Personhood is the status of having outstanding moral worth. Yet the specific criteria that qualify someone as a person are controversial. In the West, personhood tends to be defined in terms of "sophisticated cognitive capacities;" yet, in other societies, such as sub-Saharan Africa, personhood is more often understood as a relational process. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a legal person (either a natural or a juridical person) has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.[1]

Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood, and the beginning of human personhood.[2] In the 21st century, corporate personhood is an existing Western concept; granting non-human entities personhood, which has also been referred to a "personhood movement", can bridge Western and Indigenous legal systems.[3]

Processes through which personhood is recognized socially and legally vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood might not be universal. Philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire have argued for a cross-border view of persons as emergent from social relational processes involving human beings. They write that a person "emerges out of a complex configuration of relationships involving human beings; we might say they become a ‘being-in-relationship.’ The emergent ‘being-in-relationship’ is a person, showing aspects, including superlative moral worth, not present before the relationships came together."[4] Anthropologist Beth Conklin has shown how personhood is tied to social relations among the Wari' people of Rondônia, Brazil.[5] Bruce Knauft's studies of the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea depict a context in which individuals become persons incrementally, again through social relations.[6] Likewise, Jane C. Goodale has also examined the construction of personhood in Papua New Guinea.[7]

Philosophical definitions

In philosophy, the word "person" may refer to various concepts. The concept of personhood is difficult to define in a way that is universally accepted, due to its historical and cultural variability and the controversies surrounding its use in some contexts. Capacities or attributes common to definitions of personhood can include human nature, agency, self-awareness, a notion of the past and future, and the possession of rights and duties, among others.[8]

Boethius, a philosopher of the early 6th century CE, gives the definition of "person" as "an individual substance of a rational nature" ("Naturæ rationalis individua substantia").[9]

According to the naturalist epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the term may designate any human or non-human agent who possesses continuous consciousness over time; and is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.[8]

According to Charles Taylor, the problem with the naturalist view is that it depends solely on a "performance criterion" to determine what is an agent. Thus, other things (e.g. machines or animals) that exhibit "similarly complex adaptive behaviour" could not be distinguished from persons. Instead, Taylor proposes a significance-based view of personhood:

Relatedly, Martin Heidegger developed his understanding of the distinctive kind of being which a person is as Dasein. The term's literal means an existence as a "being-there" or "there-being." Heidegger writes that, "Dasein itself has a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities; [...] it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it."[11] For Heidegger, the way in which Being is an issue for a person as Dasein is their future oriented caring. This distinguishes Dasein from function or performance criteria of personhood.

Others also dispute functional criteria of personhood, such as philosopher Francis J. Beckwith, who argues that it is rather the underlying personal unity of the individual:

What is crucial morally is the being of a person, not his or her functioning. A human person does not come into existence when human function arises, but rather, a human person is an entity who has the natural inherent capacity to give rise to human functions, whether or not those functions are ever attained. ...A human person who lacks the ability to think rationally (either because she is too young or she suffers from a disability) is still a human person because of her nature. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of a human being’s lack if and only if she is an actual person.

— Francis Beckwith, "Abortion, Bioethics, and Personhood: A Philosophical Reflection"[12]

This belief in the underlying unity of an individual is a metaphysical and moral[13] belief referred to as the substance view of personhood.[14]

Philosopher J. P. Moreland clarifies this point:

It is because an entity has an essence and falls within a natural kind that it can possess a unity of dispositions, capacities, parts and properties at a given time and can maintain identity through change.

— J. P Moreland, "James Rachels and the Active Euthanasia Debate"[15]

Harry Frankfurt writes that, in reference to a definition by P. F. Strawson, "What philosophers have lately come to accept as analysis of the concept of a person is not actually analysis of that concept at all." He suggests that the concept of a person is intimately connected to free will, and describes the structure of human volition according to first- and second-order desires:

Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, [humans] may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.

— Harry G. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person"[16]

The criteria for being a person... are designed to capture those attributes which are the subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard as most important and most problematical in our lives.

— Harry G. Frankfurt[17]

According to Nikolas Kompridis, there might also be an intersubjective, or interpersonal, basis to personhood:

What if personal identity is constituted in, and sustained through, our relations with others, such that were we to erase our relations with our significant others we would also erase the conditions of our self-intelligibility? As it turns out, this erasure... is precisely what is experimentally dramatized in the “science fiction” film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a far more philosophically sophisticated meditation on personal identity than is found in most of the contemporary literature on the topic.

— Nikolas Kompridis, "Technology's Challenge to Democracy: What of the Human?"[18]

Mary Midgley defines a "person" as being a conscious, thinking being, which knows that it is a person (self-awareness). She also wrote that the law can create persons.[19]

Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are: is alive, is aware, feels positive and negative sensations, has emotions, has a sense of self, (controls its own behaviour, recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities. While many of White's criteria are somewhat anthropocentric, some animals such as dolphins would still be considered persons.[20] Some animal rights groups have also championed recognition for animals as "persons".[21]

Another approach to personhood, Paradigm Case Formulation, used in descriptive psychology and developed by Peter Ossorio, involves the four interrelated concepts of 1) The Individual Person, 2) Deliberate Action, 3) Reality and the Real World, and 4) Language or Verbal Behavior. All four concepts require full articulation for any one of them to be fully intelligible. More specifically, a Person is an individual whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical pattern. Deliberate Action is a form of behavior in which a person (a) engages in an Intentional Action, (b) is cognizant of that, and (c) has chosen to do that. A person is not always engaged in a deliberate action but has the eligibility to do so. A human being is an individual who is both a person and a specimen of Homo sapiens. Since persons are deliberate actors, they also employ hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical reasons when selecting, choosing or deciding on a course of action. As part of our "social contract" we expect that the typical person can make use of all four of these motivational perspectives. Individual persons will weigh these motives in a manner that reflects their personal characteristics. That life is lived in a "dramaturgical" pattern is to say that people make sense, that their lives have patterns of significance. The paradigm case allows for nonhuman persons, potential persons, nascent persons, manufactured persons, former persons, "deficit case" persons, and "primitive" persons. By using a paradigm case methodology, different observers can point to where they agree and where they disagree about whether an entity qualifies as a person.[17][22]