“Personhood” for Beginners

Personhood is merely a legal concept. I do not think it exists outside of law. Laws govern the relationship between humans primarily. When laws apply to non-humans, they do so through humans. One cannot call an animal to court for breaking the law.
Non-humans cannot be persons because they cannot be held accountable for their actions under the law.
Secondly, the characteristics that might be presumed to confer personhood on an animal are those characteristics that make humans persons that are accountable to the law. Differences about the rights of fetuses hinge on such characteristics and the law tends to vary according to variations in the interpretation of when the desired characteristics are developed in the developmental process. No culture regards sperm cells and unfertilized egg cells as persons but all cultures consider a living child a person upon delivery.
Personhood cannot exist without accountability under the law.

Travis, you may want to check out my thesis on this at http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/glenn.html, exploring evolving notions of personhood. 

@Denngy The philosophical discourse on what constitutes a person has been going on for millenia—and the law is evolving to recognize changing notions of personhood—women, children, and slaves were not always persons under the law.  And, as I am fond of saying to my students, what is legal is not always ethical and what is ethical is not always legal.  Social discourse and consensus is important in determining legal norms.

@Travis
The piece is interesting, sure, but its arguments are based on one, single, wrong premise - and therefore, all your conclusions could be easily dismissed.

“Well, the concept of non-human personhood grows from this. Some animals are quite intelligent.”
This is false, and quite superficial too. You insist on the idea that, somehow, humans (should) attribute personhood to other lifeforms on cognitive grounds. You seem to imply that some humans decided to respect beasts because first they noticed how smart they are. You completely fail to consider how compassion plays a fundamental role here.

For example, a severely retarded man is typically considered a person. Yet, according to your strange criterion, his poor cognitive abilities would make him less of a person than a healthy, normal pig. Is a comatose man - a person? No sign of cognitive abilities. Even emotions do not show up. He is definitely not a sentient being. So, we should be allowed to do anything to him - like, cut him open here and there, and allow our pet rats to feed on him. Rats are smart.

Do you realize the monstrosity of your ethical argument? Even when you slightly reformulate it towards the end - saying that its evolutionary development is another possible criterion. You still cannot avoid to create a hierarchy of lifeforms in your mind. You still think that only those at the top of the pyramid should be considered persons. You do not realize how such logical framework can backfire and deprive of personhood important segments of the human population. Not even one word on compassion, or religious commitment to the well-being of other creatures.

Some logical rigor would not hurt here. So, do you consider sentience a sufficient condition for personhood? - a necessary condition? - both? The only other condition that you mention - the phenotypic similarity - is immediately dismissed as an irrational bias. I agree. But is it also irrelevant? I do not think so.

@Linda
“And, as I am fond of saying to my students, what is legal is not always ethical and what is ethical is not always legal.”
Thanks for reminding this immensely important principle. People nowadays tend to forget the distinction (and sometimes the clash) between those two levels. This is why so many fail to see how their governments institute everyday new, oppressive legal tools to keep them in line. Sometimes, going against the law is indeed the only moral thing to do.

Andre,

Very good points. I agree. In fact, I’m pretty sure I did agree in the article.

Right beneath the line about intelligence, you will see that I describe attributes of gorillas, one of which is that they mourn their dead. That is not mere intelligence, but emotional awareness. And while that could be a criterion with which to claim personhood, I never say that it is.

The part about the ants is important. They obviously cannot think for themselves. If you swipe your finger across their line, the pheromones are disturbed and unless a scout comes out to retrace it, the ants that are cut off from the trail will die. That is not intelligence, nor sentience. It’s impossible to tell if they have any real emotional presence. Ants are so highly specialized that they are like machines. Again, we have traced them back to when dinosaurs were roaming the Earth. The point there was that if we try to point out things that “make us human” we can easily see how we lag behind other species in a lot of ways.

This article was not meant to describe absolutes. I wasn’t taking a position on the issue either way. It was meant to make the reader stop and think before kicking the dog or eating that sausage.

I think you may have missed the entire point of the article, and maybe I didn’t make my ramblings quite clear… We tend to think that species at the top of the pyramid are more deserving of being given personhood, but if you look closely enough, you can see personlike traits in almost everything.

As for your hypothetical regarding someone with special needs vs. a pig? You will also notice my claim in the article that humans have a right, not a privilege, of personhood. That pretty much destroys that “monstrous” ethical argument theory, doesn’t it?

Thanks for reading and engaging.

Unreported World - Last of the great apes

www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/episode-guide/series-2012/episode-6

Watched this episode last week. For anyone in any doubt as to the status of personhood for apes, checkout the footage with the young orphaned gorilla - I honestly admit I can see little difference here between the empathy, compassion and mannerisms of these apes from humans.. How about you?

