debate-points, semantics, philosophyIn response to a question about torturing kittens being wrong, a discrete problem was identified. The concept of personhood is easily understood to a Christian or Deist; they were imbued by their Creator with rights… or whatever. However, much of the western idea of Natural Rights are predicated by an appeal to some Higher Power. A kin to Natural Rights Theory is Social Contract Theory, however it is not quite immune to attacks of a Deist basis (per David Hume). Structuralism offers some consolation, but has a very relative view on personhood.
If tomorrow the supernatural glue embedded in personhood dissolved socially, how should the atheist approach rebuilding the construction of personhood? Or rather, today, since atheists do not adhere to that glue, how do we qualify/quantify the concept? So absent the belief in some edified principal [i.e. “God”], and in addition to the species/genus, how as Atheists can we coherently define a person objectively without relying on a divine principal or qualia?
What considerations determine the rights of persons?
What stratifications/derivatives of personhood do we allow and why? (i.e. kittens may not be people, but setting one on fire has more moral consequence generally than a chair or computer)
Does that ‘person’ as objectified by atheists match the one objectified by Chrisitians or other theists?
If we do not believe in some immaterial quality of a person, how do we appeal to a category of personhood?
[Edit: Re-Formulated partially. Allusions to souls removed because they distracted from the core question and were seen as a false pretense for the question of personhood being a problem atheists should consider.]
I don’t have a truly satisfying answer; but I have heard some interesting propositions.
One I’m fond of is that a “person” is a being who is or has at some time been an independent life and which:
This definition has some interesting implications (and, as I said, isn’t entirely satisfying).
Since I’ve rarely met a pro-life atheist, I suspect Item 1 wouldn’t be controversial; however item #2 would be highly controversial. This is one case where I feel like it’s wrong to accept that conclusion, though I can’t find any purely rational objection.
Item #3 is particularly fascinating, since a dolphin (e.g.) is known to meet all but one of the criteria (meta-cognition, which is hard to prove given our current abilities), yet I’ve met only a handful of people (other than PETA members) who would support giving person-like rights to dolphins.
One concept of person might be an entity that we assign rights, due to an implicit social contract.
So, I don’t want to be murdered, so it is in my rational self-interest to agree to abide by rules that say that I won’t murder others, as long as those others abide by the same rules. Likewise, I don’t want my property stolen, my child or pet hurt, etc. I agree not to do those things to others if they agree to not do them to me. Society and laws and such makes this more practical than it would be to individually make agreements with everyone.
Those that are considered to be “people” are those entities that we consider to be in on the implicit or explicit rules. Today most people find it appropriate to extend the rules (and therefore the definition of “person”) to include even those that can’t understand or cooperate with the rules (kittens and various other animals, infants and the unborn, mentally disabled, etc), and at some point I expect we will extend it to certain man-made entities.
Another definition might be “those that we feel empathy toward”, but, as I think I mention in my post re:kittens that you refer to, this seems less than satisfying, at least on an intellectual level.
Note that my definitions have blurry boundaries. I am personally most comfortable with rules that extend “rights” (and therefore personhood, if you feel the need to categorize as such) all the way to the simplest animals and potentially even machines, but with varying degrees. (i.e. its worse to hurt a kitten than it is to hurt an earthworm, etc)
I think sentience is a good line to consider. Language is probably another. (I am talking about species, not individuals, and not infants vs. adults.)
There are varying degrees of sentience — (non-human) apes are more sentient than dolphins, but less than humans. The more sentient a species proves to be, the more human it seems to be, and the more we ascribe it human-like rights, such as the right not to be tortured. (For example: kick a kitten? No way. Step on a cockroach? Twice. And go get me the insecticide.)
We ascribe humans with the right to determine their own lives, but we don’t give that right to cats. If I decide I’m moving to Vermont, the cat doesn’t get a vote in whether we stay or go. The cat, as a species, doesn’t have the capacity to understand what Vermont is, where it is in relation to where we are, why I would want to move there, or why I would want to stay. I can explain most thoroughly, but the cat doesn’t understand enough of my language to comprehend my reasoning.
I haven’t a bloody clue what the theists think.
