Wikibooks

Introduction to
Philosophy/What is
a Person
< Introduction to Philosophy

At one time the general view in some

religious societies was that people had
souls, which, when they died went to
heaven or hell, or else were reborn. The
soul was considered the essential core of
what a person was. This idea is perhaps
less fashionable now, but it forms the
basis of most religious beliefs. This belief
in the separation of mind and body is
known today as dualism.

Current scientific thought tends toward the

alternate view: monism. Bodies are viewed
as complex biological entities responsible
for all behaviors and thought processes
they express. Since no evidence for a soul
exists, only the physical entity remains for
consideration. To say that X now and Y
then are the same person is to say that
there is bodily spatio-temporal continuity
between them.
The question of personal identity, which
was first raised by Locke and later
expanded on by Leibniz, would at first
seem trivial in nature. When looking at a
person or an object one can easily trace
that person throughout his life. If I place a
pen behind my back and then pull it back
out again it is obviously the same pen.
Problems arise when we discuss cases
where this is not so straightforward.

Let us return to the example of the person;

from the time you are born to the time you
die you change a large portion of the
matter in your body, are you then the same
person? A tree that grows from a nut
shares the same thing in common
throughout its entire life, mainly its origin,
however is it always the same 'tree?' How
about when it is just a nut, or firewood
behind my house. When does an object
cease to be an object and become a
different object?

Perhaps the most famous historical

example comes from the ship of Theseus.
The ship of Theseus has 100 parts to it,
and within the hold are contained 100
replacement parts. The ship sets sail on a
voyage and on the first day out the captain
discovers there is a problem with a piece
of the boat so he replaces it with the one
in the hold. The next thing happens on the
next day, and the next, etc. At the end of
100 days the ship returns to port with
every piece of it having been exchanged
with its correlating piece in the hold. Is the
ship the same ship? What if the captain
emptied the hold and built a new ship with
the parts that were originally the ship of
Theseus, would those be the ship of
Theseus or would it be the ship he sailed
into port with?

Concerning personal identity at what point

does a person cease to be a person? If
your arm is chopped off are you still a
person, still the same person? What do I
need to remove in order to take away your
personhood?

The question of what makes a person is

charged with all types of implications. For
example, is an unborn human a "person?"
Ask a pro-lifer and you will likely get one
answer; conversely, ask someone from
Planned Parenthood and you will almost
inevitably get another. If an unborn human
is a "person," at what point does it become
recognizable as a person? Is it, perhaps,
implicit in the being? What, then,
differentiates between an unborn human
from an unborn chicken? Both contain
similar levels of sentience at the time, it
would seem. Many questions like these
are raised no matter which definition of
personhood is used.

Freedom of the Will and the

Concept of a Person
Harry Frankfurt (1929- ), wrote, "[The
criteria for being a person] are designed to
capture those attributes which are the
subject of our most humane concern with
ourselves and the source of what we
regard as most important and most
problematical in our lives." In philosophy,
"what is a person?" is not a question of
biology, but a question of other attributes.
Harry Frankfurt says that one of those
attributes is the structure of the will.

Within the Free-will Debate, there are three

main schools of thought: Hard
Determinism, Soft Determinism and
Libertarianism. These schools are divided
over two issues, Determinism vs.
Indeterminism and Compatibilism vs
Incompatibilism. In the terms of the free
will debate, determinism is the view that
the decision-making parts of the human
brain are not fundamentally random,
whereas indeterminism is the view that
those decision-making parts of the brain
are fundamentally random. Compatibilism
holds that humans can make free-willed
decisions even if our decision systems are
not random, while incompatibilism holds
that we can only have free will if our
decision processes are random.

The debate is complicated by the fact that

some writers use the term "determinism"
interchangably with "hard-determinism."
Determinism is a condition of a group of
object (a "system") such that its state at
time t-0 determines its state at time t-1, t-1
being the moment in time that comes
immediately after t-0. A determinist about
free will believes that the decision making
system in the human brain is just such a
system. A hard-determinist believes this
and one other thing, namely, that the fact
that someone's decisions are determined
(by their desires and so on) somehow
means that they do not have free will. Thus
it is important to carefully distinguish
between these two terms, and to
remember that a person who believes in
determinism is not necessarily a person
who disbelieves in free will.

Another complication stems from the fact

that some writers believe that lack of
determinism ("indeterminism") is a
fundamental randomness in which the
state of something at time t-0 does not
determine the state, or even the existence
of that thing at t-1, thus making control
impossible, while other writers believe that
indeterministically brained human beings
can still control what they do at t-1, even if
their brain states at t-1 have absolutely no
relationship to their immediately preceding
t-0 brain states. (Writers who hold the
former view tend to be soft determinists,
while libertarians seem to tend to take the
latter view. Hard determinists can take
either view.)

