person. Perhaps the most obvious example stems from the granting of legal personhood to corporations. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in the nineteenth century that corporations were explicitly declared to be legal persons in the sense of the Fourteenth Amendment. Given that a corporation consists of a collection of human beings, this declaration might not seem to fully sever the link between being human and being a legal person, but there are also numerous examples of legal systems having granted personhood to inanimate objects such as temples, church buildings, and ships. Moreover, in recent years, legal scholars have contemplated whether we might appropriately extend legal personhood to the great apes (Francione 1993), computer systems with artificial intelligence (Solum 2008), and natural objects such as forests, rivers, and oceans (Stone 1972). In a historic ruling in late 2014, an Argentinean appeals court recognized Sandra, a captive orangutan, as a non-human person who accordingly has the basic right of bodily autonomy. As a result of the ruling, Sandra will be transferred from the Buenos Aires zoo to an animal sanctuary.
As this suggests, an entity might be a legal person relative to one legal system yet not a legal person relative to another. Whether a given entity counts as a legal person does not depend solely on the entity's nature but rather on facts about a given legal system. This sharply differentiates the notion of legal personhood from the notion of moral personhood, in which facts about the nature of the entity are taken to be paramount.
Generally speaking, when we say that an entity has moral personhood, we include it as part of our moral community and treat it as deserving of moral consideration. Sometimes moral personhood is identified specifically with having the right to life. In this way of viewing the notion, what it is for an entity to be a person in the moral sense is for it to have the right to life. More commonly, however, the notion of moral personhood is understood more broadly so that what it is for an entity to be a person in the moral sense is for it to be an agent with rights and responsibilities.
Suppose that Bill has come to visit his friend Jack and that, after a few too many drinks, Bill becomes increasingly belligerent for no apparent reason. First he picks up Jack's favorite lamp and smashes it to bits. Next he kicks Jack's cat. And finally he slaps Jack across the face. Clearly, each of these actions was wrong, and Bill is probably not going to be invited over again anytime soon. But while it was wrong to slap Jack because it wrongs him, and while I suspect that many of us would agree that it was wrong to kick the cat because it wrongs the cat, matters are different when it comes to the lamp. What makes the smashing of the lamp wrong was not that it wrongs the lamp. The fact that the lamp belongs to Jack, and that he values it, makes it unacceptable for Bill to smash it. But the lamp, lacking any interests of its own, cannot be morally wronged. It is not the kind of thing that can have any rights, and likewise, not the kind of thing to which we have any moral obligations. Unlike Jack and the cat, the lamp lacks moral status.
Treating both Jack and the cat as having moral status does not commit us to saying that the wrong done to Jack and the wrong done to the cat were on a par. There are all sorts of reasons that it might be worse to harm a human being than to harm a cat. For example, some philosophers have claimed that moral status – and hence moral personhood – comes in degrees, so perhaps a human has a fuller degree of moral personhood than a cat (see, e.g., Warren 1997). That said, it's also worth noting that not everyone agrees that a cat has any degree of moral personhood at all. Historically, this latter view has been closely associated with Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher. On Kant's view, the cat, like the lamp, is a mere thing.
Our stance on issues of this kind depends on our account of moral personhood – that is, on what feature or set of features we think an entity has to have in order for it to be a moral person. Accounts of moral personhood attempt to specify its necessary and sufficient conditions. To say that a condition is necessary for moral personhood is to say that all entities counting as persons in the moral sense must have met that condition; meeting the condition is required for moral personhood. To say that a condition is sufficient for moral personhood is to say that any entities meeting that condition count as persons in the moral sense; meeting the condition is enough for moral personhood. Thus, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for moral personhood specifies the conditions such that all and only entities meeting those conditions are moral persons.
What I'll call species accounts treat membership in a particular species – typically, the human species – to be both necessary and sufficient for personhood. Such views, which seem to have their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, are frequently defended on religious grounds. Often cited in this context is the following biblical passage from the book of Genesis:
God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
(Genesis 1:27–1:28, American Standard Version)
This passage seems to suggest two different considerations relevant to the defense of species accounts: (1) humans have special moral status because they (and only they) are made in God's image; and (2) humans have special moral status because God gave them dominion over the animals.
Species accounts have been subject to considerable criticism in contemporary discussion of moral personhood. Apart from a theological justification – i.e., apart from simply taking it to be true as a matter of religious faith – it is difficult to see how such an account could be defended. Moreover, many philosophers have charged that a focus on species seems as arbitrary as a focus on race or sex or nationality. For example, Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1975 book Animal Liberation has been extremely influential in the fight for animal rights, argues as follows:
Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.
(Singer 1975/1990, 9)
When we condemn racism and sexism, we do so because the focus on characteristics such as skin color or gender are irrelevant to one's moral standing. How could those be features that make a difference? The criticism of speciesism is parallel. How could the mere fact that one is a member of one species rather than another be relevant to one's moral standing? The fact that we are members of the species Homo sapiens – as opposed, say, to the species Felis catus or Giraffa camelopardalis – just identifies the particular group of living organisms with which we are capable of breeding so as to produce fertile offspring.
