An analysis of the concept of person

This article by Dan Polansky investigates the concept of person. It aims to illuminate certain quandaries. One quandary or dissatisfaction is a surprise in finding that a range of serious sources suggest that a person is by definition a human.

Main analysis

Let us start with the observation that that pronoun who belongs to what are called personal pronouns. This would suggest that answers to who would be persons. If so, not only humans but also other agents capable of speech would probably be persons, including Martians, Ancient Greek gods, elves and hobbits. The need to introduce a head for possible answers to the question who could explain the introduction of the concept of person contrasting to human. This gives us the following putative definition:

• A person is an entity that can be given as an answer to a question using who, such as who did it?

This definition is linguistic in that it does not answer what kind of entities can be referred to as who (or someone) but delegates this question to language users.

Christian God may also be thought of as a person. If so, this reinforces the idea that a person does not need to be a human. This reinforcement is there even if one is merely in doubt about God being a person; if a person were by definition a human, God's not being a person would follow immediately from definition and not be subject to analysis or debate.

The above notion that there may be non-human persons including aliens is supported by an MU School of Medicine article.

Wikidata:person could be a candidate entry for the concept. However, it traces e.g. to Library of Congress authority entry[1] that says "Here are entered general works on human beings as individuals. Works, primarily of an anthropological nature, on humanity in the collective sense are entered under [Human beings.]" This is not the sought broader sense.

Merriam-Webster's person entry[2] does not have a corresponding broader sense; its lead sense is "human, individual—sometimes used in combination especially by those who prefer to avoid man in compounds applicable to both sexes". M-W's entry on the noun human features "a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) : a person : man sense 1c—usually plural"; this is curious since the concept of a person should rather be explicated with the help of the concept of human than the other way around.

In Google Ngram Viewer, the combination human person sees considerable use. But then, this implies there are non-human persons; indeed, also non-human persons sees considerable use.

If humans are persons, one can ask whether some non-human animals are also persons, or at least quasi-persons. For instance, chimpanzees (some of the closest human relatives) could be considered as quasi-persons. Peter Singer is a philosopher who considers some animals to be persons: "Because Singer believes that animals are sentient persons and sentient person have rights, including a right to life, Singer has been an advocate for a granting a “right to life” to Great Apes, dolphins, dogs, and other species." This some animals encompassing concept does not seem to match the definition via who (as someone); if one says "someone is there", it would be surprising to learn that in fact a chimpanzee is there (similarly probably for who).

Under the position that non-human animals are never persons, and assuming Darwinian theory, the concept of persons gets blurry edges. Since, there is the assumed evolutionary continuity between the non-human ancestors of humans and humans. This line of reasoning is mentioned in a philosophynow.org article. On a different note, it is not clear why a putative post-human descendant organism of humans, possibly having improved cognitive and moral faculties, should not count as a person.

In law, there is the concept of legal person, which is not constrained to humans but also covers certain kinds of organizations. It would have to be clarified whether human children are legal persons; they do not have all the rights of adults.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not have an article titled Person.

Some concept of a person has an application in abortion debates. One position distinguishes a person from a human and argues that a first-trimester fetus does not have enough of personhood to be protected. A more radical position even distinguishes degrees of personhood after birth. See also Should infanticide be legal?.

Tracing the etymology of the English word person could be interesting. M-W traces the word to words meaning mask (and other things), including Latin persona. According to Rejzek, Czech osoba traces to phrase o sobě, per se or on its own; other Slavic languages have a similar word.

One related concept contrasted to person is agent. For one thing, agent also refers to chemicals. For another thing, some entities in computers are called agents without much ado, whereas calling entities in computers persons would be strage, except perhaps--even if controversially--an instance of general artificial intelligence.

Webster 1913's most pertinent definition is perhaps this: "3. A living, self-conscious being, as distinct from an animal or a thing; a moral agent; a human being; a man, woman, or child." Animals are excluded. But except for the final parts "a human being; a man, woman, or child", this definition could fit a broader concept that includes Martians.

Wikipedia's definition in its Person article is this: "a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility". It traces to four sources. It could be interpreted as including Martians. Wikipedia also has a dedicated Wikipedia: Personhood article, much more detailed and covering much more than the Person article.

Some rivers are now being granted legal personhood status, as per Wikipedia: Personhood as well as reliable sources. I argue that this deviates from the non-legal concept of person too far. To be a person, an entity has to show goal-directed behavior, as a minimum; rivers do not do that. The desire to protect an entity does not warrant conferring a status on that entity that is completely foreign to it.

