Dialogue Education
2009
THIS CD HAS BEEN PRODUCED FOR TEACHERS TO USE IN THE CLASSROOM. IT IS A CONDITION OF THE USE OF THIS
CD THAT IT BE USED ONLY BY THE PEOPLE FROM SCHOOLS THAT HAVE PURCHASED THE CD ROM FROM DIALOGUE
EDUCATION. (THIS DOES NOT PROHIBIT ITS USE ON A SCHOOL’S INTRANET).
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Page 3- Fling the teacher game -Personhood
Page 4- Video Presentation- What is a person?
Page 5- The origin of the concept of Personhood
Pages 6 - Personhood in Theology
Pages 7 - A scientific Approach
Pages 8 - Individual Rights and Responsibilities
Pages 9 to 1o - Who is a person?
Pages 11 –You Tube Video - “Who s a person?”
Page 12-16 Implications of the person/non person debate?
Pages 17 – Community of Inquiry resources- Abortion - Is a foetus a
person?
Pages 18 - Bibliography
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
Click on the image above for a game of “Fling
the Teacher”. Make sure you have started the
slide show and are connected to the internet.
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
You will need
to be
connected to
the internet
to view this
presentation.
Enlarge to
full screen
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Origin of the concept of personhood
 The word "person" in English is believed to be
ultimately derived from the Etruscan word
phersu meaning "mask", and clearly passed
through the Latin persona, with the triple
meaning "mask", "character in a play", and
"person", suggesting the word's close
association with the aspects of human
individuals that elicit portraying them in
performances
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Personhood in theology
 Person and personhood were used in concepts in the early Christian
theological tradition, during the first centuries A.D. by the Church
Fathers. The very concept of person (prosopon in Greek) was the result of
a theological dispute, how God, according to the Christian (Orthodox)
teaching, can be One and three at the same time. Further explication of
the problem led to the formulation that there is one substance (or being)
and three persons (hypostases): God Father, God Son and God Holy
Spirit, but still just one God, not three. This theological concept of the
person as something that has a specific identity and holds the fullness of
being, was applied to the human being as well. The Church Fathers
interpreted the "icon of God" in man as human ability to exist as a
person, having his/her own unique identity in communion with other
persons. Later in the West the concept was translated into Latin as
persona and was explained by Boethius and St. Augustine as something
characterized by rational capacities.
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Scientific approach
 Phenomena such as the perception and
attribution of personhood have been
scientifically studied.Typical questions
addressed in Social Psychology are the
accuracy of attribution, processes of
perception and the formation of bias and
reason. Various other scientific/medical
disciplines address the myriad of issues in the
development of personality.
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Individual rights and responsibility
 There is also the debate on the definition of
personhood, the relationship between persons'
individual rights, and ethical responsibilities.
Many philosophers would agree that all and only
people are expected to be ethically responsible,
and that all people deserve a varying degree of
individual rights. There is less consensus on
whether only people deserve individual rights
and whether people deserve greater individual
rights than non-people. The rights of animals are
an example of contention on this issue.
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Who is a person?
 Human beings - Once human beings are born, personhood is considered
automatic.
 Exceptions: - Exceptions to this are often emotive and controversial. Some
people have given opinions that fetuses, the disabled, the profoundly and
long term brain damaged, those in coma or other persistent vegetative states,
may be dubious as regards personhood. Such views are strongly debated from
both sides.
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Animals - Some philosophers and those involved in animal welfare,
ethology, animal rights and related subjects, consider that certain
animals should also be granted personhood. Commonly named species
in this context include the Great Apes and possibly cetaceans or
elephants, due to the acknowledged intelligence and intricate societies
of such species.
Certain societal constructs - certain social entities, are considered legally
as persons, for example some corporations and other legal entities. This
is known as legal, or corporate, personhood.
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Who is a person?
In addition speculatively, there are three other likely categories of beings where
personhood might be at issue:
Unknown intelligent life-forms - for example, should alien life be found to exist,
under what circumstances would they be counted as 'persons'?
Artificial life - at what point might human-created life be considered to have
achieved personhood? Artificial intelligence - assuming the eventual creation
of an intelligent and self-aware system of hardware and software, what criteria
would be used to confer or withhold the status of person?
