In the philosophy reading group to which I belong, we’ve had some discussion, arising from our reading of Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein, on the nature or status of personhood. Who or what counts as a person?
I’m interested in what kind of question this is, or could be.
There’s what I’d call a “legislative” version of the question. This will lead us to a definition of “person” that can form the basis of rights and obligations. A “person” is someone you shouldn’t kill. Or a “person” is someone whom you can hold morally responsible for his or her actions. Our objective in this legislative approach is to minimize ambiguity in our understanding of “person.” That’s in the nature of jurisprudence, and the philosophical approach it influences: the less ambiguity the better.
Another version of the question might be dubbed “poetic”. Now instead of minimizing ambiguity, we would take the ambiguity itself — the ambiguity inherent in the idea of personhood — as a point of interest: not a problem to be rid of, but a focus of exploration.
It seems to me that our sense (if not “definition”) of personhood is extraordinarily fluid. The boundary keeps moving, historically on one dimension, and psychologically on another.
The changing status of African Americans in the United States is a vivid example of this moving boundary. There have been (legislatively) a few categorical shifts: the 13th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act… But these are symptomatic of much more fluid changes in the perceptual boundary between person and non-person — a boundary that continues to move. The Founders managed to exempt slaves from the universal personhood implicit in the Constitution. Times have changed, but are Black people in the US fully recognized as full persons, even today? (Legally, yes, but in daily discourse and practice or even in actual courtrooms?) In my own lifetime, I have watched the boundary of personhood shift dramatically in the case of homosexuality. I was brought up in an environment where homosexual was effectively homo sacer*. Now I watch open-mouthed while conservative politicians debate the merits of gay marriage. This is, to my mind, an implicit debate on the lines of: “Do these people count as people?”
There is another fluid boundary that I find equally interesting. There are real persons in my life. And there are imaginary persons. And there are imaginary versions of the real persons. And I’m often unclear which is which. Our relations to teddy bears, pets, dream lovers, characters in novels, the deceased, absent friends… All of these can be as dynamic and complex as our relation to real persons. Nor are they quarantined from those real relations. “Everything is projection,” says the Fritz Perls (gestalt therapy) with brash overstatement. I don’t think he’s right. But I don’t find the remark altogether foolish. Between the inside and the outside I see a blurred and far from static line.
Might close attention to the moving boundary around “person” prove more interesting than a quixotic attempt to stop it moving?
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*Homo sacer was a Roman legal concept, defining an outcast individual who may be killed by anyone, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. See Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben.