A person is not always a human being, but is a human being always a person?
Examples abound of non-human persons: Christians believe that the Godhead consists of “three Persons of one substance”; U.S. judges have ruled that corporations are “artificial persons”; fans of Star Trek argue that androids like Data and aliens like Spock are all (fictional) persons; the Spanish Parliament ruled that great apes are “legal persons”; and yesterday I noted that some ethicists believe dolphins are persons too.
Clearly, being a member of the human race is not necessary to be considered a person. But should all human beings be considered persons? Historically, the answer has been a resounding “no.” Slaves, women, infants, Jews, and various “foreigners” are all groups that have at one time or another been denied either legal or moral standing as persons. While they were typically considered to be human they were not afforded the rights that are imbued by personhood. The judgment of later generations, however, has without exception concluded that denying personhood to these members of the human family is a great moral evil. I have no doubt that future generations will judge our culture just as harshly.
Yet while recognition of personhood is necessary for a human to be granted certain positive rights, I contend that it is not required for a basic negative right—the right not to be deprived of life without due process of the law. In other words, people don’t have a right to kill you simply because they don’t want to concede that you are a person.
Rights—whether positive (those that impose an obligation on others) or negative (those that oblige others to refrain from certain activities)—should be assigned based on the ability to respond as moral beings. For example, a Belgian Sheepdog has no moral accountability and thus no moral obligations to me as a person. If he eats my hamster I can’t fault him for not respecting my right to private property. But since I am morally accountable I have an obligation not to cruelly torture and kill the dog for eating my pet rodent.
Likewise, human beings at the earliest stages of development have not developed the moral accountability to be assigned positive rights. For this reason some people, such as philosopher Daniel Dennett, believe that a class of human beings exists that are not yet persons. Let’s call this class of homo sapiens “non-person human beings.”
For the sake of argument, let us concede that certain humans are not persons, just as certain persons are not humans. This means that a human being can be a non-person but that a person (at least a human person) must also be a human being. No one argues that there are classes of human persons that are not also human beings. Being a human being is, therefore, essential to being a human person. This leads to a peculiar insight.
We can kill non-person human beings (e.g., the embryo) and we can kill human persons that are also human beings. But we cannot kill the human person without killing the human being. In fact, you cannot kill any type of person unless it is already a living biological being. The Spanish may be able to kill Great Apes but lawyers cannot kill a corporation. What is being killed is not the person but the being.
This distinction is important because those who argue that it is acceptable to kill non-person humans base their rationale on the claim that what matters is not the being (the living biological organism) but the personhood (a set of functional criteria such as consciousness or rationality). This view has become the dominant view in bioethics.
Most reasonable people—which, unfortunately, doesn’t always include bioethicists—would be horrified if we followed these views to their logically consistent outcomes. Ethicist Joseph Fletcher, for example, believed that humans with an IQ below forty might not be persons, and those with an IQ below twenty were definitely not persons. Bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. says that “fetuses, infants, the profoundly mentally retarded, and the hopelessly comatose” all fall into the category of “nonpersons.” And Princeton philosopher Peter Singer believes that since patients with Alzheimer’s and infants up to the age of twenty-four months are not persons, it is not wrong to kill them. Not surprisingly, when you allow intellectuals to define personhood, they will attempt to establish a criterion based on intellect, reason, and consciousness.
Although they intend to include themselves within the lines of demarcation, they are not wholly successful. For instance, if these philosophers were to fall into a deep sleep they would cease to meet the very criteria that they have established for personhood. Using their own arguments, we should be able to kill them before they wake up.
They may protest that they were persons before they fell asleep. But so were the “hopelessly comatose.” Yes, but the difference, they’ll contend, is that they’ll meet the criteria again once they wake up. This is certainly true, but if they are killed in their sleep they won’t ever wake up, so that becomes an irrelevant point. What does it matter that a human being was a person or will once again be a person? If it is morally acceptable to kill non-human persons then what matters is what they are right now.
(You might find my justification absurd. Indeed, I hope you do because this type of thinking is utterly idiotic. The blatant attempts at rationalizing clearly immoral behavior is why Francis Beckwith and other scholars have been able to demolish the ‘functionalism’ argument, that defends the killing of “non-person” humans.)
The reason why it is wrong to kill philosophy professors in their sleep is the same reason it is wrong to destroy embryos and fetuses: moral people do not kill innocent human beings. Not all persons are human beings, of course, and it may even be the case that not all human beings are persons. But all human beings—whether persons or non-persons—are human beings; this is not only a tautology but a scientifically and ontologically verifiable fact.
Advocates for embryo and fetal destruction should therefore stop playing semantic games and admit that what they believe is that it is acceptable to kill some human beings because human beings do not have, per se, intrinsic worth.
