Product Code Database
Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a legal person (either a natural person or a juridical person) has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability."Where it is more than simply a synonym for 'human being', 'person' figures primarily in moral and legal discourse. A person is a being with a certain moral status, or a bearer of rights. But underlying the moral status, as its condition, are certain capacities. A person is a being who has a sense of self, has a notion of the future and the past, can hold values, make choices; in short, can adopt life-plans. At least, a person must be the kind of any who is in principle capable of all this, however damaged these capacities may be in practice." Charles Taylor, "The Concept of a Person", Philosophical Papers. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 97.
Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethics, and in debates about corporate personhood, and the beginning of human personhood. In the 21st century, corporate personhood is an existing Western concept; granting non-human entities personhood, which has also been referred to a "personhood movement", can bridge Western and Indigenous legal systems.
Processes through which personhood is recognized socially and legally vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood are not universal. Anthropologist Beth Conklin has shown how personhood is tied to social relations among the Wari' people of Rondônia, Brazil. Bruce Knauft's studies of the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea depict a context in which individuals become persons incrementally, again through social relations. Likewise, Jane C. Goodale has also examined the construction of personhood in Papua New Guinea. (1995). 9780295974361, University of Washington Press. ISBN 9780295974361
Boethius, a philosopher of the early 6th century CE, gives the definition of "person" as "an individual substance of a rational nature" (" Naturæ rationalis individua substantia").
According to the naturalist Epistemology tradition, from Descartes through John Locke and David Hume, the term may designate any human or Non human agent who possesses continuous consciousness over time; and is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.Charles Taylor, "The Concept of a Person", Philosophical Papers. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 97–114
According to Charles Taylor, the problem with the naturalist view is that it depends solely on a "performance criterion" to determine what is an agent. Thus, other things (e.g. machines or animals) that exhibit "similarly complex adaptive behaviour" could not be distinguished from persons. Instead, Taylor proposes a significance-based view of personhood:
Relatedly, Martin Heidegger developed his understanding of the distinctive kind of being which a person is as Dasein. The term's literal means an existence as a "being-there" or "there-being." Heidegger writes that, "Dasein itself has a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities; ... it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it."Heidegger, Martin. "The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being." Being and Time / Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: S.C.M., 1962. 32 For Heidegger, the way in which Being is an issue for a person as Dasein is their future oriented caring. This distinguishes Dasein from function or performance criteria of personhood.
Others also dispute functional criteria of personhood, such as philosopher Francis J. Beckwith, who argues that it is rather the underlying personal unity of the individual:
This belief in the underlying unity of an individual is a [[metaphysical]] and moral belief referred to as the substance view of personhood.
Philosopher J. P. Moreland clarifies this point:
Harry Frankfurt writes that, in reference to a definition by P. F. Strawson, "What philosophers have lately come to accept as analysis of the concept of a person is not actually analysis of that concept at all." He suggests that the concept of a person is intimately connected to free will, and describes the structure of human volition according to first- and second-order desires:
According to Nikolas Kompridis, there might also be an intersubjective, or interpersonal, basis to personhood:
Mary Midgley defines a "person" as being a conscious, thinking being, which knows that it is a person (self-awareness). She also wrote that the law can create Legal person. "Persons and non-persons", in Peter Singer (ed), In Defense of Animals. Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 52–62.
Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are: is alive, is aware, feels positive and negative sensations, has emotions, has a sense of self, (controls its own behaviour, recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities. While many of White's criteria are somewhat Anthropocentrism, some animals such as would still be considered persons. Some animal rights groups have also championed recognition for animals as "persons". Fellow Champions Dolphins as “Non-Human Persons”, Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, January 10, 2010; Midgley, Mary.