In response to these criticisms, some defenders of species accounts have dug in their heels. For example, American philosopher Carl Cohen not only identifies himself as a speciesist but also insists that speciesism is essential for correct moral reasoning. Dismissing the analogy between speciesism and racism as “insidious,” Cohen claims that while there are no morally relevant distinctions between members of different races, there are morally relevant distinctions between members of different species. Unlike, say, cats or giraffes, humans engage in moral reflection, are morally autonomous, are members of moral communities, and recognize just claims against their own interest (Cohen 1986).
Interestingly, however, this sort of defense of speciesism seems to undercut itself. The invocation of features such as the capacity for reflection and autonomy suggests that it's not species membership in and of itself that matters, but rather the fact that being a member of the species Homo sapiens tends to go along with the possession of certain features. But as we will discuss in more detail below, not all members of the human species have the capacity for reflection and autonomy (e.g., the severely cognitively impaired) and there may be members of other species that do. And the problem here is not just with the particular features that Cohen has picked out. More generally, it's hard to see how one could come up with a list of such features that would apply to all and only human beings. Thus, either one is back to the claim that species itself is all that matters – in which case the charge of speciesism again seems to have bite – or one has really switched to a different kind of account, one in which moral personhood consists in the possession of certain features.
Since the features that tend to be discussed in this context are mental in nature, this latter kind of account is what I'll call a mental capacity account of moral personhood. On this kind of view, what matters for moral personhood is not what species you belong to but rather what psychological attributes you have. Most accounts of moral personhood on offer in contemporary philosophical discussions are mental capacity accounts, although there is considerable disagreement about how exactly to specify the relevant mental capacity or capacities. Is it consciousness? Self-consciousness? Rationality? Autonomy? Sentience? Or some combination thereof? To give just a few examples of how such accounts have been developed:
Mary Anne Warren marks out five traits as central to the notion of moral personhood: consciousness, the capacity of reasoning, being capable of self-motivated activity, having the capacity to communicate, and having the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness (Warren 1973).
Michael Tooley defines moral personhood in terms of self-consciousness. In order for an entity to be a moral person, it must be a subject of experiences and be aware of itself as a subject of experiences (Tooley 1983).
Daniel Dennett offers six conditions that he thinks are necessary for moral personhood: (1) persons are rational beings; (2) persons are beings whose behavior can be explained and predicted in terms of intentional states, i.e., states like beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions, expectations, and so on; (3) for an entity to be a person, a certain stance must be adopted with respect to it; in other words, “our treating him or her or it in this certain way is somehow and to some extent constitutive of its being a person” (Dennett 1976, 178); (4) the entity must be capable of reciprocating this stance in some way; (5) persons must be capable of verbal communication; and (6) persons are conscious in some special way, perhaps by being self-conscious.
Tom Regan focuses on what he calls
being the subject-of-a-life
. Being the subject-of-a-life requires an entity to
have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their being the object of anyone else's interests.
(Regan 2004, 243)
As we will see, mental capacities also feature centrally in discussions of metaphysical personhood. I will thus postpone further discussion of them until section 1.2 when we take up this notion in detail. But before we conclude our discussion of moral personhood, it will be useful to make explicit two important general facts about mental capacity accounts: first, that they leave open the possibility that there could be non-human moral persons, and second, that they leave open the possibility that not all humans are moral persons.
While it is not clear that animals such as cats and dogs will meet all the requirements laid out above, there are other mammals such as dolphins and the great apes that might. (The mental capacities of animals such as dolphins and apes will be discussed in more detail below in section 1.3.) We can also imagine all sorts of alien races that meet these requirements – from Wookiees like Chewbacca to Hobbits like Bilbo Baggins. In fact, we can even imagine machines that meet the specifications of mental capacity accounts. Consider Andrew, the sentient robot in Isaac Asimov's Bicentennial Man, or Data, the android Starfleet officer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, both of whom seem to possess many of the relevant mental capacities. Thus, if mental capacity accounts are correct, not only does it fail to matter what species you are, but also it doesn't even matter whether you're biologically alive.
But mental capacity accounts also tend to exclude many humans from the class of moral persons. Newborn infants, for example, don't yet have many of the mental capacities listed above. Some of these capacities also seem absent in individuals with congenital brain damage who are significantly cognitively impaired, or individuals in persistent vegetative states. Of course, even if such individuals are excluded from the class of moral persons, that is not to imply that they can be indiscriminately killed. But it does suggest that an analysis of why it would be wrong to kill such individuals would have to rely on indirect reasons, not reasons relating to the moral personhood of the individuals themselves.
