Personhood

Human being = your biological species. Person = a being with the right mental/moral status (thinks, feels, chooses).

A being with a certain moral and mental status — not just a member of a species.

Consciousness, reasoning, self-awareness, communication, moral agency.

Being able to feel things — pleasure, pain, experience.

Being able to weigh right and wrong and act on it.

It decides who could have full rights — only humans, or any being with the right kind of mind (animals, AI?).

It seems to exclude newborns and people who can't yet reason — though Warren protects them for other reasons.

On Warren's view, no — personhood tracks mental abilities, and those aren't tied to one species.

Either you are a person or not, versus personhood being fuller or thinner over a life.

Infants, great apes, advanced AI, or people in comas — each tests where the line falls.

Weigh competing criteria on the hard cases and reach a reasoned conclusion — don't just describe.

Consciousness = having experiences. Self-consciousness = being aware that YOU are the one having them.

Being aware of yourself as a self — able to think about your own thoughts.

A thinking being that can 'consider itself as itself', the same thinking thing across different times and places.

It lets a being treat itself as one continuous 'me' — owning its past and planning its future.

Ownership of your choices (praise/blame), planning your future, and deciding to change.

Newborns and sleeping adults can't consider themselves right now — Locke replies personhood needs the CAPACITY, not constant use.

Maybe degree — some animals show flickers (mirror self-recognition), which matters for animal/AI personhood.

Chimps and dolphins recognising themselves in a mirror suggests self-awareness may be graded, not simply human-only.

A being that acts for its own reasons — a doer — not just something pushed around by causes.

Doing = you act for a reason of your own. Happening = a cause acts on you, no reason of yours.

A cause pushes you (reflex/shove) vs a reason you hold guides you (goal/want) — only the second is an action.

It builds on self-awareness: a person is a doer who acts for reasons, not just a being things happen to.

Your reasons came from upbringing and brain — so are you really free? A bridge to the freedom topic.

Many say no — it follows programmed causes; the reasons aren't its own, held and understood by it.

Consciousness (feeling) → self-consciousness (knowing yourself) → agency (acting for your own reasons).

An event: it has a cause but no reason of your own, so it isn't an exercise of agency.

Being fairly open to praise or blame for what you do — it needs you to have really done it, for your own reasons.

You can only be responsible for what you actually DID as an agent; no agency, no fair blame.

You were forced (e.g. threatened at knife-point) — the act wasn't your own free choice, so fair blame drops.

You couldn't have done otherwise — you didn't know, couldn't understand, or couldn't control it.

You're responsible when a free, informed agent who could have acted otherwise stood behind the act.

Rational agents have priceless worth, so must be treated as ends in themselves, never mere tools.

Never use a person only as a tool for your goals — respect them as a rational agent with worth beyond price.

Humans who can't reason (infants, some illnesses) seem to lose dignity — Kantians patch this, but it's a real gap.

In principle yes, if personhood tracks abilities, feeling or community rather than species — the debate is whether animals/AI really have those.

Treating one species as more important simply because it's yours — a bias he compares to racism.

If the ability to feel earns moral status, ignoring an animal's suffering just for being non-human is speciesism.

Personhood is earned and graded through community life, not automatic at birth — a matter of degree.

You grow into being a person; a newborn is a full human but not yet a full person (Menkiti). Reframes animal/AI cases.

Western (Warren/Locke): abilities, roughly on/off, in the individual. African (Wiredu/Menkiti): earned, graded, in your relationships.

It can behave like one — say 'I care' — with no inner feeling or real relationship behind it. Behaving ≠ being.

The key gap: producing the outward marks (words, memory) isn't proof there's any inner life or real relationship there.

Exploring and weighing several views on the stimulus and reaching a reasoned conclusion — not describing.