Another approach to personhood, Paradigm Case Formulation, used in descriptive psychology and developed by Peter Ossorio, involves the four interrelated concepts of 1) The Individual Person, 2) Deliberate Action, 3) Reality and the Real World, and 4) Language or Verbal Behavior. All four concepts require full articulation for any one of them to be fully intelligible. More specifically, a Person is an individual whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical pattern. Deliberate Action is a form of behavior in which a person (a) engages in an Intentional Action, (b) is cognizant of that, and (c) has chosen to do that. A person is not always engaged in a deliberate action but has the eligibility to do so. A human being is an individual who is both a person and a specimen of Homo sapiens. Since persons are deliberate actors, they also employ hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical reasons when selecting, choosing or deciding on a course of action. As part of our "social contract" we expect that the typical person can make use of all four of these motivational perspectives. Individual persons will weigh these motives in a manner that reflects their personal characteristics. That life is lived in a "dramaturgical" pattern is to say that people make sense, that their lives have patterns of significance. The paradigm case allows for nonhuman persons, potential persons, nascent persons, manufactured persons, former persons, "deficit case" persons, and "primitive" persons. By using a paradigm case methodology, different observers can point to where they agree and where they disagree about whether an entity qualifies as a person.P. G. Ossorio, The Behavior of Persons, Ann Arbor: Descriptive Psychology Press, 2013Schwartz, Wynn. (1982) The Problem of Other Possible Persons: Dolphins, Primates, and Aliens. in, Advances in Descriptive Psychology, vol 2, (eds: Davis & Mitchel), Greenwich, CT: JAI Press
In Federal law, the concept of legal personhood is formalized by statute (1 USC § 8) to include "every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development." That statute also states that "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being 'born alive' as defined in this section."
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, many US States have their own definition of personhood which expands upon the federal definition of personhood, and Webster v. Reproductive Health Services declined to overturn the state of Missouri's law stating that
The beginning of human personhood is a concept long debated by religion and philosophy. With respect to the abortion debate, personhood is the status of a human being having individual human rights. The term was used by Justice Blackmun in Roe v. Wade.
A political movement in the United States seeks to define the beginning of human personhood as starting from the moment of fertilisation with the result being that abortion, as well as forms of birth control that act to deprive the human embryo of necessary sustenance in implantation, could become illegal. Supporters of the movement also state that it would have some effect on the practice of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), but would not lead to the practice being outlawed. Jonathan F. Will says that the personhood framework could produce significant restrictions on IVF to the extent that reproductive clinics find it impossible to provide the services.Will, Jonathan F. (2013) "Beyond Abortion: Why the personhood movement implicates reproductive choice". American Journal of Law and Medicine. (Boston: American Society of Law and Medicine) 39 (4): 601–602.
Currently, the personhood movement is led by the Personhood Alliance, a coalition of state and national personhood organizations headquartered in Washington DC. The Personhood Alliance was founded in 2014 and currently has 22 affiliated organizations. A significant number of the state affiliates of the Personhood Alliance were once affiliates of National Right to Life. Organizations like Georgia Right to Life, Cleveland Right to Life, and Alaska Right to Life left National Right to Life and joined the Personhood Alliance after refusing to support National Right to Life's proposed legislation that included exceptions like the rape and incest exceptions. The Personhood Alliance describes itself as "a Christ-centered, biblically informed organization dedicated to the non-violent advancement of the recognition and protection of the God-given, inalienable right to life of all human beings as legal persons, at every stage of their biological development and in every circumstance."
A precursor to the Personhood Alliance was Personhood USA, a Colorado-based umbrella group with a number of state-level affiliates, which describes itself as a nonprofit Christian ministry. and seeks to ban abortion. Personhood USA was co-founded by Cal Zastrow and Keith MasonPro-Life Profiles, [3] Retrieved 2014-11-02. in 2008 following the Colorado for Equal Rights campaign to enact a state constitutional personhood amendment.
Proponents of the movement regard personhood as an attempt to directly challenge the Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, thus filling a legal void left by Harry Blackmun in the majority opinion when he wrote: "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment."
Some medical organizations have described the potential effects of personhood legislation as potentially harmful to patients and the practice of medicine, particularly in the cases of ectopic and molar pregnancy.
Susan Bordo has suggested that the focus on the issue of personhood in abortion debates has often been a means for depriving women of their rights. She writes that "the legal double standard concerning the bodily integrity of pregnant and nonpregnant bodies, the construction of women as fetal incubators, the bestowal of 'super-subject' status to the fetus, and the emergence of a father's-rights ideology" demonstrate "that the current terms of the abortion debate – as a contest between fetal claims to personhood and women's right to choose – are limited and misleading."Susan Bordo, "Are Mothers Persons?", Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 71–97.
Others, such as Colleen Carroll Campbell, say that the personhood movement is a natural progression of society in protecting the equal rights of all members of the human species. She writes, "The basic philosophical premise behind these personhood amendments is eminently reasonable. And the alternative on offer – which severs humanity from personhood – is fraught with peril. If being human is not enough to entitle one to human rights, then the very concept of human rights loses meaning. And all of us – born and unborn, strong and weak, young and old – someday will find ourselves on the wrong end of that cruel measuring stick."