They should also stop making the ridiculous claim that their opinions on personhood are based on science (when did metaphysics become an empirical science?) and should instead employ historical arguments to defend their position. History, after all, is filled with examples of people justifying the slaughter of other human beings. If you want to kill certain groups of human beings, you can find a sufficient rationalization somewhere in the history of human beings—there’s no need to make the argument personal.
January 6th, 2010 | 9:15 am
Without engaging the substance of the argument, I do want to point out that I wouldn’t put Engelhardt in the same grouping with Fletcher and Singer. A few years back, he became an Orthodox Christian and has repudiated his earlier bioethical writings; in fact, he is deeply against abortion and has written a book detailing his reasons why.
January 6th, 2010 | 9:42 am
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January 6th, 2010 | 10:36 am
Joe, you’re trying to defend the pro-life position while conceding the functional definition of personhood. I don’t think that will do.
You assert: “The reason why it is wrong to kill philosophy professors in their sleep is the same reason it is wrong to destroy embryos and fetuses: moral people do not kill innocent human beings.” Nowhere in your post, however, do I find an actual argument that killing human beings who fail to qualify as persons, under a functional definition of personhood, is per se immoral. It can be argued that such killing is wrong for the most part, because it makes life more precarious for the survivors and tends to desensitize the killers. That sort of consequentialist argument is very popular, and has been used by functionalists to explain why it’s wrong to kill temporarily unconscious adults or normal infants, but not embryos. But the only way to argue that it’s intrinsically wrong to kill innocent human beings is that they belong to a genus whose members have a certain sort of inherent dignity, i.e. persons.
That is why the Boethian definition of person, i.e. “an individual substance of a rational nature,” is used in Catholic theology to help explain the absolute prohibition on killing innocent human beings. For under that definition, all human beings qualify as persons. Children forming in the womb, who count as individual human beings, cannot yet exercise rational capacities; they are developing the physical requirements for doing so. But so are one-year-old babies. The permanently comatose can no longer exercise those capacities; but like preborns and neonates, they belong to a species that has them by nature.
The upshot is that adopting a functionalist definition of personhood allows only for consequentialist arguments against abortion, euthanasia, and ESCR. We both know that such arguments open the door to a slippery slope.
January 6th, 2010 | 2:00 pm
The difference between a sleeping philosopher and a permanently comatose person is that the former has the capacity to wake up and continue seamlessly with her plans, projects, relationships, and so on, the sorts of things that make life worth living according to consequentialists. To rob a person of the opportunity to wake up and continue her meaningful life is to harm her in a way the permanently comatose cannot be harmed. Or so would argue a consequentialist.
January 6th, 2010 | 2:06 pm
Let’s think about this logically. How should we define Neanderthals? They were intelligent tool users who ceremonially buried the dead, made music with bone flutes, and used fire. By any reasonable definition they were people, but they were not human.
And what of the more primitive tool using Homo Erectus? There is evidence that they too used fire and cared for the sick and injured, and a language capability that may have even equalled our own.
Suppose that tomorrow, we found small living populations of both. Would it be morally acceptable to put them in zoos and treat them like animals or to be used in forced labor (“slaves” in human terms)?
January 7th, 2010 | 11:42 am
I’ve read almost everything Daniel Dennett has ever published, and I don’t remember any such statement in his works.
Either you have made a false statement with the intent to misrepresent, or I have missed Dennett’s paper where he does state such a belief.
So which is it?
January 7th, 2010 | 12:01 pm
Michalis Sarigiannidis Either you have made a false statement with the intent to misrepresent, or I have missed Dennett’s paper where he does state such a belief.
I’m not sure how you could have read much of Dennett without coming across a statement by him that some humans are not persons. This is a rather common trope for him.
For example, in his article “Conditions of Personhood” he says that infants, the mentally defective, and the insane are all excluded from personhood.
January 7th, 2010 | 12:50 pm
Here’s a small excerpt from the 1st page of “Conditions of Personhood” by Daniel Dennett:
“For instance, infant human beings, mentally defective human beings, and human beings declared insane by licensed psychiatrists are denied personhood, or at any rate crucial elements of personhood.
One might well hope that such an important concept, applied and denied so confidently, would have clearly formulatable necessary and sufficient conditions for ascription, but if it does, we have not yet discovered them. In the end there may be none to discover. In the end we may come to realize that the concept of a person is incoherent and obsolete.”
The whole point of the article is to support the last statement, that the concept of person is incoherent and obsolete. It does not say that the mentally defective, and the insane are excluded from personhood. In fact, it tries to show that there are no grounds to deny anyone their personhood.
Wouldn’t it then be very strange & inconsistent for Dennett to have such a “common trope”, that some humans are not persons? Yes it would. But you have demonstrated no such thing. You have only made yet another unsubstantiated claim – which answers my question.
Misrepresentation it is.
January 7th, 2010 | 1:02 pm
Michalis SarigiannidisMisrepresentation it is.
