Personhood
What causes a person to be a person? In some cases, it is said that personhood is directly tied to physical aspects, such as genetics and chemicals in the mind, but it seems absurd to think that that personhood is limited to such a shallow existence. Do thoughts make up a person in part? And in that sense, consciousness must be part of personhood.
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As a person we change over time and circumstance. What served us years ago, no longer is of use to us. People we used to love, might not be worthy of that respect anymore and that may have caused us to harden a bit, make those walls around our heart just a little bit taller, a little bit stronger than those we first erected out of Balsawood. That is until we learn that the walls that keep the pain of life out, also keeps the love of life out as well.
All of those things and more make up who we are as a person, beyond the science of our genes or in concert with our genes but it definitely makes up what I would consider our "consciousness".
But then I wonder what happens to that person, when their consciousness is no longer accessible to them? Do they become less of a "person"?
The foundational question is: what is a person? It's an important question because personhood has social and legal implications.
All human beings have a self (personal and social) identity:
1) Personal identity is the set of heritable attributes which remain essentially unchanged throughout the course of a person's life.
2) Social identity is the set of social attributes which have their basis in social learning and change throughout the course of a person's life.
Social identity is a mental construct which is stored in episodic and semantic memory.
Addis DR, Tippett L J. (2008). The Contributions of Autobiographical Memory to the Content and Continuity of Identity.
If a person is a human being possessing a social identity, and all human beings have a biological mother and father, then all human beings are persons.
:chin: True...
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
So maybe personhood must in part be physical?
So there are at least two aspects of identity, but is who we think we are, make us who we are?
Does a person's identity change when they suffer from a brain disease (e.g., dementia) or a mental illness (e.g., dissociative identity disorder)?
In legal ontology, personhood is a sort of mark of nobility, which sets apart certain entities from the rest. It's a bit like the object/subject distinction : a useful fiction. It doesn't matter if we colour a bit out of the lines with it... And it is a selective quality : a child is not a person re liability under US law, but is a person re protection under the law from the moment he is born viably.
But yes, personhood relates to the physical existence of the individual being in question, as well as their thoughts, which are just physical processes themselves. There is no disconnect.
All of the properties you have is what makes you YOU. This includes the genetic makeup that started you off, and has changed over the years (yes, our DNA changes over time), as well as all the experiences you've had. Alter one property, or one experience and it's not you.
Are you now the same person you were when you were 2 years old? Yes and No. Your 2-year old self lacked the experiences (and DNA changes) that you've had - so in terms of strict identity, you are not identical to your 2-year old self. On the other hand, you have 2 years of common history with that 2-year old self. So there is a trans-temporal person-ness that is you, which is a looser identity - the trans-temporal identity has temporal parts (i.e. I subscribe to perdurantism).
That is a question that I am pondering as well... :up:
Death may be viewed as tragic, natural, necessary, unfortunate, horrible, final, a transition, good... all sorts of things. What is very difficult is when the former person remains animate but unable to recognize self or others, and to navigate the world. There personhood has ended before death. Alzheimers disease, for instance, places individuals in this netherworld towards the end stage of disease. Severe injury may do the same thing.
Take Henry Molaison who lived for 50 years at the age of 27. The catastrophic damage to his brain was the result of radical surgery to alleviate very severe seizures. His memory prior to the surgery was intact; his sensory and motor apparatus was intact; his pleasant personality was intact. What was lost was the ability to acquire new permanent memories because he lost the capacity to form short-term memories.
In a sense, Mr. Molaison was not a real person any more, because he could recognize nothing new about himself or anyone else. When someone to whom he had been introduced and had been speaking with left the room briefly and returned, Molaison did not know who they were.
He spent many years in the care of others, and participated in laboratory studies. His unique condition made him an exceptional human subject for cognitive and memory studies.
I agree.
And yet, in hierarchical social groups, a legal domain exists, and social role (a part of social identity) is often linked with legal status. For example:
1) Family and conjugal relations.
2) Inmates of penal and mental health institutions.
3) Wards of the State.
4) Officials.
You have a notion of your own identity (i.e., a Self Schema), and others have a notion of your identity (i.e., a Person Schema). Nishida, H. (1999). Cultural Schema Theory: In W.B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing About Intercultural Communication, (pp. 401–418). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
If a human being has dementia (entailing distortions, then loss, of autobiographical memory), their social identity changes, but their personal identity (heritable attributes) remains essentially unchanged.
The self and person schemata of the individual with dementia may be modified initially, but ultimately they are lost. And the person schema of their family members and acquaintances would be accommodated (modified) or assimilated (extended), resulting in a change of social identity for the afflicted individual. But self (combined personal and social) identity is not lost unless a human being is no longer recognised by one's self and others.
