Personhood
About
Personhood is the name for whatever attributes or qualities define the difference between a person and anything else (e.g. animals), such that the entity is subject to the usual mores and laws which apply to people.
Most political disagreement around this concept refers to:
A more interesting discussion revolves around the question of non-human intelligent life being deemed to have "personhood". These discussions have largely been eclipsed, as of the early 21st century, by the above attempts to confer personhood on entities whose expressed wishes can be controlled by the wealthy (fetuses via legal fiat; corporations by their owners) while removing it from actual self-aware creatures ("natural persons", in the legal parlance).
definitions
Warren criteria
Mary Anne Warren (who may have coined or popularized the term) has argued that the following qualities characterize personhood:
- consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain
- reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)
- self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control)
- the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics
- the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both
- This criterion is somewhat questionable given that "racial" is not a scientific term; see race science.
mores and laws
It is almost universally accepted that it is wrong to kill a person who has done no wrong, although many consider it to be allowable under certain circumstances (e.g. civilian casualties in wartime; euthanasia). This rule plays a large part in the debates over abortion and euthanasia and is often emphasized by pro-life advocates.