Other respondents have pointed to both sentience and sapience, however there’s a related but uniquely distinct thing that humans do which other animals do not: we constantly seek out both new tools to do what we have been doing all along, and we seek new uses for pre-existing tools. This is something that is distinct from learned behaviors. An easy example of a learned behavior is seen in gulls in that when they catch a crab in the sea, the gull will fly upwards and drop the crab to the ground as a means of gaining their food. But we take learned behavior to a completely different level in the way we interact with one another. I can’t imagine any other animal needing to communicate on a level like we do with the Internet.
I wouldn’t throw the idea of a soul completely out of the window, but look what is useful from it, and what is not.
Afaik, Siegmund Freud was an atheist, 100 years ago, and used the term in a different sense than the churches of that time, and tried to find scientific access to the human psyche.
My reasoning would be to ask: What observations lead to the idea of a soul? What is it describing (feelings + thoughts)? What is a modern, scientific description? What is the distinction between religious ideas about a soul, and things I could mean when talking about it?
The distinction would be: I don’t believe in a divine breath, which made man from potter’s clay. And I don’t believe a soul does exist after the death of a person, or independent from the body.
But as an abstraction over feelings, temperament, experiences, thoughts, nerves and wisdom, it might be useful.
I will treat you, the way I want to be threatened by you.
The more parallels we observe, the more we are forced to threat others the way we want to be threaten. We see apes as very close to us, we threat pets well, which we see very often and where we therefore make more observations of their moods and feelings. We don’t see much parallelism to fish, so we don’t care that much for them, but more than with bugs. Yes, I would agree, it is partly an ignorant, chauvinistic view of the world, but if we look at tigers, wolfs or bears, they act the same: Most social in their family, than in their race, and other animals are their food.
I don’t understand question No. 3.
A person is and remains exactly what we have always been absent of religion, because all religion is a lie.
Humans are unique in that we invent and use language. Anecdotal evidence taken from recovering stroke victims relates that people without language seem to exist in the present moment state, an animal state - fully conscious but without the ability to look forward significantly.
So, I tend to look at this through a three tier model. At the top are language using or communicative animals like humans, or theoretical aliens. In the middle tier are conscious animals and below them are the unconscious and plants. I’d be hard pressed to think of bugs or shrews as ‘conscious’ entities.
I believe that a ‘person’ is defined by his/her ability to communicate (as a species not an individual) and/or make forward looking plans. This (to me) indicates a significant degree of consciousness rising above the animal state.
Edited to add:
The point was raised about ‘artificial’ or machine intelligence, specifically how would you identify personhood for them? I believe that the answer is simply an expansion of the forgoing.
(As a species, not individual - since individuals become incapacitated through birth or accident, etc)
If any species demonstrated enough of these points, you would have to seriously evaluate them as a possible ‘person’. A machine intelligence may for example be able to move from hardware platform to platform with ease, not recognizing itself in any way as a function of body image - yet still demonstrate self-awareness, self-consciousness, language, planning, etc. In that case I’d believe that intelligence to be a person. An ape may demonstrate self-awareness after being exposed to a mirror for a long enough time, yet never demonstrate long term planning, languaging, etc. And so I’d not believe that creature to be a person.
The problem is that there is no definition, let alone an explanation, of consciousness which everyone agrees on. But there’s growing evidence that consciousness and the accompanying sense of free will which we tend to define as “a person” is really an illusion created by a part of the brain which monitors the brain’s own activity. Experiments have shown, for example, that the brain makes decisions on its own, seconds before we’re “aware” of making that decision. We believe our “self” is the free-willed author of the decision, when in fact it’s just an automated mechanism which makes a decision based on the entirety of the state of the brain at the time. If that is true, then there is really no person to speak of outside of the body at all.
See the following for an interesting exploration of this issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbItRBc4Cp8&feature=player_embedded
It’s an episode of BBC’s Horizons Programme which deals with the nature of Consciousness, called “The Secret You”. Here’s the synopsis:
With the help of a hammer-wielding scientist, Jennifer Aniston and a general anaesthetic, Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science's greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are? While the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience, they are notoriously difficult to explain. So, in order to find out where they come from, Marcus subjects himself to a series of probing experiments.
He learns at what age our self-awareness emerges and whether other species share this trait. Next, he has his mind scrambled by a cutting-edge experiment in anaesthesia. Having survived that ordeal, Marcus is given an out-of-body experience in a bid to locate his true self. And in Hollywood, he learns how celebrities are helping scientists understand the microscopic activities of our brain. Finally, he takes part in a mind-reading experiment that both helps explain and radically alters his understanding of who he is.
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