Subscription for Channel 4OD is FREE, all programmes are FREE to watch.

@Leland

Thanks for engaging - and also for the explanatory comment. Of course I am very sympathetic with the spirit of your piece. All I wanted to do was - to suggest a different approach on the matter.

If the goal of the article was merely to invite people to think twice about dismissing animal rights as something laughable - obviously you did a good job. However, its rhetorical structure could be easily attacked, and its conclusions invalidated. So, to make a better case for nonhuman animal rights, I would have employed a different strategy.

The crucial point, I believe, is where you say that humans have a right, not a privilege, of personhood. This is very much incorrect. Personhood is not a right at all. It is the prerequisite for having rights. Only persons have rights. We should bear in mind that “being a person” is a human concept, and therefore humans attribute it to other lifeforms according to their taste. There is no reciprocity in this. Yes, humans might attribute personhood to certain animals (in the Czech civic code, if I am not mistaken, dogs are considered persons, for example), but it is a gift from us, humans, to them, beasts. Dogs cannot rally, protest, strike, or sabotage our social order to press politicians to pass a pro-doggie legislation.

Typically, intelligence and sentience are not considered particularly relevant factors in these matters. Above, I gave certain human examples to show you how we are inclined to consider persons even organisms completely devoid of sentience, emotions, and intelligence. Sacredness is the trick. Take human embryos, for example. Many people consider them persons, even at the earliest stages of development. The reason is - because they consider human life sacred, no matter what. Therefore, any individual human organism, no matter its developmental conditions or cognitive capacities, is a person, and therefore entitled to a number of fundamental rights.

Women, and weak human minorities were granted the rank of “persons”, only after long, civic battles. They had the strength and the strategic capacity to influence our legislative machine, and the social discourse altogether. Animals and human children cannot do that. And, indeed, even nowadays their will means nothing, they are tutored and moved around, regardless of their individual preferences. Sometimes they are abused. Animals, in particular, are universally enslaved and, often, killed - treated as a mere alimentary resource for our species.

So, why don’t we focus on compassion and on the essential sacredness of all individual lifeforms instead? There is a very beautiful text, from St. Augustine. It is quite old, but still important. He examines the reasons behind vegetarianism - and he dismisses the notion of animal rights on practical grounds. He argues that our lives, and in particular our alimentary lives, would not be sustainable without systematic abuses on beasts. But now we have artificial meat. We have technological tools capable of making our lives compatible with universal compassion. So, you see, a Christian champion was almost ready to embrace the notion of animal rights, if only people could live without meat, and animal slaves. Buddhists and Hindus are already there. Now, also we can. We just have to light once more this religious, compassionate light - the light behind our ethical judgments.

Andre, I think we are kindred spirits ;>); beautifully written ~!

A clear, succinct column here, Travis. I think we’d have lots to discuss on the matter.
Cheers!

Helping to build an equitable framework for rights devoid of anthropocentric and biocentric bias is transhumanism’s crucial political mission. Any desirable technological future hinges on defeating speciesism and substrate chauvinism.

Apes and dolphins can’t fight back very much. As wrong as it is to deny them their rights, the perpetrators (myopic lawmakers and those who elect them) get away with it. Not so when it comes to the children of technological evolution. Enslavement of sentient, self-improving, intellectually superior minds may well turn out to be a Darwin Award winning self-destructive blunder for humanity. Human-racism, if not overcome in time, will create an entirely avoidable us-vs.-them situation and thereby jack up the risk of a human-unfriendly branch of posthumanity.

Personhood implies inalienable fundamental rights, the bedrock of Enlightenment ethics, so better to articulate it clearly. The previously mentioned “sacredness of all individual lifeforms” doesn’t pass the smell test because it’s badly defined, can be understood to exclude people beyond meatspace (mindclones), has no place in secular legislation, and worst of all makes no apparent distinction between people and bacteria.

Compassion is an obvious motivator for advancing a progressive rights culture, though not sufficient alone as a basis of rights, for philosophical and practical reasons. Rats are capable of suffering and thus deserve our compassion. But rodent rights would prohibit every way, painless or not, of keeping the disease-carrying critters in check. Not going to fly until something like the technological Singularity renders it feasible to end violence against animals entirely.

Martine Rothblatt suggested what I think of as the most rational, least convoluted reason for the rights of the person:

“anyone who values being free should be free”

… echoing Isaac Asimov who wrote, “There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state.”