Incompatibilists argue that in order for a

person to have free will, under all of the
same conditions, it must be the case that
one would follow different courses of
action. For example, let us imagine I go to
the ice cream store wanting chocolate ice
cream. With all of my inner states and
psychological states and every condition
remaining the same, it must be the case
that I would order EITHER the chocolate
OR the Neapolitan, in order to have free-
will. For instance, if it is the case that I love
chocolate and hate Neapolitan, me
ordering chocolate because I wanted
chocolate ice cream would not be a free-
willed action because it was determined
by the fact I wanted chocolate ice cream.
Incompatibilists argue that I could only
have free will if me going into the ice
cream store wanting chocolate and hating
Neapolitan could result in me ordering
Neapolitan even though I wanted
chocolate and hate Neapolitan.

In contrast, compatibilists argue that in

order for a person to have free-will, they
must decide what they do without
coercion. If I go to the ice cream store
wanting ice cream, compatibilists hold
that my choice to order chocolate being
determined by my firm desire for
chocolate does not make it not a free
willed action. Rather, compatibilsts believe
that what robs people of free will is
coercion. If a crazed tourist from Naples
held a gun to my head and made me order
Neapolitan instead of my beloved
chocolate, my ordering the Neapolitan ice
cream would not be a free willed action.

Hard Determinists accept determinism

and incompatibilism, believing that human
decisions are not random, and that this
nonrandomness rules out free will. Soft
Determinists accept determinism and
compatibilism, believing that human
decisions are not random, and that this
nonrandomness does not rule out free will.
(Some soft determinists believe that
randomness in human decision making
would make free will impossible.)
Libertarians accept indeterminism and
incompatibilism, believing that human
decisions are random, that this
randomness does not rule out free will,
and in fact that randomness actually allow
free will.

Determinists hold that, if a particular

system is deterministic, its immediately
next state will be exactly determined by its
present state. This means that, in a
deterministic system given any particular
set of circumstances, the immediately
succeeding set of following outcomes or
events are determined, guaranteed by the
laws of nature. Everything in nature is
made up of atoms that behave according
to the laws of nature, and we are no
different. Determinism is the view that
everything happens necessarily due to the
circumstances that precede it; Hard
determinism is the dual view that this is
true and that people are unable to truly
make their own decisions. Incompatibilism
is the view that, if the laws of nature
determine what people will do under
certain circumstances (circumstances
which were themselves determined by the
circumstances that immediately preceded
them), people cannot have free will.
Everything we know about science and the
physical world points to determinism
being true under virtually all observable
circumstances. However, certain
interpretations of quantum mechanics
hold that some events are fundamentally
random, which means it is possible that
some brain events are random. This in turn
means that it is at least theoretically
possible that some human decisions could
be random, as in the case of a person who
decides to order chocolate ice cream but
instead, for no reason, orders Neapolitan.

Libertarians believe that the everyday

experiential evidence that people have
free-will proves that human decisions are
not determined. Soft determinists agree
that the evidence overwhemingly supports
the idea that free will exists, but that the
fact that human beings at least
sometimes determine their own actions
does not prove that those actions are not
determined. Some soft determinists argue
that the fact that someone determines her
own action proves that the action was
determined (by her.)

Libertarians argue that people can only

deliberate about choices that are truly up
to them, and that this fact proves that
human actions are not determined. Soft
determinists reply that deliberation is not a
random sequence of events, but a
deterministic process in which a human
brain comes to a decision caused by the
person's needs, preferences and desires.

Libertarians sometimes refer to the basic

feeling have that tells them they are
making things happen. Soft determinists
reply that this feeling is correct, and that it
reflects the fact that the person's brain is
recognizing needs, forming preferences,
making decisions and then initiating
actions based on those decisions, none of
which could happen if the brain was
inderterministic, which is to say, random.
People feel like they are making my own
choices, and that they are free to pick
among different alternatives. These
feelings are cause by the fact that I
experience myself forming forming
preferences based on my feelings, forming
desires based on my preferences, making
decisions based on my aggregated
desires, and performing actions from
those decisions. Libertarians, who hold
that human behavior is not subject to
cause-and-effect, cannot explain this
orderly one-thing-leads-to-another process,
and thus this experience of choosing is a
strong argument against libertarianism
Throughout history, the majority of
philosophers have found middle-ground,
and argued that free-will and determinism
are compatible. David Hume is a good
example of this. Hume argued that people
are free as long as they are doing what
they want to do. I may not be able to really
make my own choice (in the way that hard-
determinists and libertarians mean), but
as long as I wanted the chocolate ice
cream, and that desire determined that I
would choose it, I have free will.

