Who Gets a Place in Person-Space?

Abstract

We notice a number of interesting overlaps between the views on personhood of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Marya Schechtman. Both philosophers distance their views from the individualistic ones standard in western thought and foreground the importance of extrinsic or relational features to personhood. For Menkiti, it is ‘the community which defines the person as person’; for Schechtman, being a person is to have a place in person-space, which involves being seen as a person by others. But there are also striking differences. Schechtman sees this aspect as expanding the scope of personhood to infants and those who are severely mentally disabled. Menkiti thinks that there is a line to be drawn at some point between those humans that are persons and those who are not. We consider the cases offered in questioning how the dispute between the two views should be resolved.

Notes

1 At the same time, comments he makes in its support suggest that he does endorse it to some extent and uses it as a foil against characteristically Western views of personhood.

2 See, for example, Wiredu 2009, for discussion of ‘Onipa’ in the Akan language and Gbadegesin 1991 for discussion of ‘Ènìyàn’ in the Yoruba language.

3 The classic psychological continuity theory is to be found in Parfit 1984, Olson’s animalism in Olson 1997 and Schechtman’s narrative self-constitution view in Schechtman 1996.

4 He puts it as ‘the individual comes to see himself as man’ (Menkiti 1984: 172). There are obviously issues that call for comment in this, but we will not focus on those issues here. The gendered nature of the communitarian understanding of personhood is investigated in Oyowe and Yurkivska 2014.

5 Willingness to consider such fantastic thought-experiments might well be a divergence between Menkiti and Schechtman. Or perhaps not––she has strong misgivings about them. But even so, her discussion reflects the point about her commitment to the social aspect of a person life that we wish to make. Beck 2016 offers a more detailed discussion of her views on the matter.

6 His position is made slightly unclear by his arguments for the exclusion of animals based on the possibility of their inclusion allowing them equal demand for resources to humans. The discussion is too brief to make a decision on exactly what he takes the exclusion criterion to be.

7 Menkiti says ‘truly definitive of man’.

8 Schechtman denies that the exclusion of animals, and the inclusion of Carla is arbitrary. She points, for instance, to the different reactions a family would have to hearing that their child will never be able to talk or dress herself as opposed to hearing this of their pet poodle. She writes: ‘

Humans are not easily excluded from person-space and poodles are not easily included. This is not a simple convention or species prejudice; it is based on differences between the ways in which humans usually develop and poodles never do. Nor is it to say that if a mutant poodle developed reflective self-consciousness and language, it would be in principle impossible to include him in person-space. The fact is, however, that no poodle ever has developed in this way, and we have good reason to suspect none ever will’ (Schechtman 2010: 281).

But this makes the point more acute rather than solving anything. The non-human animal would have to display forensic capacities in order to be granted a place in person-space. The human does not have to. The fact that humans typically do develop them does nothing to alter the arbitrariness of this criterion of personhood.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Grant Numbers 109035 and 109110). The opinions, findings and conclusions are those of the authors and not of the NRF.