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Thursday, November 03, 2011
Life, Humanity, and Personhood...a Source of Some Confusion
In the comments to one of my prior posts one of the commentators (Lifeisbeautiful) makes some statements regarding living and its impact on the abortion debate. I think it more likely than not this was not an attempt to engage in serious debate, but in any event I think the comment helps point out a bit of equivocation or confusion that is common in these debates.
We ought to distinguish (at least) three questions:
Life: Is X living or not living?
Human: Is X a member of the human species, or not?
Person: Is X a person or not -- and by person here we mean the bearer of a set of moral and legal rights, the most important of which is that they are inviolable?
The relation of these three concepts, though, is non-obvious and depends on an argumentation.
One could have a view that if X has LIFE + is HUMAN, then X is a PERSON. This would treat being living humans as sufficient for personhood.
One could have a view that ONLY living humans are persons, this would treat those conditions as necessary.
Neither proposition is self-evidently true....
Defenders of what might be referred to as a "quality X" view of personhood for instance, would disagree. If your quality X is the capacity for rational reasoning, you might treat certain living non-humans (like intelligent apes, or intelligent aliens if they ever show up) as persons. You may also exclude some living humans from personhood, for example ancephalic children or the severely retarded.
Peter Singer, for example, famously argues that views that equate being human with being a person, and exclude non-human animals from personhood definitionally are "speciesist" and that this is a kind of discrimination equivalent to racism.
There are still further nuances: what is the right quality or joint set of qualities to fill in "quality X"? Does one have to actually possess quality X at the time in order to be a person, or is it enough to have the potential to possess quality X in the ordinary course of things? What does the "ordinary course of things" mean, for instance is human sperm standing alone the kind of thing that in the ordinary course of things will have the potential for quality X? Is a fetus that is gestating? Can a line be drawn? There are further questions about non-living humans, and their relationship to personhood, which may govern how we treat the dead. Finally, there are questions about the relationship between moral and legal personhood, and within legal personhood between constitutional and non-constitutional conceptions of personhood.
One can only get at these very hard and interesting questions, though, if one is careful to note the possibility that being living, being human, and being a person are three separate concepts whose interactions are complex and not self-evident.
Posted by Glenn Cohen on November 3, 2011 at 09:29 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Jimbino-can you explain why so much depends on the change in a 40-ish week old human being's location?
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Nov 4, 2011 12:00:16 AM
Sperm and ova are human and alive, but zillions die every minute.
The dead have no rights. Human + alive + born = personhood. No sperm, egg or fetus has any rights whatsoever.
Persons have rights. Any woman has the self-defense right to kill, if necessary, any sperm, egg, fetus or person that threatens to attach itself to her for 38 weeks.
Posted by: Jimbino | Nov 3, 2011 10:50:37 PM
A very interesting post Glenn! Another potential reductio that demonstrates your point:
It is at least arguable that we believe that deceased humans are bearers of legal and moral rights, which are the two conditions for personhood (according to Lifeisbeautiful). As to the former, it could be said that estates law and even aspects of tort law (such as survival actions) demonstrate that the deceased possess legal rights. As to the latter, it is widely believed that we ought to observe practices that respect the dead (not to mention those that believe that moral rights carry over into the afterlife).
Now if we take this as a necessary relation, which is likely what Lifeisbeautiful meant to say, it could be characterized as follows: if and only if the conditions of humanity and living are true, then it is true that there is a bearer of legal and moral rights (a person). Thus, if we have a person, and only the condition of humanity is satisfied, then there is obviously something wrong with the necessary relation. Even if we use the mathematical relation, then it would make sense only if living had a value of zero.
This, of course, leaves the option of conceding absurdity and simply saying that being a human is really the only condition that needs satisfaction for personhood to exist, but that risks being absurd in its own right; it would allow those that will never achieve the condition of living to be bearers of legal and moral rights, such as fictional humans. There is also the option of redefining personhood, or taking it out of the discussion (as Singer points out).
In any event, I am convinced that you are right: assembling these conditions in a formula obscures the things we ought to be discussing when we tackle this very complex and important topic.
Posted by: Brian Sheppard | Nov 3, 2011 10:11:27 PM
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