The big idea: We've built up the person from feeling, self-awareness, agency and responsibility. None of those said 'must be human'. So here's the sharp question the whole topic has been aiming at: could an animal, or an AI, ever count as a person?
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer pushes hard on animals. If what earns a being moral status is that it can feel — suffer and enjoy — then to ignore an animal's suffering just because it isn't human is speciesism, a bias like racism. A great ape that is self-aware and communicates, he argues, has a stronger claim to personhood than many assume.
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That reply — 'a person to a degree' — is exactly how one African tradition has long thought about personhood.
Wiredu and Menkiti: personhood is earned: Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu and Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti describe a view common across many African communities: personhood isn't something you simply have at birth — it's something you earn and grow into through your life in a community. As Menkiti put it, personhood comes in degrees: a newborn is a full human being but not yet a full person; you become more fully a person as you take on relationships, duties and a place among others. It's graded and relational, not automatic and individual.
Warren / Locke (Western)
- Personhood = having certain abilities
- Roughly on/off — you meet the marks or you don't
- Located in the individual mind
Wiredu / Menkiti (African)
- Personhood = earned through community life
- Comes in degrees — you grow into it
- Located in your relationships, not just you
Checkpoint — degree view: In one line: for Wiredu and Menkiti, personhood is earned and graded through community — not a switch you're born with, but a status you grow into. That reframes the animal/AI question: it's not 'is it a person, yes or no?' but 'how far along is it?'
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Now turn the same tools on a harder case — a machine that talks like a person.
Go further — higher-level insight: The deepest worry about AI personhood isn't cleverness — it's whether there's anything it's like to be the machine. A chatbot can produce the words 'I'm sad' with no inner feeling behind them. On Singer's test (real feeling) and the African view (real, lived relationships), imitation isn't enough. Naming the gap between behaving like a person and being one is a top-band move.
How Section A works: An unseen stimulus (text or image) [25]. Task: with explicit reference to the stimulus and your own knowledge, explore a philosophical issue related to what it is to be human. Personhood — who counts as a person, and whether a non-human could — is one of the strongest issues to reach for, and this whole topic feeds it.
Stimulus — A care-home installs a talking robot companion. A resident says: "She listens, she remembers my stories, she says she cares about me. My own daughter says it's just a machine — but honestly, some days she feels more like a person to me than half the people here." With explicit reference to the stimulus and your own knowledge, explore a philosophical issue related to what it is to be human.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.
Common mistakes: 1. Describing views instead of arguing them. 2. Ignoring the stimulus — quote the robot 'saying she cares'. 3. Only one view — top bands need tension (abilities vs feeling vs community). 4. No conclusion — decide, with a reason. 5. Name-dropping — a name earns nothing without its argument.