So, given that identity loss is a possibility, should personhood be defined in terms of social identity, or only in terms of human nature (i.e., genetic predisposition)?
1) If I have a notion of my identity, and others have a notion of my identity, does my actual identity consist only of the relevant facts which can be established, or does it consist of the intersubjective identification of the agents involved in a social situation, or both?
2) If animals have social groups, do they have personal and social identities, and if so, should they be granted personhood in a human society?
You have a really good understanding about what I was asking and I appreciate you taking the time for such a thoughtful response. You have identified what I have witnessed in my family that has a strong history with Alzheimer's including early onset. As the elderly lose their personhood, it is easier to understand, for they have lived a full life, along with all the other platitudes that serve us through out the journey to their end of life. Early onset, early loss of personhood feels much more painful because you see a younger person disappear slowly before your eyes. That is my experience anyway.
Quoting Galuchat
Let me ponder this part a little more because in some ways it feels like we would be stealing the very identity from the elderly person even though logic suggests that their identity is already lost, so there would be nothing to steal....
IOW, you first identify the physical object, the human animal, with its shape, form, size, colouring, etc., and with its biologically-driven proclivities and potential (which are generally circumscribed by man's being a social animal); then on top of that is layered the identification of social roles that social animal (given its construction, capabilities and potential) may play, then on top of that is layered the unique style of motion, speech, etc., that social animal manifests as a result of the previous two layers plus their own ongoing internal world-and-self-modelling, and peculiar biography/trajectory through life, all of which results in a thinking (and social) animal.
That total package is the person.
At each stage, you are moving more from something given, to something that's ongoingly self-created by the person. The social roles are intermediary, in that they are partly thrust on us, partly something we choose (whereas our biology is totally a given hand of cards that we're dealt, and our creative, individualistic manifestations are totally self-built, the result of choices made in the present - choices not necessarily reflected in self-consciousness, but rather choices in a broader sense, made by the total package and usually reflected in self-consciousness).
(Of course the division into three layers, genetic, social and individual, with each subsequent layer built on and constrained by the previous layers, is just a rough-and-ready approximation: the reality is complex, with lots of interweaving between the layers, and it also differs between people case by case. But that's the general picture.)
That is an interesting perspective from a legal viewpoint. So maybe what is implied is that their are different kinds of persons?
Quoting Bitter Crank
Suppose we could maintain consciousness after death, and our characteristics (such as the style of communication) are recognizable to others, would we still be a person then? Also, is personhood relevant to other persons? :chin:
Quoting gurugeorge
That makes sense. So we are fundamentally the same person, but changeable.
Yes, I liken it to a massive ocean liner and a tugboat. The tugboat is relatively small, but it has enough power to move the liner given a bit of time and patience. It's like that with the bulk of us and our conscious minds.
At the very least, there is a distinction between a natural person - a human being - and a legal person - a private or public organization - and this distinction somewhat relates to degrees of possible liability, so yes, in a way, there are different kinds of persons. But you have to be careful with such qualification. 5 generations ago it was still ok to discriminate purely on the basis of preexisting legal fictions.
I think that the vagueness of the concept of personhood forces us, ethically, to err on the side of generosity : better remain open to the idea that something might be someone in principle, so as not to deny the existence of alternate form of subjectivities.
I agree, and well said.
Is it possible to arrive at a general definition of "person" given the natural-legal distinction?
Quoting Akanthinos
Yeah, better to be safe than sorry, so to say.
- "Is it possible to arrive at a general definition of "person" given the natural-legal distinction?"
Yes, a person would be a legal fiction which can hold, demand and receive rights and obligations. If we ontologize this a bit, a person would be an object in a legal domain capable of being attributed specific characteristics in the form of socially mandated powers and restrictions.
But this definition doesnt resolve the philosophical problem of personhood, which is that our relation to its essence is completely different from the one we have toward its phenomenology. Taylor is wrong : the only real relation to personhood is that of recognition and attribution, it is absolutely dependant on the actors performance (both the actor and the attributor). But Taylor is also right : if left to performance recognition, the concept of personhood loses a lot of steam, we no longer have any reason to believe that there is something inherently nobler in a person than an object. We are always thrown back to the idea that there is a qualitative difference to being a person.
However, it is important to note that Taylor's significance criterion is a complete step backward. It is either vague to the point of being absolutely useless (generous interpretations will range from 'having an Umwelt makes you a person' to 'reacting in any way to anything makes you a person) or restrictive to the point of turning any legal system into a nightmare (do we have to determine every legal actors 'domain of signification' in order to check his rights? Is significance really the best gauge for rights recognition?).
Performance is how we are cursed to recognize what constitute a person. But this recognition actually hints at something else, hidden, ineffable, and which we have, as a specie, mostly ignored until now : the intrinsic and increasingly rich community of all beings populating this universe.