Personhood

• Personhood (moral term) ≠ human (biological term)
• genetic criterion: person if you have human DNA

  • Corpses are persons? Cells? Easily dissmissed theory
• Cognitive Criteria for personhood:

  1. consciousness
  2. reasoning
  3. self-motivated activity
  4. capacity to communicate
  5. self-awareness
• Social criterion: you're a person whenever someone cares about you

  • fully rational, healthy, functional adult humans might not have personhood bc no one happens to care about them?
• Peter Singer: they key to personhood is sentience - the ability to feel pleasure and pain

  • wrong to cause unnecessary pain to anything that can feel it; if it can't feel, we do no harm bu excluding it from the group of being that matter
• Gradient theory: personhood comes in degrees, can have more or less of it

  • is personhood a right?
• Phineas Gage: metal rod in head guy
• reductive physicalism: the view that the world is made of only physical stuff

  • everything can be explained by our bodies - brains, hormones, neurotransmitters
• substance dualism: the world is made of both physical and mental stuff

  • the mind is a seperate, nonphysical substance that cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of physical stuff (ie. brain)
• Qualia: instances of subjective, first person experience
• Ephphenomentalism: physical states can give rise to mental states, not vice verse.

  • beliefs, desires, temperments exist, but have no power over anything physical about you
• taking away someone's personhood as punishment for their actions is like punishing a rick for not being a tree

  • + when not recognized as a person anymore, arguing in favor of you being a person is completely useless