What's a person?
 

In two different parts of the world the definition of 'human' is being challenged in court.

In Colorado (US) a "proposed amendment to the state constitution defining a fertilized human egg as a person has enough petition signatures to get on the November ballot."

And in Austria, "animal rights activist and teacher Paula Stibbe, along with the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories (AAAF), says she wants [a] chimpanzee, named Matthew Hiasl Pan, declared a person."

Both of these are politically motivated, but I would think the petitioners are at opposite ends of the spectrum (animal rights = left vs. restricting access to abortions = right).

I see both of these as leading to lots of unintended consequences, if they pass.

"You're not a person until you're in my phonebook"

~Bill Hicks

The political implications aside, for a moment, the philosophical question is an interesting one. There are two paths to head down in trying to define personhood.

The first is to try to establish a certain kind of essential nature that defines a person. That conversation centers around ideas like "mind" or "soul", or particular non-material qualities that are essential to personhood. The objection to this path is that it requires something more than brute materialism. It defines human beings by something other than the mere connection of certain molecules together in a particular pattern. Plato was fine with that, modern post-religious ethics, not so much.

The second path is to define "person" by a certain set of capacities. Things like capacity to reason, or to make tools, or to use language. Those definitions have gone through rocky times recently, as we discover more and more non-human animals that demonstrate those same capacities, albeit in limited measure. The other problem with capacity definitions is that they present huge difficulties for people who once had, but no longer have, those capacities. If personhood is a set of capacities, then at what point does someone with a degenerative mental disease, who slowly loses all of those capacities, also lose their status as a person?

There is, I suppose, a "pure science" way of defining persons. That would involve identifying the exact DNA differential that makes up a member of Homo Sapiens, and making that the exact definition of "person". There's a disconnect with that, though. We talk about "person" differently than we talk about Homo Sapien. A "person" is a moral entity, with rights and obligations. A Homo Sapien is a certain kind of animal. There's no good reason to presume that the rights and ethical obligations we assign to "persons" should attach simply by virtue of protein math.

Not only that, every cell on my discarded coffee cup would qualify.

Sometimes, when someone close to you dies, that's when "what is a person?" becomes a topic.

Some people deal with this by saying a person is an eternal soul in heaven. That's an easy and popular answer.

You could also say that the essence of a person is in their interactions with others. The impact they have had on the lives of others are not erased by their physical absence.

For instance, I can read a book by a person who was never alive on this Earth during my lifetime, and my interaction with the essence of that person is just as valid, regardless of whether they inhabit a physical body or not.

I can remember times I've spent with people how are long gone from this world. My memories, the things I learned from them, are just the same as if they were in the next room. People don't disappear when they die. People are inside you. What a person is, to you, is inside you.

Dogs are people. Well...Pilau is anyway.

I think it's one of those concepts which are so broad they are hard to define.

But I don't think either one of those qualify.

They're both wrong.

A person? Those are both a bit outrageous (especially the chimp one!) to me, personally.

I guess I define person as a homo sapien...who can breathe, and I can touch/interact with. Guess we have to discount non species, fertilized egss, and fetesus, according to my definition.