Personhood practice questions.

Locke calls 'person' a forensic term. What does he mean by that description?

• That whether someone counts as a person is settled by the courts of a given society
• That the term is a technical coinage with no application outside legal proceedings
• That a person is whatever a particular community happens to agree to treat as one
• That the concept is tied to accountability for one's own past actions

Answer: That the concept is tied to accountability for one's own past actions

For Locke the work the concept does is the ascription of praise and punishment, which is why he anchors personal identity in consciousness of one's past acts rather than in body or soul. Legal personhood in the institutional sense is a separate notion that a state confers and can withdraw.

A doctor argues that a patient who will never regain consciousness remains a person, on the ground that she is a living member of our species. This position is best described as

• a cognitive criterion, resting on capacities such as reasoning and self-awareness
• a relational criterion, resting on the ties in which the patient still stands
• a biological criterion, resting on species membership rather than capacities
• a gradualist criterion, on which moral status is acquired and lost by degrees

Answer: a biological criterion, resting on species membership rather than capacities

The criterion appealed to is membership of Homo sapiens, which Singer attacks under the name speciesism. It is not the cognitive criterion, which would deliver the opposite verdict in this case, and it should not be confused with the relational view that standing derives from continuing relationships with others.

A writer holds that moral status is not all or nothing: a being acquires it by degrees as the relevant capacities develop and loses it by degrees as they decline. Which consequence does this view have that a threshold account avoids?

• It denies that any being at all has moral status of any kind
• It lets claims to protection vary in strength with capacity
• It ties moral status to membership of a biological species
• It restricts moral status to beings that can bear obligations

Answer: It lets claims to protection vary in strength with capacity

A graduated scale gives a determinate verdict at every point but gives up the equality of status that a threshold secures; a threshold keeps that equality at the price of a boundary that looks arbitrary. Neither commitment follows from species membership or from moral agency.

Singer's charge of speciesism is that one move in moral argument is illegitimate. Which move?

• Claiming that non-human animals have interests at all
• Treating suffering as the only thing that matters morally
• Assuming that all human beings have the same moral status
• Discounting a being's interests because of its species

Answer: Discounting a being's interests because of its species

The charge concerns the relevance of the ground rather than the existence of the interests: species membership is held to be as irrelevant as race to the weight an interest carries. It does not by itself establish that suffering is the only thing that matters.

An argument holds that a being should be accorded the status of a person because it will, in the ordinary course of events, come to have the capacities of one. What is the standard objection to that move?

• That a potential X does not yet have the rights of an actual X
• That the capacities in question cannot be measured reliably
• That no being ever in fact develops those capacities
• That status must always be conferred by law rather than argued for

Answer: That a potential X does not yet have the rights of an actual X

The objection is that potentiality transmits nothing: an heir to a throne does not yet hold the powers of a monarch. Defenders reply that the cases are disanalogous, since the being will become an actual person by its own development rather than by anybody's decision.

Dennett sets out conditions for personhood which include being a rational being, being an intentional system, being regarded as a person by others, being able to reciprocate that stance, using language and being conscious in a special way. His point in assembling them in this order is that

• each condition is separately sufficient, so meeting any one of the six makes something a person
• the conditions form a list from which any three may be selected as the definition of personhood
• personhood is entirely a legal notion, and the six conditions merely restate what a legal system happens to require
• the later conditions presuppose the earlier ones, so the notion is not a simple property but a layered achievement

Answer: the later conditions presuppose the earlier ones, so the notion is not a simple property but a layered achievement

The order is the argument: being treated as a person presupposes being an intentional system, and reciprocating that treatment presupposes being treated so. This is why Dennett doubts that any sharp line can be drawn, and it is quite different from Warren's cluster account, on which the traits are listed without a stated dependence between them.