Abstract
I am a person, and so are you. That much is beyond doubt. I am a human being, and probably you are too. If you take offense at the “probably” you stand accused of a sort of racism, for what is important about us is not that we are of the same biological species, but that we are both persons, and I have not cast doubt on that. One’s dignity does not depend on one’s parentage even to the extent of having been born of women or born at all. We normally ignore this and treat humanity as the deciding mark of personhood, no doubt because the terms are locally coextensive or almost coextensive. At this time and place human beings are the only persons we recognize, and we recognize almost all human beings as persons, but on the one hand we can easily contemplate the existence of biologically very different persons—inhabiting other planets, perhaps—and on the other hand we recognize conditions that exempt human beings from personhood, or at least some very important elements of personhood. 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.
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Notes
See my “Mechanism and Responsibility,” in T. Honderich, ed., Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
In “Justice as Reciprocity,” a revision of “Justice as Fairness” printed in S. Gorovitz, ed., Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1971), Rawls allows that the persons in the original position may include “nations, provinces, business firms, churches, teams, and so on. The principles of justice apply to conflicting claims made by persons of all these separate kinds. There is, perhaps, a certain logical priority to the case of human individuals” (p. 245). In A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1971), he acknowledges that parties in the original position may include associations and other entities not human individuals (e.g., p. 146), and the apparent interchangeability of “parties in the original position” and “persons in the original position” suggests that Rawls is claiming that for some moral concept of a person, the moral person is composed of metaphysical persons who may or may not themselves be moral persons.
Setting aside Rawls’s possible compound moral persons. For more on compound persons, see Amelie Rorty, “Persons, Policies, and Bodies,” International Philosophical Quarterly XIII, 1 (March 1973).
J. Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), pp. 101–102. It has often been pointed out that Strawson’s definition is obviously much too broad, capturing all sentient, active creatures. See, e.g., H. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy (January 14, 1971). It can also be argued (and I would argue) that states of consciousness are only a proper subset of psychological or Intentionally characterized states, but I think it is clear that Strawson here means to cast his net wide enough to include psychological states generally.
D. M. MacKay, “The use of behavioral language to refer to mechanical processes,” British Journal of Philosophy of Science (1962), 89–103;
P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy (1962),
reprinted in Strawson, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford, 1968);
A. Rorty, “Slaves and Machines,” Analysis (1962);
H. Putnam, “Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life?” Journal of Philosophy (November 12, 1964
W. Sellars, “Fatalism and Determinism,” K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism (New York: Random House, 1966);
A. Flew, “A Rational Animal,” J. R. Smythies, ed., Brain and Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968);
T. Nagel, “War and Massacre,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (Winter 1972);
D. Van de Vate, “The Problem of Robot Consciousness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (December 1971);
my “Intentional Systems,” Journal of Philosophy (February 25, 1971).
H. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” op. cit.
And sufficient, but I will not argue it here. I argue for this in Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), and more recently and explicitly in my “Reply to Arbib and Gunderson,” APA Eastern Division Meetings, December 29, 1972.
Cf. Bernard Williams, “Deciding to Believe,” in H. E. Kiefer and M. K. Munitz, eds., Language, Belief and Metaphysics (New York: New York University Press, 1970).
E.g., B. F. Skinner, “Behaviorism at Fifty,” in T. W. Wann, ed., Behaviorism and Phenomenology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
For illuminating suggestions on the relation of language to belief and rationality, see Ronald de Sousa, “How to Give a Piece of Your Mind; or, a Logic of Belief and Assent,” Review of Metaphysics (September 1971).
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 80.
Cf. Ronald de Sousa, “Self-Deception,” Inquiry 13, (1970), esp. p. 317.
I argue this in more detail in “Brain Writing and Mind Reading,” in K. Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), and in my “Reply to Arbib and Gunderson.”
The key papers are “Meaning,” Philosophical Review (July 1957), and “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions,” Philosophical Review (April 1969). His initial formulation, developed in the first paper, is subjected to a series of revisions in the second paper, from which this formulation is drawn (p. 151).
John Searle, “What is a Speech Act ?” in Philosophy in America, Max Black, ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965), discussed by Grice in “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions,” p. 160.
Cf. “Intentional Systems,” pp. 102–103.
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, p. 11.
In fact, Grice is describing only a small portion of the order which is there as a precondition of normal personal interaction. An analysis of higher order Intentions on a broader front is to be found in the works of Erving Goffman, especially in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959).
See Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief, p. 38.
See Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” pp. 102–103.
J. Rawls, “Justice as Reciprocity,” p. 259.
H. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Frankfurt does not say whether he conceives his condition to be merely a necessary or also a sufficient condition of moral personhood.
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Dennett, D. (1988). Conditions of Personhood. In: Goodman, M.F. (eds) What Is a Person?. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3950-5_7
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