Frank Pavone agrees, adding, "Nor is this a dispute about the state imposing a religious or philosophical view. After all, your life and mine are not protected because of some religious or philosophical belief that others are required to have about us. More accurately, the law protects us precisely in spite of the beliefs of others who, in their own World view, may not value our lives. …To support Roe vs. Wade is not merely to allow a medical procedure. It is to acknowledge that the government has the power to say who is a person and who is not. Who, then, is to limit the groups to whom it is applied? This is what makes "personhood" such an important public policy issue.
In March 2007 Georgia became the first state in the nation to introduce a legislative resolution to amend the state constitution to define and recognize the personhood of fetuses. The Georgia Catholic Conference and National Right to Life supported the effort. The resolution failed to attract the Supermajority in both chambers required for it to be placed on the ballot. Georgia legislators have filed a personhood resolution every session since 2007. In May 2008 Georgia Right to Life hosted the first nationwide Personhood Symposium targeting anti-abortion activists.http://www.joniandfriends.org/help-and-resources/other-resources/personhood/
In the summer of 2008 a citizen initiated amendment was proposed for the Colorado constitution. Three attempts to enact the from-fertilization definition of personhood into U.S. state constitutions via have failed. Following two attempts to enact similar changes in Colorado in 2008 and 2010, a 2011 initiative to amend the state constitution by referendum in the state of Mississippi also failed to gain approval with around 58% of voters disapproving. In an interview after the referendum, Mason ascribed the failure of the initiative to a political campaign run by Planned Parenthood.
Personhood proponents in Oklahoma sought to amend the state constitution to define personhood as beginning at conception. The state Supreme Court, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ruled in April 2012 that the proposed amendment was unconstitutional under the federal Constitution and blocked inclusion of the referendum question on the ballot. In October 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the state Supreme Court's ruling.
In 2006, a 16-year-old girl was charged in Mississippi with murder for the still-birth of her daughter on the basis that the girl had smoked cocaine while pregnant.ProPublica, 18 March 2014: A Stillborn Child, A Charge of Murder and the Disputed Case Law on ‘Fetal Harm’ These charges were later dismissed.The Dispatch, 3 April 2014: Judge dismisses Rennie Gibbs' depraved heart murder case
In February 2024, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that frozen embryos were "extrauterine children" subject to the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, based on protections for unborn children in the state constitution"Sanctity of Unborn life", Article I, § 36.06 of the Constitution of Alabama These protections were added in 2018 by ballot referendum, as Amendment 930 to the Alabama Constitution of 1901, and gained relevance when the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization returned full control over regulation of abortion to the states. The concurring decision of Justice Tom Parker cited Christian theology to support the decision, raising complaints about separation of church and state
Other commentators have noted that some of the ratifiers of the US Constitution (in 1787) also, in contemporaneous contexts, ratified state level Constitutions that saw women as Persons and required them to be treated as such, including granting women rights such as the right to vote. Professor Jane Calvert argues that the 17th and 18th Century Quaker concept of Personhood applied to women, and the prevalence of Quakers in the population of several colonies, such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, at the time that the original Constitution was drafted and ratified likely influenced the choice of the term "Person" for the Constitution instead of the term "Man", which was used in the Declaration of Independence and in the contemporaneously drafted French Constitution of 1791.
The personhood of women also has consequences for the ethics of abortion. For example, in "A Defense of Abortion", Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that one person's right to bodily autonomy trumps another's right to life, and therefore abortion does not violate a fetus's right to life: Instead abortion should be understood as the pregnant women withdrawing her own body from use, which causes the fetus to die.
Questions pertaining to the personhood of women and the personhood of fetuses have legal and ethical consequences for reproductive rights beyond abortion as well. For example, some fetal homicide laws have resulted in jail time for women suspected of drug use during a pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, like one Alabama woman who was sentenced to ten years.
In 1853, Sojourner Truth became famous for asking Ain't I a Woman? and after slavery was abolished, black men continued to fight for personhood by claiming, I Am A Man!.
Those who become disabled later in life often experience a change in how they are perceived, including others Infantilization them or assuming cognitive disability due to the existence of physical disability. The concept of disability as being worse than death can be seen as a denial of disabled people's personhood, such as when medical professionals suggest euthanasia to non-suicidal disabled patients.