Before I spend too much time on this, let me make sure I understand what you are saying: Are you claiming that Dennett does believe that a human fetus is a person?
January 7th, 2010 | 1:31 pm
No, no – this will not do. I do not care to claim anything regarding Dennett’s beliefs. So please, don’t try to shift the burden of proof on my shoulders. Do try to show your readers the respect they deserve and detract the unsubstantiated claims you have made.
Else, you do need to show where Dennett states that:
1. a class of human beings exists that are not yet persons,
2. some humans are not persons,
3. infants, the mentally defective, and the insane are all excluded from personhood.
In any case, you should acknowledge you were wrong to claim that Dennett says in his article “Conditions of Personhood” that infants, the mentally defective, and the insane are all excluded from personhood. This is clearly, factually, wrong – as can be easily verified by anyone with a library card.
January 7th, 2010 | 1:40 pm
“The whole point of the article is to support the last statement, that the concept of person is incoherent and obsolete.”
This isn’t the point of the article. The point is to suggest we tend to work with six conditions of personhood that are plausibly thought of as necessary, but whose sufficiency is problematic. Consequently the term in the end is inherently moral and not purely metaphysical. The essay also situates the idea of “personhood” in his Intentional Stance theory. As he says in the ‘Introduction’ to ‘Brainstorms’: “persons can be defined as a subclass of intentional systems, “higher order” intentional systems with the capacity for natural languages and (hence) consciousness.”
This would certainly rule out fetuses and the like. That said, I’ve read a lot of Dennett too, and he really doesn’t get into those specific, applied ethics issues too often that I’m aware of. It’s an exaggeration to say it’s a ‘common trope.’
January 7th, 2010 | 2:32 pm
Michalis Sarigiannidis No, no – this will not do. I do not care to claim anything regarding Dennett’s beliefs.
How do you then claim that I am misrepresenting Dennett’s beliefs if you don’t know what they are?
Do try to show your readers the respect they deserve and detract the unsubstantiated claims you have made.
My claim is that there are certain classes of humans (fetuses, newborns, etc.) that Dennett does not consider to be persons. At Tristian points out, Dennett sets certain conditions for personhood that fetuses and infants could not meet. While he may not come out and say so directly (since as Tristian also notes, he rarely talks about applied ethics) the inference is rather obvious.
Now to be fair to Dennett, I’m not saying that he thinks we should be able to kill “non-person humans.” He may not be willing to go as far as, say, Peter Singer.
Trisitian It’s an exaggeration to say it’s a ‘common trope.’
I did leave out a line that muddles my intentions there. I should have clarified that the “common trope” is Dennett’s idea that certain conditions are necessary for personhood. From that it’s easy to deduce that not all humans meet those conditions.
January 7th, 2010 | 2:36 pm
Michalis,
Also, let me add that if I truly thought I was misrepresenting Dennett by making a claim that he himself would not agree with, I’d be more than willing to issue a correction.
I could have easily substituted in Peter Singer for the same point. But as I mentioned in the comment above, I truly think the inference from Dennett’s conditions is rather obvious.
January 7th, 2010 | 7:29 pm
Perhaps it doesn’t matter that an average Joe doesn’t understand you, this post seems to be aimed higher than that but you have lost this Joe. First you lay out that negative rights apply regardless of personhood. You then show that you cannot kill a person without killing a being, something the other side would agree I think. What I cannot parse from your argument is how you show that a non-person has a right to due to…what? You have already (for the argument) conceded that embryoe’s are non-persons. So from that angle why should I pause any longer before I kill a non-person human being than to kill a non-person chicken?
1. Yet while recognition of personhood is necessary for a human to be granted certain positive rights, I contend that it is not required for a basic negative right—the right not to be deprived of life without due process of the law.
2. Rights—whether positive (those that impose an obligation on others) or negative (those that oblige others to refrain from certain activities)—should be assigned based on the ability to respond as moral beings.
3. We can kill non-person human beings (e.g., the embryo) and we can kill human persons that are also human beings. But we cannot kill the human person without killing the human being. In fact, you cannot kill any type of person unless it is already a living biological being. The Spanish may be able to kill Great Apes but lawyers cannot kill a corporation. What is being killed is not the person but the being.
4. This distinction is important because those who argue that it is acceptable to kill non-person humans base their rationale on the claim that what matters is not the being (the living biological organism) but the personhood (a set of functional criteria such as consciousness or rationality). This view has become the dominant view in bioethics.
January 8th, 2010 | 8:49 am
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January 8th, 2010 | 4:49 pm
Generating much heat and little light over Mr. Dennett.
Lost a Joe.
How about the addage that if you are not sure, you do not kill?
If you are hunting and you hear a rustling in the bushes, but you are not sure if it is a bear or a person, is it morally right to shoot?
Personhood matters. Legally and morally.
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