As for the plural, the correct plural for the purpose of this analysis is persons, not people; people refers to humans.

Applications

This analysis is not just a theoretical exercise but has at least the following applications:

• In the ethics of abortion of human fetuses (or babies, as the critics would have it), the contrast between a human individual and a person can be used to justify the acceptability of first-trimester abortion.
• In the ethics of animal torture and experiments on animals, claiming that some animals are persons or quasi-persons may impact the result of the analysis.
• In the definitions of agent nouns in a dictionary (e.g. doer, swimmer, experimenter, and analyst), one may want to allow non-human persons and then, if one uses the word "person" in the definition, one has to require persons to be possibly non-human.
• In the environmental protection, some want to expand the concept of legal person to include rivers, resulting in a certain form of protection.
• When a human is seen as possible multiple persons, the concept of a person needs to be different from the concept of a human.

Words person and human in English

In English, the word person seems much more natural to refer to humans than human. For instance, one would say "I am not that kind of person" but not really "I am not that kind of human". Therefore, a dictionary would probably need at least two senses for person: 1) human, 2) referent of a personal pronoun. Another word often used for humans is man, which ambiguously refers to males as well as humans regardless of sex, and which seems to be often displaced by person.

The U.S. constitution uses the words people and person, and never human.

Dictionaries

We already covered M-W: it defines person as a human.

German Duden defines the relevant sense of Person as a human (Mensch) as well..

Google Gemini

Google Gemini answered the following questions in the affirmative:

• Is Sherlock Holmes a fictional person?
• Is Eru a fictional person?
• Is Bilbo a fictional person?
• Is Smaug a fictional person?
• Is Spock a fictional person?
• Are Huey, Dewey and Louie fictional persons?

The following is answered in the negative:

• Is Sherlock Holmes a person? (Dropping "fictional" changes the answer.)
• Is Smaug a person? (Dropping "fictional" changes the answer.)
• Is Scooby-Doo a fictional person? (Why? If a talking dragon is a fictional person, why not a fictional talking dog? And fictional ducks were persons above. Asking "Ok. Why is Huey a fictional person (a duck) but not Scooby-Doo?" does not lead Gemini to change its mind.)
• Is a centaur a mythological person?

The following is answered ambiguously:

• Is Christian God a person?
• Is Christian God multiple persons? (The answer is yet according to a certain doctrine/tradition.)

A reservation: it is not clear what conclusions one may draw from this. Generative AI is generally unreliable.

Entity that can give consent

We can consider the following definition of some concept relating to the concept of person:

• An entity that can give consent.

It is not perfectly clear what give consent refers to, but it seems to exclude babies in the womb. And therefore, this concept cannot be the concept of person useful for the ethics of abortion analysis, unless one wants to grant all before-birth abortion (including late-term abortion) as freely available. This concept does include young children who understand questions being asked, as well as fictional characters (in the capacity of fictional persons) and human-like talking aliens. One would have to figure out whether it could include chimpanzees; animals cannot give consent to a verbally made proposal, but they can perhaps indicate consent in some way to a proposal made without verbal means. One would have to clarify whether "give consent" means "give a verbal consent to a verbally formulated proposal". But then, a mute human would not be a person, unless perhaps he could write.

It is perhaps true that a human who cannot talk is seen as less of a person. This may also be true of a human whose ability to make their own decisions about themselves and their own body has been legally removed.

Grammatical person

A grammatical person is a distinct concept. For instance, in the sentence "the sun rises", the verb rise is in the 3rd grammatical person. The sun does not seem to have anything to do with the concept of person outside of grammar. Then, one might ask why the label person is applied to the name of the concept of grammatical person. It may have to do with the three distinguished grammatical persons corresponding to I/we, you, he/she/they, all referring to persons. It is only the 3rd grammatical person that can refer to non-persons, not the 1st and 2nd person (except in poetic and similar uses, when one may address oneself to non-persons as if they were persons or let a non-person speak using I, e.g. "I, the sun of the earth, herewith declare that I am the brightest and shiniest").

This ties in well to the initial consideration of persons as referents of personal pronouns. In particular, it is not suprising to see fictional characters (arguably thus fictional persons), human as well as non-human, use the words I/we, you and he/she/they in refering to themselves.

Further reading:

• Grammatical person, wikipedia.org

Further reading

• Personhood, wikipedia.org
• Person, wikipedia.org
• Great ape personhood, wikipedia.org
• Environmental personhood, wikipedia.org
• Wikisource: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Person, wikisource.org
• Concept of Personhood, MU School of Medicine, medicine.missouri.edu