Chapter 7

Persons, Minds and Brains

What is a Person?

What is the difference between you and an orangutan?

The Concept of Person

Concept of personhood is an essential component of most legal and moral systems because a person is the holder of certain rights and privileges

The Concept of Person (con’t) How are persons and things differentiated?

To regard an entity as a person is to include it as a member of the community of persons, a moral community and to say that that entity is not a person is to exclude them in that community

one problem with a broad concept of person is that it risks overpopulating the world with persons and the problem with a narrow concept of person is that it risks depopulating the world of persons

The Concept of Person (con’t)

Locke defined a person as a “thinking intelligent being,

that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places: which it does only by that consciousness which is in separable from thinking” thus, the mere fact that that an entity has a human

body or human biology does not make it a person but, this does allow non-humans to be defined as

persons

The Concept of Person (con’t)

Daniel Dennett identified six basic conditions of personhood

rationality conscious mental states and intentionality being the subject of a special stance or attitude of regard

by other persons reciprocating this person-regarding stance the capacity for verbal communication self-consciousness

like Locke’s definition this allows non-humans to be classified as persons and can exclude some humans

two of these conditions are social in Dennet’s view people do not treat living creatures as

persons only after the objective fact of its personhood has been established a creature’s treatment of it as a person makes it a person

The Concept of Person (con’t)

Mary Ann Warren discussed personhood in the context of

abortion and identified conditions consciousness of objects and events and the

ability to feel pain reasoning and problem-solving ability the ability to carry out self-motivated activities the ability to communicate messages of an

indefinite variety of types the presence of self-concepts and self-

awareness a person does not need to satisfy all of these

conditions to meet personhood

The Concept of Person (con’t)

some argue that Warren’s conditions are too restrictive because they exclude infants, developmentally handicap, and those with brain damage a response to this may be that these conditions

could include the potential for rationality or meeting the conditions but how would potential for consciousness be

established

The Concept of Person (con’t)

Annette Baier is critical of the above theories as they establish personhood

as a test that some creatures pass and others fail says that they often reflect the narrow values of those who

design them in addition, they stress importance of cognition rather than social

roles this implies that people float free of their own history, dependency,

mortality and biology proposes a naturalist view of persons as embodied,

interpersonally responsive and dependent creatures “Persons are born to earlier persons, and learn the arts of

personhood from other persons. These arts include the self-consciousness which follows from mutual recognition, along with the sort of representation that speech makes possible…the first persons we recognize as such are those who greet us, call to us, answer our calls. Our personhood is responsive…”

Personal Identity

despite the changes that occur most people regard themselves as the same person over time your past self is not numerically different

than your present self just as they are not different in the same way as you are distinct from your best friend

your past self is not referred to in the third person

although their may be qualitative differences between the selves they are still one and the same

questions of personal identity are those that ask what makes you the same you over time what is the metaphysical glue that holds us

together

Personal Identity (con’t)

Locke believed that it was not the body or

the spirit that tied us to personal identity the body changes over time and the

immaterial soul is not important the most important component of

personal identity was “continuing consciousness” the ability to remember, relive, take

responsibility for past actions, and to thing of events and actions in relation to the self

Personal Identity (con’t) in Locke’s view you remained the same

person as long your consciousness can place you in the past, thereby enabling you to relive the past with some of the same feeling that you had at the time if there is a break in your consciousness Locke

argued that you are no longer the same person if there are two or more consciousness that cannot

communicate with each other then there are two or more people

e.g.: sleepwalking and crime

Personal Identity (con’t)Derek Parfit argued that what really mattered

was people’s survival, or their continued existence, over time, not their identity over time survival is much less metaphysically

demanding a concept than identity because identity is an all-or-nothing proposition and survival is a matter of degree one degree of you overlaps with

another at any or other particular time these overlaps are psychological links,

like memories, plans and intentions

Personal Identity (con’t)

this view as strange moral implications if your current self fades over time then you may not

deserve the penalty you received 15 years ago when you were caught vandalizing the school

or a promise you made to a friend five years ago may not be valid today as it was not you that made the promise, it was a past self

if you start smoking now then a decision you make now may affect a future self

also says that the question of whether you are the same person as before cannot always be answered definitely