Yes! Fundamental rights are supposed to protect one’s essential interests and freedoms from societal encroachment. How to fairly distribute these rights? By guaranteeing them to all individual beings that may want to be free! This is an emphatically inclusive yet practically applicable principle which ought to be guiding technoprogressive legislation.

@PeterB—I agree that “any desirable technological future hinges on defeating speciesism and substrate chauvinism.”  And I think it is important to have something to strive for, even if we have not yet achieved it. (Basic rights for women comes to mind).  Andre’s plea for recognition of the “essential sacredness of all individual lifeforms” sounds a lot like ahimsa, an approach that Albert Schweitzer advocated and gives us an ideal towards which to strive.

Also,  I think it is helpful to stop thinking of personhood in terms of dichotomies, and think rather in terms of a continuum. In the law, there is this notion of proportional autonomy, a concept introduced to me by Stephen Wise, law professor and author of “Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals.”  As you point out, though, this approach needs to be “emphatically inclusive yet practically applicable”—I suspect that it will be slow going and decided on a case by case basis, unless there is more technoprogressive legislation.

@Linda
Thanks for your words. Probably we are kindred spirits indeed. It is good to mirror ourselves in other individuals, at least occasionally, along the way. So, if you will ever visit Italy, let me know, I’d be glad to offer you a coffee, or any other conversational beverage of your liking
Also, you were right in pointing out how Oriental teachings influenced my opinion. However, I do believe there are several cultural and mental paths that lead to the same, universally compassionate conclusion.

@PeterB
“How to fairly distribute these rights? By guaranteeing them to all individual beings that may want to be free!”
I disagree. You advocate a very dangerous approach. I suggest you to take a look to the WPA slave narratives. There you can read many nostalgic impression of ex-slaves. Many of these men and women missed their days of slavery, when they had someone taking care of their needs. Work was not so hard, in the end. Alcohol was often available. Slaves, apparently,enjoyed a great promiscuity, no responsibility. It is all there, in those interviews. Many slaves preferred slavery over freedom.
According to your criterion - we should not guarantee any right to those people - possibly not even personhood. They explicitly said that they did not like to be freed. And, it is not only a bias of ex-slaves. Unfortunately - many, many men and women out there are ready to give up all the freedom they might have, in exchange for a promise of absolute security. How can you know which animals want to be free? Leopards usually kill themselves if caged - they repeatedly slam their head against metal bars, in the vain attempt to break free. Rag-doll cats endure confinement much more quietly. But, can we really tell anything about their desires? Do you have any theoretical/legal tool that would allow us to identify freedom loving organisms?
On the contrary, we are perfectly able to identify individual living organisms (and, also, contrarily from mindclones, fairies, and pixies - they do exist). Yes, bacteria are included. I do not see why we should not abstain from unnecessary extermination of harmless bacterial colonies. I am very serious. Jainists are also serious about this. Sure, aggressive lifeforms - from multicellular predators, down to simple viruses - can and should be neutralized, or killed. I am not advocating compassionate suicide. But, a compassionate tolerance of all harmless organisms is absolutely feasible. The real question is - do you consider it moral, or not?

Dolphin bubbles do not entail the understanding of universals.  They are perceptual abstractions.  If monkeys understood tools, they would mass-produce them.

André, your first objection misses the point of my position on rights, which argues from the ability to choose, not a particular choice. Ironically, those reports of happy slaves only further display their ability to “grasp the concept [of freedom] and desire the state”. They just figured that freedom had to take a backseat to security for pragmatic (if deplorable) reasons.

The main “theoretical tool” for finding out whether animals can value their autonomy is behavioural studies. See if an animal possesses a sense of self developed enough to tell apart its own wants and needs from those of others. The tests are certainly less than perfect. For instance, the “mirror test” can firmly establish the presence of self-awareness and OTOH may provide only weak evidence of its absence. Hopefully as the Human Connectome and Blue Brain projects move forward, behavioural evidence will be accompanied by stronger neurological evidence enabled through a deeper understanding of the neural patterns underlying basic mental faculties.

Granted, my volition-based approach allows for ambiguities, but which pale against the sheer arbitrariness in your proposal. “unnecessary extermination of harmless bacterial colonies” – okay, should I ring up my lawyer each time before washing my hands? Some people don’t consider higher education as required. Who knew I was being a bacteriocidal supervillain while performing biochemical experiments at university. Morally justified necessity, as opposed to mere necessity, depends on one’s subjective idea of a good life, open to almost limitless interpretation.

The topic here is rights rather than nice nonbinding sentiments. Of course I believe it morally commendable to try to avoid doing harm to other life-forms. That’s not the question. The question is what works as a foundation of law.