Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist. Many commenters took issue with that argument.
Money quote:
Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was enhanced by understanding the beliefs, motivations and personalities of others. They also speculate that the cost of ascribing intentions to non-intentional systems might have been far less than the cost of failing to recognize intentions in intentional systems. Thus the brain's personhood network may err on the side of activating too often...
Farah and Heberlein then claim that since the personhood network makes frequent mistakes and often attributes personhood to non-intentional systems that "suggests the personhood is a kind of illusion." They conclude, "If personhood is not really in the world, then there is no fact of the matter concerning the status of a given being as a person or not, and there is no point to the philosophical or bioethical program of seeking objective criteria for personhood more generally because there is none."This claims too much. Fortunately, the Journal publishes a number of thoughtful responses to Farah and Heberlein. One of the more devastating is by University of California, San Diego neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland. "Are there no mountains, no vegetables, no weeds, and no diseases?," she begins. Her point is that there are no precise criteria, or "natural kinds" that completely specify what a mountain, a vegetable, a weed or a disease is. Lambs quarter can either be a salad green or weed depending on how various gardeners regard it. Is obesity really a disease in quite the same way as smallpox? Yet despite the lack of precise criteria for all kinds of things out in the world (matters of fact, if you will), we manage to know what we're talking about and get along quite well.
As Christian Perring, a philosopher from Dowling College in Oakdale, New York, points out there is a great deal of agreement on what constitutes personhood. These include attributes such as rationality, memory, ability to self-reflect, intelligence, and a concept of self. "We are good at distinguishing persons from non-persons in most ordinary circumstances," writes Dowling. It is the extraordinary circumstances that modern medicine engenders -- embryos in Petri dishes, severe Alzheimer's patients, anencephalic newborns, early fetuses, and patients in persistent vegetative state - that are problematic for many people. For example, it is clearly the case that prolife activists hope to activate the personhood networks of women seeking abortions by requiring them to view ultrasound images of their fetuses before undergoing the procedure.
University of Maryland philosopher Mark Sagoff makes the extremely interesting point that the notion that personhood is somehow a moral trump that demands that others recognize a being's rights is an historically new concept. "The idea that every human being prima facie is entitled to equal respect and concern under rules fair to all seems to depend not on hard-wired biological factors but on contingent historical variables," writes Sagoff. Human history, after all, is replete with tribes who kill outsiders, men who kill "dishonored" women, believers who kill and torture infidels, and so forth. (Emphasis mine.)
This debate is fascinating to me for two reasons.
1) Some individuals do not show normal development in the system of identifying personhood described. For example, individuals with autism sometimes show deficits in this area. What does the fact that this system is not universal say about ethical behavior? Clearly, many autistic people are still getting there, but they must be getting to ethical behavior by some other route.
2) This debate gets to the core of what effects science is likely to have on ethics. Should we discover that personhood as an ethical precept is essentially arbitrary, can we still argue for its centrality in our moral systems? (I would say "yes," but likely that will require us to resort to utilitarian arguments.)
Anyway, read the whole thing. I don't have access to American Journal of Bioethics, so I haven't had a chance to read the article itself yet.
UPDATE: I realized that I wasn't being clear in my comment about autism, so I tried to set the record straight here.
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Once "personhood" is defined precisely, it would be possible to determine what is and what is not a person. Then one could decide whether "personhood" exists. This article seems ignore the basic scientific approach that requires any problem to be well stated.
By their apparent definition, as others have pointed out, anything that a person recognizes can be mistaken for something else and thus does not exist. I once identified an oil company sign in the distance as the rising full moon. Does that mean neither oil company signs nor the moon exist?
I'm quite happy to use the Touring Test to prevent bots from getting accounts on my blog. Machines are still pretty bad at answering questions like "What is it about this blog that interests you?". And the results so far are astoundingly good.
"These include attributes such as rationality, memory, ability to self-reflect, intelligence, and a concept of self. 'We are good at distinguishing persons from non-persons in most ordinary circumstances,' writes Dowling.
What a hoot. We are not good at distinguishing persons from non-persons and resist vigorously any challenge to the status quo.
We seem unable to grasp the implications of the steady stream of evidence for rationality, memory, ability to self-reflect, intelligence, and a concept of self in non-human animals. How odd that we instead argue about cells in a Petri dish.
We seem unable to notice what is directly in front of us.
The review and thread was packed with interesting ideas. The observation on social and moral behavior of autists was especially illuminating for me.
Perhaps in most cases it is a gain to rely on a preexisting system, even if we are punished by easier 'seeing' correlations that aren't there.
Some workmen seems to personify their tools, probably in order to easier remember their idiosyncratic properties and invest effort in their care. For example, 'poor Ol' Joe's engine gets cranky in cold, best get him started before it's too late' instead of 'oops, I forgot, my latest car's engine is hard to start when freezing'.
It could be especially beneficial as we mostly want to track observed correlations, we don't always know about specific causality which is perhaps easier to remember as such.
Hi Jake
I grew up with many chidren and got to know them very well.Many years later I ran into those same children at a classmate reunion and they were now adults.All our lifestyles were extremely different,and any outside observer would say we didn`t fit into the same room.But after meeting and speaking to each and every one,it was obvious that nobody was basically changed.I concluded that living is just picking up facades,and whether we like it or not we were born to be who we really are.If you examine your self carefully you will see that your inner child never left you.Those that think a new environment or education will create a new person are wrong.We were born to be who we are.
Hi Jake
I grew up with many chidren and got to know them very well.Many years later I ran into those same children at a classmate reunion and they were now adults.All our lifestyles were extremely different,and any outside observer would say we didn`t fit into the same room.But after meeting and speaking to each and every one,it was obvious that nobody was basically changed.I concluded that living is just picking up facades,and whether we like it or not we were born to be who we really are.If you examine your self carefully you will see that your inner child never left you.Those that think a new environment or education will create a new person are wrong.We were born to be who we are.