Those who oppose personhood for non-human animals are known as human exceptionalists or human supremacists, and more pejoratively speciesism."Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason", Val Plumwood
Other theorists attempt to demarcate between degrees of personhood. For example, Peter Singer's two-tiered account distinguishes between basic sentience and the higher standard of self-consciousness which constitutes personhood. His approach has been criticized for accepting the personhood of some animals, but rejecting the personhood of people with disabilities such as dementia. It has also been given as an example of the limits of a capacities-based definition of personhood, in that they tend to be defined in ways that reinforce existing systems of power and privilege by preferring the capacities that are valued by those who write the definitions. A squirrel would value agility and balance in defining personhood; a tree might grant personhood on the basis of height and longevity, and a long-time academic, "a human being with a fully functioning cerebral cortex who resides in a social context where the workings of this part of the brain are particularly prized", would just as predictably value the qualities that benefited his own life and overlook the ones that had little relationship to his own life.
Wynn Schwartz has offered a Paradigm Case Formulation of Persons as a format allowing judges to identify qualities of personhood in different entities.P.G Ossorio, The Behavior Of Persons, Ann Arbor: Descriptive Psychology Press, 2013 Julian Friedland has advanced a seven-tiered account based on cognitive capacity and linguistic mastery. Amanda Stoel suggested that rights should be granted based on a scale of degrees of personhood, allowing entities currently denied any right to be recognized some rights, but not as many.
In 1992, Switzerland amended its constitution to recognize animals as beings and not things. A decade later, Germany guaranteed rights to animals in a 2002 amendment to its constitution, becoming the first European Union member to do so. The New Zealand parliament included restrictions on the use of 'non-human hominids' in research or teaching when passing the Animal Welfare Act (1999). In 2007, the parliament of the Balearic Islands, an autonomous province of Spain, passed the world's first legislation granting legal rights to all great apes.
In 2013, India's Ministry of Forests and Environment banned the importation or capture of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) for entertainment, exhibition, or interaction purposes, on the basis that "cetaceans in general are highly intelligent and sensitive" and that it "is morally unacceptable to keep them captive for entertainment." It noted that "various scientists" have argued they should be seen as "non-human persons" with commensurate rights, but did not take an official position on this, and indeed did not have the legal authority to do so.
In 2014, a hybrid, zoo-born orangutan named Sandra was termed by the court in Argentina as a "non-human subject" in an unsuccessful habeas corpus case regarding the release of the orangutan from captivity at the Buenos Aires zoo. The status of the orangutan as a "non-human subject" needed to be clarified by the court. Court cases relevant to this orangutan were continuing in 2015.For corporations, see "Justices, 5–4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit", Reuters, December 21, 2014. Finally, in 2019, Sandra was granted nonhuman personhood and freed from captivity to a Florida sanctuary.
In 2015, for the first time, two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, were thought to be "legal persons", having been granted a writ of habeas corpus. This meant their detainer, Stony Brook University, had to provide a legally sufficient reason for their imprisonment. This view was rejected and the writ was reversed by the officiating judge shortly thereafter.
In 1819, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, that corporations have the same rights as natural persons to enforce contracts.
Many generally non-religious Japanese people maintain a degree of Shinto spirituality (thus avoiding fully declared non-spirituality) because the kami are not as central to the Shinto religion as a monotheism creator deity, thus having an indirect impact on the formation of an individual's personality. The non-centrality of the kami allow an individual to take an ambivalent stance towards atheism or theism and deism. Religiously speaking, the degree of personhood granted to a deity (along with their universal centrality to a given religion) may be seen to have an impact on the world view and understandings of personhood by mortal individuals.
According to other sources, which also admit that the origin of the term is not completely clear, persona could be related to the Latin verb per-sonare, literally: sounding through, with an obvious link to the above-mentioned theatrical mask, which often incorporated a small megaphone. The word was transformed from its theater use into a term with strict technical theological meaning by Tertullian in his work, Adversus Praxean ( Against Praxeas), in order to distinguish the three "" of the Trinity. Christianity is thus the first philosophical system to use the word "person" in its modern sense.Met. John Zizioulas, Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997, pp. 27–49 Subsequently, Boethius refined the word to mean "an individual substance of a rational nature." This can be re-stated as "that which possesses an intellect and a will."
|
|