Back to Harry Frankfurt. He believes that

causation really has nothing to do with
freedom of the will and personhood.
Frankfurt constructs a hierarchy of desires
and volitions. A first order desire is
wanting to do something. Mostly every
creature has this type of desire. "I want to
eat." A second order desire is the want to
be different, or to have different first order
desires. This self-evaluation, Frankfurt
says, is a mostly human trait. A step up
from that is a second order volition, that is,
when someone wants a certain desire to
be his will. Frankfurt says that these
volitions are characteristics of people,
whereas "wantons" are creatures without
these volitions, creatures who do not care
about their will and are moved simply by
their desires.
These theories, along with others, still
exist and are in conflict to this day.

This question must be answered before

we can even begin to think about whether
it might be possible to build a person. The
English term, "person," is ambiguous. We
often use it as a synonym for "human
being." But surely that is not what we
intend here. It is possible that there are
aliens living on other planets that have the
same cognitive abilities that we do (e.g.,
E.T., Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, the
famous "bar scene" from Star Wars).
Imagine aliens that speak a language,
make moral judgments, create literature
and works of art, etc. Surely aliens with
these properties would be "persons"--
which is to say that it would be morally
wrong to buy or sell them as property the
way we do with dogs and cats or to
otherwise use them for our own interests
without taking into account the fact that
they are moral agents with interests that
deserve the same protection that ours do.
Thus, one of our primary interests is to
distinguish persons from property. A
person is the kind of entity that has the
moral right to make its own life-choices, to
live its life without (unprovoked)
interference from others. Property is the
kind of thing that can be bought and sold,
something I can "use" for my own
interests. [Of course when it comes to
animals, there are serious moral
constraints on how they may be "used." We
urge you to learn about the philosophical
debates concerning the ethical treatment
of animals and whether animals may not
themselves have extensive rights not
commonly accorded them in our society.
Persons are not to be treated as property.
Henceforth, we shall define a person as
follows:

PERSON = "any entity that has the moral

right of self-determination." So then, any
entity judged to be a person would be the
kind of thing that would deserve protection
under the constitution of a just society. For
example, you might think that any such
being would have the right to "life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness." One of the
primary philosophical questions that
concerns us in the PT-Project is: What
properties must an entity possess to be a
"person"? Many properties have been
suggested: Intelligence, the capacity to
speak a language, creativity, the ability to
make moral judgments, consciousness,
free will, a soul, self-awareness . . and the
list could go on almost indefinitely.

Free-will and Ethics

There is a definite link between ideas of
free-will and ideas of ethics and
responsibility. Libertarians and
Determinists mostly agree that in order for
a person to be held responsible for her/his
actions, that person must have made the
decision to carry out said action. This
translates to philosophy of law. We
generally do not hold someone
responsible for a crime if we do not
consider him/her to be the "owner of his
actions". For example, if a man with
schizophrenia shoots someone in a fit of
hallucinogenic rage, we do not believe it
was his fault, and we consider him "not
guilty by reason of insanity". There can be
no blame, nor praise, in a world without
freedom of the will.

However, some compatibilists, namely

Hume, claim that people can be held
responsible for their actions only when
they are not free. In his essay "Of Liberty
and Necessity", Hume offers a disjunctive
syllogism. He claims that either the
actions of humanity are pre-determined
(like everything else in this world), or else
human actions are random and chaotic.
He goes on to say that if human action is
random, if my actions do not come from
my character but only from chance, then
there is no ethical responsibility. I cannot
be held responsible if my actions do not
come from me. However, if everything is
pre-determined, then at least my actions
are coming from my psychological and
metaphysical states. At least then it can
be said that my character is causing me to
act in a certain way.

Hume, for the most part, lost this battle,

mostly because Richard Taylor defeated
Hume's syllogism and offered a third
alternative: Agent Causation, the notion
that a person can cause an event to
happen. This is arguably different from
determinism and the idea of random,
chaotic action. However, even this notion
can be countered by determinists who can
argue that though a person can be said to
have caused an event, the person cannot
make the decision that causes the event
without relying on the beliefs and desires
that followed naturally, or deterministically,
from past experience and genetics. If the
person's actions do not follow directly
from beliefs and desires developed from
past experience and genetics, we come
full circle and must accept that the world
is random and chaotic.

Further reading
John Locke An Essay concerning Human
Understanding, especially Book II
Chapter xxvii
Christian Smith What is a Person?
University of Chicago Press 2010
David Hume Of Liberty and Necessity
Derek Parfit Reasons and Persons
Oxford University Press 1984
Harry Frankfurt Freedom of the Will and
the Concept of the Person
Richard Taylor Freedom and
Determinism
Simon Blackburn Think Oxford
University Press 1999
Retrieved from
"https://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?
title=Introduction_to_Philosophy/What_is_a_Perso
n&oldid=3523364"

Last edited 3 months ago by Chant...

Content is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless

otherwise noted.