Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've had several discussions about rights and priveleges that get derailed because the people involved have two different ideas of what personhood is, and neither can actually define it.

It is a difficult task, but I shall try to give a skeletal structure to the idea, and you guys can help me fill in the necessary and contingents.

One common theme I've noticed is that most people consider personhood to be an on-off switch. That is, if someone has personhood, they are entitled to all rights, responsibilities, priveleges, etc, that pertain to personhood. If they are not a person, they are not entitled to any of those.

I, personally disagree with this philosophy, as I see personhood as a combination of factors. When some criteria are met, some rights are given, and when other criteria are met, other other rights are given.

For example, I do not consider infants full people. They have some value of personhood, but not all, and are thus not full people. They have the right not to be killed or tortured, and privelege of being taken care of, but not the right to participate as full members of society. Once someone demonstrates a fuller value of personhood than an infant, they get more things, like the privelege of learning to tie their own shoes, the right to vote, etc.

As another example, I do not consider animals to have the full value of personhood, but still have some of it. They have less than infants, for me, because they are not of the same species. They have the right not to be tortured and, but not the right not to be killed and eaten.

You're talking about priveleges awarded to personhood, and not actual personhood, I hope you realize? You can't revoke "personhood" because it's a state of being, but you can revoke some of the social priveleges associated with it because someone has broken the rules of the society (i. e. felony)

Though you can certainly revoke priveleges, many social philosophers, Locke as the most noted, argue that it is immoral to actually revoke right of personhood (thus "inalienable" our government had quite a bit of influence from Lockian philosophy.)

How do you define personhood, in a way that makes it revokable? I've never heard of that idea. Everything I've heard about the philosophy of personhood is that it's a mental state of being, roughtly synonymous with "cognitive competence." I suppose you could torture someone until they go insane to revoke that, but even that's iffy.

I'd have to say that personhood is best defined as the ability to be a unique person. To be a person is to have a personality. But then, I'd have to say that you need a unique personality to be a person, so it's sort of like circular logic (Okay, it is circular logic. Shut up.) In other words-if you're exactly the same as everyone else, you're a robot, not a person.

As to rights/priveleges attached to personhood-I'd say that you have the right to bodily integrity, the sanctity of your own mind (Translation: Cougar, if you take power, I will oppose all attempts to make mind reading devices.), the right to live (and ultimately, die) in the manner of your choosing, the right to companionship, and the right to believe whatever you want (but to be wrong if you don't believe it was Cthulhu). I think that you have these rights even if you're no longer considered a person (More on that is a sec, I promise). However, priveleges, like drinking, driving, smoking, having an X-Box, etc.-those can be taken away.

And yes, personhood can be "stripped" away. That's one of the things that I don't like about prisons-some of them are too gentle. People who are sentenced to life imprisonment are, in my opinion, not people anymore. They should be broken, to the point where they are just robots. But then again, that's just my opinion, and I'm kind of a b***h.

"Verging?" xd

I'm sorry for the circular definition-I tried as hard as I could to come up with one that wasn't, but it got really confusing. So I used what I could.

And only in certain cases. Personally, I think that if you threaten people with being psychologically broken (as opposed to death) they'll be less likely to commit crimes.

I find it rather interesting that "personhood" is one of the only concepts that gets defined this way, regardless of how long or hard people think about it.

Oh, it'd certainly be more effective. After all, a drooling moron can't commit more crimes or knife people in the shower. However, whether it's ethical or not is another matter.

A dog has been born, and has not commited a felony. You'll have to get a little more specific. wink

As to the metaphysics, there are several arguments I'm familiar with, a lot of which come from a rather eclectic professor who took examples from Star Trek, so bear with me.

First there's Decartes's definition of personhood, which includes the ability to communicate. Of course, to Decartes, this meant the ability to learn French. This eliminates animals, but also comes with some problems of "physical ability to communicate" versus "cognitive ability to communicate" and also leads to problems with ability to learn to communicate according to a given standard. Ergo, I can communicate just fine, but that doesn't mean I have the ability to learn a new language in order to pass the communication test.

Also, there's bodily continuity. The example is generally given with a boat. A boat goes from port to port on a voyage, and gradually has to replace old parts as is goes. Eventually, when it gets back to port, it has all new parts. Is it the same boat? The owner doesn't turn it away, just because it has new stuff on it. Likewise, my body constantly replaces old cells, and takes in new things, so I'm still the same person as long as I'm temporally continuous. I.e. as long as the boat is still going on the journey with the same intent, it's still the same boat.

However, this leads to complications when you talk about mind swapping. If someone switches my consciousness with that of a dog, technically I'm still me with a dog's consciousness. That doesn't seem right, because even though I'm the same person biologically, my synapses are firing in completely different patterns, and I'm no longer the same at all mentally.

So then people translate bodily continuity into mental continuity. I'm the same if my thoughts, feelings, and mental states are temporally contiguous. But then there's another problem. If I have amnesia, and forget everything since the age of three, then I live my life for another twenty years, which one is the real me, pre-amnesia me, or post-amnesia me.

This seems pretty easy at first glance, because we've kept bodily continuity intact, so maybe the two are jointly sufficient. But if you remove bodily continuity the situation is just exacerbated. In an episode of Star Trek, Riker had this situation. The trasporter split him into two fully bodily contiguous Rikers. One half went one way and the other went the other, and they only met up again later. They lived seperate lives, and became seperate people, because they shared neither bodily nor psychological continuity.

So, if bodily continuity and psychological continuity are jointly sufficient to define personhood, what about the ship example. If pirates replace the crew, and steal the ship then replace all the parts and go do some piracy with it, the owner doesn't say "well, that's not my ship anymore. I don't know where mine got to." The owner says, "hey, they stole my ship." It's not just a proprietary factor either, because even if the pirates bought the ship, it'd still be the same ship, even though it's completely different in every way possible. It's the same ship, even though it contains neither bodily continuity, nor psychological continuity, i.e. it's purpose, ownership, destination, etc.

We could speculate as to what factor is missing, but I doubt we could find one that we can't eliminate ad nauseum.

I'm a fan of the web definition system started by Wittgenstein, personally. (I'm a huge fan of Wittgenstein, so please excuse any philosophical fangirling that may occur.) Ol' Witt tried to define what a game is. He came up with definition after definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and found exceptions to every rule, one way or the other. Either the definition was too strict, and didn't allow for some games, or was too loose, and defined things that were not games. Ultimately, he determined that necessary and sufficient conditions were no way to actually define things in reality at all, only in philosophical abstracts. So, to him, definition happens by association and usage. This is a game because it's like this other game, which is like this other game, which is like these others, which are games because people call them such. It forms a spiderweb of definition, rather than a straight up necessary and sufficient condition list.

So that means I'm a person because people call me a person, and am like other things that are called people, not because of some broader definition. That's the hardest to debunk because Wittgenstein rocks it. I'd be a Wittgensteinian, if they weren't all such losers.