READINGS-- I have two short readings and a 'listening' for you this month, each treating the question of personhood from a different point of view. I’ll post this to the club's website, too, along with any other interesting quotes or passages on the issue I may come across (philosophy-in-LA.tribe.net). Clarify your thinking and inspire yourself by reading this article and listening to the show! In no particular order:

1. en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Intr...s_a_Person
This is a two page overview of the “What Is A Person” question from Wikibooks.

2. www.philosophypress.co.uk/
From TPM, The Philosopher's Magazine, “Dolphin People” is a 3.5 page argument that Dolphins are persons, based on what the author (philosophy professor Thomas White) sees as the essential characteristics of personhood.

3. philosophytalk.org/pastShows/Loops.html
If you want to listen to some philosophizing, the Philosophy Talk radio show on "Persons, Selves, Souls, and Loops" is a 55-minute audio program (listen online or download to your computer or mp3 player) along with a quarter page of 'listening notes.' The two hosts, philosophers at Stanford, interview and argue with Cognitive Science Professor and author Douglas Hofstadter. Though hosted by professors, the show isn't jargon-laden.


Also, you can check out the "Abortion: philosophical arguments for & against" discussion thread on this site; it was the monthly topic about 6 months ago and many in our group discussed the personhood question,
philosophy-in-la.tribe.net/thre...4f029


Whether or not you post your ideas online, you are invited to jot down your thoughts and bring them to our discussion Sunday!

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FYI, here are the full vote-by-email results for the month:
1) Is It Wrong To Do Medical Experiments On Animals? (13.75 Votes)
2) Wikileaks: The Public's Right To Know Vs. A State's Need For Security (13.50 Votes)
3) Conspiracy Theories versus real conspiracies (16.75 Votes)
4) Terrorism: How Do You Define It, And Is It Ever Justified? (14.75 Votes)
5) What Is A Person? What Are The Important Characteristics…? (33.50 Votes)

Each topic stays on the list until it wins or consistently receives a paltry number of votes. Votes do not come in whole numbers because each of you receives one vote for your top choice, a half vote for your 2nd choice (if you had one), a quarter vote for your 3rd choice, and so on. Recent, regular participants at our gatherings or website discussion board have their vote doubled.

Since this question is vast and encompasses so many different aspects, I would like to focus on the following area/ point brought up for consideration:

"WHAT IS A PERSON? What are the important, relevant characteristics that makes someone or something a person rather than a thing, animal or something else? So far, "person" has usually been restricted to human beings, but that may change when and if technology allows computers or animals to be endowed with something similar to or better than human intelligence, emotions, capacity for subjective experience, and so on. Furthermore, many thinkers hold that we are already inconsistent in our use of the term person. For example, should we apply the term to humans with severe and non-reparable brain damage (e.g., someone an irreversible coma)? Should we apply the term to animals like chimps (which have a kind of intelligence similar to that of three-year old children), some whales or dolphins?"

Soon after reading the above segment, I thought of a rather interesting scenario: The unusual instance in which a baby/ small child may have been left in the woods to be raised by an animal. Consider the following story (which I came across through a google.com search):


"Animal Children – Superminds 10

The story of Mowgli, the boy who was lost in the jungle as a baby, and who was raised by wolves, although fiction, is based on fact. Throughout history, and in all parts of the world, children have been discovered who were loved and raised by an animal. The story of Romulus, who is said to have founded Rome in about 700 BC, and his brother Remus, says they were suckled by a she wolf, and discovered by a shepherd.

A baby raised by an animal is not something that only happened in the past though. A headline in the newspaper Daily Star on April 17 1991, at the time the film Dances With Wolves was popular reads: “TRAGIC BOY’S DANCE IN WOLF’S LAIR.” It goes on to say: A tragic orphan brought up by a pack of wild wolves will never be able to live like a normal man, say doctors. The boy who REALLY danced with the wolves was aged about seven when he was found 29 years ago in the wastes of Southern Russia by a team of oil explorers. He howled like a wolf and savagely bit one of the oil men who christened him Djuma – the Wolf Boy.

Professor Rufat Kazirbayev said doctors had battled to re-educate him to act like a normal human being – but failed. They are now giving up the fight. Professor Kazirbayev said that, “His mind is with the wolves. He will howl at the moon for the rest of his life”.

Djuma, now about 37, is still in hospital. He still crawls on all fours, eats raw meat and bites when frightened. He can speak only disjointed phrases – “Mother dead. Father dead. Brother dead. Sister dead. Mother nice. Father bad.”

Dr. Anna Ticheenskaya said: “presumably his family were killed in a political purge. He has shown us in sign language how, when his mother was killed, she saved him by throwing herself over his body.”


While there is more text included in the (original) online story, I think the paragraphs clearly indicate how one's environment/ surroundings/ upbringing, etc. play a major role in one's development. Although the man in the story was clearly born as a "human being", could he be classified as a "person", based on his level of development/ the fact that he closely identifies with/ behaves like an animal (based on the above descriptions/ characterizations)?

At the very least, I think this example/ scenario can spark further enlightened discussion on the question ("What is a Person?").

I feel people are getting bogged down in semantics: I think the common sense view of personhood is one we all accept without thinking about it, and we'd know a person the instant we were in the presence of one. If you reduce personhood to a laundry list of characteristics, such as "do they have free will", you're actually removing any possibility of discussing the subject rationally. To discuss whether free will is a characterizing feature of personhood means that you're not questioning whether there's even such a thing as free will. It's as if we're discussing how to define life but have no understanding of what, say, metabolism is. And free will - or the lack of it - is such a central topic in current philosophy, that I'm surprised somebody would so unquestioningly state it as a potential requirement for personhood. If none of us have free will, then are none of us persons?

I think the more interesting question is: what is the self? How does the self get constructed? Is there even such a thing as a permanent sense of self, or is it all just interpolation and pattern recognition? I think anybody who's had any kind of powerful experience such as mania, or extreme hallucination, would get a new perspective on this question. Not that I'm advocating you go that route, mind you ...

Another interesting way of looking at it is the idea of the philosophical zombie: a construct that is indistinguishable from a normal human being in every way, except there's an absolute blank inside - a complete absence of self. I know that I'm not such a being, but it's impossible to disprove to any one person that everybody else is not a philosophical zombie, since everybody else would - by definition - behave in exactly the same way whether they were zombies or not.