What is it to be a person? On personhood

What is it to be a person? On personhood.

#ethics #philosophy #persons #personhood

[eligar]

Curious as to differentiating personhood from agency. Being a person/human-being/having personhood doesn’t override the fact that not all beings that are human people have agency. An unborn “person” (should one choose to apply personhood to an embryo) has no agency, but the woman who is pregnant does. The woman’s agency takes priority, otherwise we’d be removing one person’s self agency to give priority to someone else, basically picking and choosing who is allowed to have certain rights while removing someone else’s based solely on subjective feelings. Medically speaking, we all have rights defined by medical ethics laws of bodily autonomy and informed consent for a reason. These all go away if we choose to place a non-sentient “person” with no agency over someone who is born, has agency, and has already enjoyed clearly defined medical rights regarding physiological states and biological processes. Consent is hers, not society’s.

[robertmunga]

So ... if the presence or absence of a "quality" such as feelings, thoughts, et cetera make a "person", is there a spectrum such that having more or less of one of these qualities thay make up "personhood" makes you more or less of a person? This is a classically slippery slope.

[ivannisevic]

Personhood idea is one step away from concentration camps. It opens too many questions in the wrong places. It makes it legitimate to ask if a mentally disabled or a senile human deserves the same dignity as the rest. Until we meet a similarly intelligent alien species, lets just talk about people.

[JohnSmith-rzfh]

This seems intuitively wrong, the majority of people would still consider someone in a comma to be a person or to have personhood. You simply asserted that if someone is in a comma, they would not be considered a person. Furthermore, if you are to look from a legal angle, an individual in a comma is considered to have personhood via legal consensus, further providing evidence that your dismal of an individual in comma as not being a person was hasty and too offhanded. It seems if you are to provide a definition of personhood, this definition must be able to accommodate individuals who are in an unconscious state. Language is in a sense a form of general consensus, and it seems plainly obvious that there is a general consensus as to the personhood of an individual in a comma. Let me know what you think.