Abstract
The present paper unravels ontological and normative conditions of personhood for the purpose of critiquing ‘Cognitivist Views’. Such views have attracted much attention and affirmation by presenting the ontology of personhood in terms of higher-order cognition on the basis of which normative practices are explained and justified. However, these normative conditions are invoked to establish the alleged ontology in the first place. When we want to know what kind of entity has full moral status, it is tempting to establish an ontology that fits our moral intuitions about who should qualify for such unique normative standing. But this approach conflates personhood’s ontology and normativity insofar as it stresses the primacy of the former while implicitly presupposing the latter; it thereby suffers from a ‘Normative Fallacy’ by inferring from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. Following my critique of Cognitivism, I sketch an alternative conception, contending that, whereas the Cognitivist ontology of personhood presupposes the normative, a social ontology is constituted by it. In due consideration of evidence from developmental psychology, the social embeddedness of persons—manifested in the ability of taking a ‘second-person stance’—is identified as a key feature of personhood that precedes higher-order cognition, and is directly linked to basic normative concerns.
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Notes
In Section 3.2, I detail how personhood is widely seen as the grounds of full moral status.
So far as morality is believed to directly follow from personhood, this assertion has recently been called into question by de Waal’s (2014) research suggesting that at least rudimentary levels of morality are present in apes and monkeys. Other members of the animal kingdom, such as dolphins, have also been suggested as candidates whose lives are governed by moral rules. Revisiting the theory of mind debate, Andrews (2012) argues that some of the mental features that are by most believed to be uniquely human may also be present in great apes.
Insisting that someone can only be a person by way of having features that are ipso facto human ultimately collapses into ‘Speciesism’: the doctrine that just by virtue of being human there is a good enough reason to have a superior moral status to non-human animals.
An anonymous reviewer pointed out that there is a difference between a ‘descriptive concept that plays a normative role’ and a straightforwardly ‘normative concept’. Since Cognitivists claim that their descriptive, or ontological concept of personhood justifies persons’ superior moral status, it becomes even more important to show on what grounds the descriptive concept does that normative work. And if it turns out, as I argue in what follows, that the grounds for so doing are wobbly, there is all the more reason to be wary of Cognitivism.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this.
In the next section, I argue that it is not the exclusion of the social dimension of personhood that renders Cognitivism flawed, but the insistence on higher-order cognition as its necessary condition.
Chappell (2011) makes a similar remark with regards to the very idea of having criteria for personhood.
I am thankful to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this.
In social neuroscience, Schilbach et al. (2013) coined the term ‘second-person engagement’ reporting behavioral and neural evidence for persons’ pre-reflective self-and-other-awareness.
I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dieter Birnbacher, Pedro Chaves, Lucas Jurkovic, Luca Lavagnino, Heidi Maibom, Susana Monsó, Neil Roughley, Gregory Walters, Katherine Wayne, and the anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for their insightful comments that helped improving the paper significantly. I am particularly indebted to Marya Schechtman for her ingenious comments and constant encouragement. I’ve presented this work at the Carleton University Philosophy Colloquium in Fall 2014, and at the Boston Conference on Persons in Summer 2015. Many thanks to the audiences at these events—particularly to Gabriele Contessa and Andrew Brook at Carleton—for their valuable feedback.
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Wagner, NF. Against Cognitivism About Personhood. Erkenn 84, 657–686 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9976-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9976-9