This unpalatable consequence has suggested to some contemporary philosophers that mental capacity accounts are misguided, and they have correspondingly offered various alternative accounts. Many of these alternatives can be grouped together as versions of what I'll call relational accounts. According to such accounts, the problem with mental capacity accounts stems not from focusing on the wrong sorts of capacities but from focusing on capacities at all. The problem is that capacities are intrinsic properties of individuals. Roughly speaking, an intrinsic property is one that an individual has in and of itself, a property that it would have even if it were the only thing in the world. But it might naturally be thought that our moral rights and duties to one another arise at least based in part on our relationships to one another. Building on this idea, relational accounts claim that an individual's moral personhood derives at least in part from the individual's place in a complex web of social and interpersonal relationships. Newborns and individuals with brain damage, even if they lack certain intrinsic mental capacities, stand in these kinds of relationships and thus are not ruled out as persons in the moral sense.
As this brief discussion suggests, figuring out the right account of moral personhood is a very tricky business, with conflicting intuitions often pulling us in different directions. In fact, the difficulty has led some philosophers to treat the very notion of moral personhood with suspicion and to suggest that we abandon the search for a proper account of it. As Jane English has argued, “There is no single core of necessary and sufficient features which we can draw upon with the assurance that they constitute what really makes a person; there are only features that are more or less typical” (English 2005, 234–5). Likewise, Tom Beauchamp has suggested that our concept of person “is simply not orderly, precise, or systematic in a way that supports one general philosophical theory to the exclusion of another” (Beauchamp 1999, 319).
Despite such skepticism, however, discussion of moral personhood continues to play a key role in debates about a wide array of social practices and public policies – from disputes about abortion, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide to those about factory farming and vegetarianism. It should thus come as no surprise that discussion of moral personhood is often fraught with tension. Fortunately, it is not our purpose here to adjudicate this issue. Our interest in moral personhood stems primarily from the need to distinguish it from metaphysical personhood.
As we have seen, legal and moral personhood are normative or evaluative notions. To ascribe legal personhood to an entity is to say that it has a certain legal status, i.e., that it has certain legal rights. To ascribe moral personhood to an entity is to say that it has a certain moral status, i.e., that it has certain moral rights. But the ascription of legal or moral personhood to an entity does not thereby tell us anything about what kind of thing it is or what properties it has. In contrast, metaphysical personhood is a descriptive notion. In ascribing metaphysical personhood to an entity we thereby provide at least a partial description of it.
Of course, it seems plausible that moral and metaphysical personhood are very closely connected. Perhaps such notions even perfectly coincide, such that all and only persons in the metaphysical sense are persons in the moral sense. But this result would not show that the two notions are the same. To use a familiar philosophical example, it turns out that all and only creatures that have a heart are creatures with kidneys – having a circulatory system requires both a pump (the heart) and a waste removal system (the kidneys). But the notion “creature with a heart” is different from that of “creature with a kidney”; the first phrase has a different meaning from the second phrase.
In what follows, we'll proceed under the assumption that metaphysical personhood and moral personhood are, likewise, distinct notions. Not everyone agrees with this assumption. For example, after developing his account of moral personhood, Dennett claims that the metaphysical and moral notions of personhood “are not separate and distinct concepts but just two different and unstable resting points on the same continuum” (Dennett 1976, 193). But given that inquiries in metaphysics generally aim for non-normative descriptions of the fundamental features of reality, it seems worthwhile to try to keep the metaphysical notion of person separate from the moral notion of person.
One might worry that the separation of metaphysical personhood from moral personhood deprives it of any real interest. If our inquiry into the notion of metaphysical personhood will not shed light on how such a being should be treated, or on whether we owe it moral consideration, then perhaps there is not much point to it. As might be expected, however, I think such a worry is misguided. First, a notion of metaphysical personhood that's wholly distinct from the notion of moral personhood might well be of considerable use in attempting to construct an account of moral personhood. But second, and in my view more importantly, the notion of metaphysical personhood has importance in its own right. What could be more interesting, more important, than achieving a deeper understanding of ourselves, and of what kind of beings we fundamentally are?
1.2 Metaphysical Personhood
Consider a non-disabled adult human being. Such a being is undoubtedly a person in the metaphysical sense, if anything is. What are some other examples of persons in the metaphysical sense? There are various sorts of candidates we might consider:
human beings in different life-stages
human beings with various disabilities
non-human mammals
other animals
single-celled organisms
alien beings
non-organic beings
non-physical beings
Many of these candidates undoubtedly belong to the class of metaphysical persons, while some undoubtedly do not. In some cases, the answer is not clear cut. This might be because we need more information: What kind of animal is it? What kind of alien? What capacities does it have? But it also might be because our intuitions about metaphysical personhood are still somewhat muddled. The discussion of this section aims to sharpen those intuitions. In doing so, I will usually drop the qualifiers “metaphysical” and “in the metaphysical sense” – references to persons and personhood from here on should be understood to be picking out metaphysical persons and metaphysical personhood.
