SALON

Thursday, Oct 7, 2010 11:01 AM UTC

So, you think you know what a “person” is?

The definition may seem simple now, but new technologies are poised to make it a whole lot tougher

By

Topics: Science, War Room,

So, you think you know what a

Last week, I defined a right as a certain advantage or form of protection that all persons are entitled to by virtue of their personhood. Of course, all that definition does for us is open up two ancient arguments: What do persons deserve? And what is a person?

The first question might seem a lot more difficult than the latter. Presumably, we should be able to use the Justice Stewart argument for defining personhood: You know it when you see it. Most of us encounter many persons every day, and nearly all of us are well practiced at distinguishing the persons in our lives — our family, for example — from other physical entities, such as chairs.

But as Adam Serwer points out in his fascinating article from this month’s issue of the American Prospect, emerging technologies might make separating the persons from the non-persons a lot more difficult than we’re used to. It may just be a matter of decades, maybe even years, before we’re forced to examine cyborgs, genetically modified clones, and even sentient computers, and ask ourselves: Are these persons? Do they have the same rights I do?

In fact, our modern understanding of personhood is already more muddled than we usually like to admit, even when you remove science fiction overtones from the debate. Where you fall on whether a woman has a right to terminate her own pregnancy likely has a lot to do with whether you believe the fetus in her womb is already a person. And recently, some animal rights proponents have argued that non-human animals are nonetheless partial or full persons; a growing segment of the scientific community believes that dolphins are non-human persons, and two years ago Spain’s Parliament voted to grant great apes civil liberties.

At this point, maybe about half of you are vigorously nodding your heads in agreement, while the other half are snorting derisively. But even if a permanent consensus on this problem is beyond our reach, we should be able to agree on the problem itself: the lack of a universal, coherent legal framework for defining personhood and assessing the rights of all persons, be they human, animal or other.

If there is an answer, I suspect that it lies not in existing law, but in philosophy. So I sent an e-mail to Neil Sinhababu, a professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, known to the liberal blogosphere as one half of the political blog Donkeylicious. Sinhababu is a hedonic utilitarian, meaning that he believes moral goodness lies in whatever maximizes the aggregate amount of pleasure being experienced by all conscious beings. In 2006, he wrote an article — also for the Prospect — in which he argued that human fetuses are not persons, and that non-human persons — and even some non-human non-persons, like kittens — should be accorded higher moral status than the human unborn.

Via e-mail, Sinhababu told me that, “what makes something a person is that it can experience happiness and suffering, and that we can promote its welfare and ours by giving it a certain set of legal protections and permissions.” That’s a broad view of personhood, which, while it might not include human fetuses, nonetheless extends to nearly any feeling entity that can be said to have welfare.

It’s also not a view shared by many people (or human people, anyway), according to Yale professor Joshua Knobe. Knobe is among the leading figures in an expanding field called experimental philosophy, which combines neuroscience and philosophy to examine how we form our philosophical intuitions. In a phone interview, he told me that people tend to use two different criteria to define a person: a capacity for complex reasoning skills, and what he called “phenomenological traits” — the ability to experience strong emotions. Sinhababu’s definition only examines the latter category.

“[Throughout history] a lot of philosophers thought that there was one notion that makes up a person,” said Knobe. But his work shows that most people disagree. When asked to imagine “a robot exactly like a human,” they will argue that it is not a person because it can’t possibly have genuine phenomenological experiences like pleasure and pain. Animals, on the other hand, “have phenomenological traits but not complex reasoning,” so they can’t be persons either. The consensus: Only humans have both, and therefore only humans can be persons.

However, even entities that aren’t full persons can have varying degrees of moral or legal status. “A newborn baby can never be guilty or innocent,” he said, because they don’t yet have the ability to reason. “But you can be guilty of doing wrong to it,” because they can nonetheless feel pain. Even those who don’t think animals are persons tend to object to senseless animal cruelty. Could an artificial intelligence with no phenomenological traits nonetheless be considered guilty of doing harm to a person?

In terms of inclusiveness, my own view lies somewhere between Sinhababu’s and the consensus articulated by Knobe. It is closest to the existential-phenomenological view of Jean-Paul Sartre, with some caveats that I won’t go into here. For Sartre, the meaningful distinction was between “être-en-soi” (being-in-itself) — inanimate objects and other entities that are incapable of self-reflection — and “être-pour-soi” (being-for-itself) — that which can step outside itself, observe itself, and, in Sartre’s terminology, negate itself. To put it another way: the être-pour-soi is, in the language of countless science fiction stories about evil thinking machines, that which is self-aware.

All of these definitions share a problem: They are based in metaphysical, and therefore unverifiable, criteria. Even if we achieve consensus over a single definition of personhood, it seems there is no way to prove that any entity meets that definition; not a robot, not a clone, not even you or I. In philosophy, this is known as the philosophical zombie problem: If we can conceive of an entity that exhibits all the behavior of a person but is not one, how can we say that anyone is a person with any certainty? For the courts — no strangers to uncertainty, them — the only way out of that dilemma might be by way of something similar to “reasonable doubt”: that is, unless we can establish with any certainty that something is not a person, it should be considered to have the legal protections and obligations of one.

Ned Resnikoff is a freelance writer and researcher for Media Matters for America. The opinions expressed above are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of MMFA. More Ned Resnikoff.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 36 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Journalists file suit against Manning's trial secrecy: Plaintiffs including Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange demand press, public access to trial and documents
126 points127 points | comment
vote
Report: Nearly a quarter of Americans struggle to afford food
115 points116 points | 10 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
73 points74 points | 16 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
72 points73 points | 75 comments
vote
Journalists file suit against Manning trial secrecy: Plaintiffs including Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange demand press, public access to trial and documents
58 points59 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations