What's interesting to me about that list is that it gives pretty short shrift to agency as a criterion for personhood. Which in turn has to do with the personal history of how I come at the term "personhood."
"Personhood" is a term with a very particular meaning in Anthropology, and at least as of the early 90s when I was studying anthro as an undergrad at UR, there were some criteria that were fairly precise (by the standards of Social Anthropology) for whether or not you should regard a participant in society as a "full person." As I recall, they basically came down to two questions: - Is the actor treated as though they have agency in society? - Does the actor actually have a high degree of agency in society? Grace Harris (now retired) was the professor there most interested in this concept. She'd studied under Meyer Fortes, who first brought the concept into the mainstream of anthropological thought. For Fortes and for Harris, the key question was what agency you as an actor have: You're a person if you have the power to act like one. One of the key cases that was often used to elucidate the issue was the Tallensi treatment of sacred crocodiles. These crocodiles were said (it's been a long time, so I may not have this exactly right) to be inhabited by the spirits of ancestors, and were treated in many regards as though they were those ancestors: It was a crime to kill them, punishable by reparation to the family; they were consulted on important decisions; and there were other issues that I don't recall. In contrast, consider, say, an unmarried young man or woman: It's a crime to kill them, but the reparations aren't likely to be as severe as for killing a sacred crocodile; and they're almost never consulted about anything, they just do what they're told. I.e., very little agency. In practice, in most "traditional societies", you didn't become a "full person" until you were married and had children. In many cases, you couldn't really say that individuals had achieved "full personhood" until your children were married. The point is that you had made and delivered on the commitment to perpetuate your society. Of course, things don't work that way for us so it can be harder for us to see the agency issue. So let's look at a current use case and see how it plays out with agency as the criterion. If you are mentally disabled in some way, or if you attempt suicide, you can have a great deal of your lawful agency taken away from you: You can't enter certain kinds of contracts on your own; you can't make certain decisions; you may not be permitted to drive a car or purchase certain kinds of goods, or participate in certain activities; and so on. You have lost agency. In Fortesian terms, you could be said to have become "less of a person." Professor Harris was particularly interested in how agency (and personhood) gets diminished with age and infirmity, and saw laws against suicide as particularly interesting cases of restricting agency. At the time I was studying this stuff, I found it very difficult to explain it to people. They just didn't want to talk about it. They'd start damning the attitude as fascism, when what Grace Harris was trying to do was expose how things actually worked. I'd explain that I wasn't advocating an attitude, I was just describing one, but in general people just wouldn't hear me after a certain point. Re. Craig's point about ex nihilo approach: I guess that's partly what I'm on about here, too. I don't think that theological approaches are liable to be very helpful in figuring out what's actually going on with regard to personhood or the "personhood spectrum." But I'll go further and say that a priori ethics aren't likely to do any better. Anything we reckon with regard to personhood must reference empirical facts about personhood to be valid. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:40 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > > ...And what might it mean in the future? > > http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20090429/ > > > Frank > > Check out my web page at: http://www.geocities.com/stardolphin2/link3.htm > > "To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair > convincing." > - Raymond Williams > ____________________________________________________________ > Diabetic and on Medicare? Get Your Free Diabetes Supplies Now. > > http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/jZBdzA5MhhN79PrUQINuQymnnoc6Rzj71PTL06YVmWHT2AMYpA6wpxe/ > > > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