Modified living beings - for example, how much of a human being can be
replaced by artificial parts before personhood is lost?
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Further, if the brain is the reason people are considered persons, then if the human brain
and all its thought patterns, memories and other attributes could also in future be
transposed faithfully into some form of artificial device (for example to avoid illness such
as brain cancer) would the patient still be considered a 'person' after the operation?
Such questions are used by philosophers to clarify thinking concerning what it
means to be human, or living, or a person.
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You will need to be
connected to the
internet to view this
presentation.
Enlarge to full screen
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Implications of the person/non-person debate
 The personhood theory has become a pivotal issue in the field of ethics.
While historically most humans did not enjoy full legal protection as
persons (women, children, non-landowners, minorities, slaves, etc.),
from the late 18th through the late 20th century, being born as a
member of the human species gradually became secular grounds for the
basic rights of liberty, freedom from persecution, and humanitarian care.
 Since modern movements emerged to oppose animal cruelty (and
advocate vegan philosophy) and theorists like Turing have recognized the
possibility of artificial minds with human-level competence, the
identification of personhood protections exclusively with human species
membership has been challenged. On the other hand, some proponents
of human exceptionalism (also referred to by its critics as speciesism)
have countered that we must institute a strict demarcation of
personhood based on species membership in order to avoid the horrors
of genocide (based on propaganda dehumanizing one or more
ethnicities) or the injustices of forced sterilization (as occurred in many
countries to people with low I.Q. scores and prisoners).
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While the former advocates tend to be comfortable constraining
personhood status within the human species based on basic
capacities (e.g. excluding human stem cells, fetuses, and bodies
that cannot recover awareness), the latter often wish to include all
these forms of human bodies even if they have never had
awareness (which some would call pre-people) or had awareness,
but could never have awareness again due to massive and
irrecoverable brain damage (some would call these post-people).
The Vatican has recently been advancing a human exceptionalist
understanding of personhood theory, while other communities,
such as Christian Evangelicals in the U.S. have sometimes rejected
the personhood theory as biased against human exceptionalism.
Of course, many religious communities (of many traditions) view
the other versions of the personhood theory perfectly compatible
with their faith, as do the majority of modern Humanists.
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The idea of extending personhood to all animals
has the support of legal scholars such as Alan
Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law
School, and animal law courses are now taught
in 92 out of 180 law schools in the United States.
On May 9, 2008, Columbia University Press
published Animals as Persons: Essays on the
Abolition of Animal Exploitation by Professor
Gary L. Francione of Rutgers University School
of Law, a collection of writings that summarizes
his work to date and makes the case for nonhuman animals as persons.
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There are also hypothetical persons, sentient
non-human persons such as sentient
extraterrestrial life and self aware machines.
The novel and animated series Ghost in the
Shell touch on the potential of inorganic
sentience, while classical works of fiction and
fantasy regarding extraterrestrials have
challenged people to reconsider long held
traditional definitions.
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The theoretical landscape of the personhood
theory has been altered recently by controversy
in the bioethics community concerning an
emerging community of scholars, researchers,
and activists identifying with an explicitly
Transhumanist position, which supports
morphological freedom, even if a person
changed so much as to no longer be considered
a member of the human species (by whatever
standard is used to determine that).
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
CLICK ON THIS LINK
FOR THE STIMULUS
MATERIAL FOR A
DISCUSSION ON
WHEN DOES
PERSONHOOD
BEGIN. (You might
like to print this
material out and
distribute it to the
class.)
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Strawson, P.F. 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen: 104.
Locke, John. 1961. Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
London:Dent: 280.
Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood,
NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1997). ISBN 978-0881410297
Person Perception. Second Edition. Schneider, Hastdorf, and Ellsworth.
1979, Addison Wesley ISBN 0-201-06768-4
Second-Language Fluency and Person Perception in China and the
United States
Dershowitz, Alan. Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of
Rights, 2004, pp. 198–99, and "Darwin, Meet Dershowitz," The Animals'
Advocate, Winter 2002, volume 21.
"'Personhood' Redefined: Animal Rights Strategy Gets at the Essence of
Being Human", Association of American Medical Colleges, retrieved July
12, 2006.
"Animal law courses", Animal Legal Defense Fund.
Wikipedia-Personhood- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood
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