Personhood Beyond the West

This article refers to:

The End of Personhood

Is it time to ditch the concept of “person” from practical fields, like bioethics? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) answers in the affirmative. They urge leaving personhood out of practical debates at the frontiers of science and technology. Their argument turns on showing that personhood (1) squelches debate and provides an opening for speciesism, (2) offends people excluded, and (3) is a blunt tool for addressing cutting-edge challenges like human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence (AI), and interspecies chimeras. Had we confined ourselves to a narrow version of the Western tradition, we might find such conclusions attractive. Yet, doing bioethics across borders leads us to a different conclusion. This Open Peer Commentary uses the example of African approaches to personhood to address each of Blumenthal-Barby’s objections.¹

OBJECTIONS

Proclaiming “the end of personhood,” Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that at best, personhood is “unhelpful to much of bioethics today;” at worst, it is “harmful and pernicious.”

Nonhuman Species

Their first objection holds that personhood is a conversation stopper, flattening ethics discussion by sorting people into boxes labeled “has serious rights” or “does not have serious rights.” Blumenthal-Barby worries specifically that “person” acts as a cover for speciesism by taking humans as the gold standard.

While an all-or-nothing approach to personhood might indeed be a conversation stopper, this way of rendering persons is hardly inevitable. Many African approaches understand the designation, “person” as a matter of degree. Thus, it might be said that someone is “more” or “less” of a person, depending on the degree of moral excellence they exhibit. Many African views consider personhood aspirational and unfinished over the whole course of a person’s life. For example, Menkiti (1984, p. 172) writes, “personhood is something which has to be achieved and is not given simply because one is born of human seed.” The related concern, that conceptual sorting is speciesist also seems less obvious when considered from an African standpoint.² Many African accounts of personhood include all living things (Behrens 2014), ecosystems (Eze 2017), and recently, AI-equipped social robots (Jecker, Atiure, and Ajei 2022).

Independent of these concerns, the appeal to “speciesism” is itself confounding. In practical debates, the term is variously invoked, as a basis for (1) rejecting species-related abuses, like factory farming; (2) declaring all species equal and prioritizing nonhumans in some instances; and (3) asserting species bias is analogous to racism and sexism, because it rests on an arbitrary difference. These assorted uses suggest to us that “speciesism” is a slippery notion, lacking a clear, unambiguous meaning. Compounding the problem, “speciesism” assumes a prior understanding of “species”—a concept philosophers of biology have had a field day with. Given novel cases on the horizon, “species” is bound to become more contentious, further muddling speciesism.

People with Disabilities

A second concern Blumenthal-Barby raises is that “person” can be offensive to those excluded from its ranks. Labeling cognitively impaired humans as “nonpersons,” or even asking if they are “persons,” is problematic. This concern arises specifically when individuals lack intellectual capacities that Western views deem necessary for personhood, such as sentience, consciousness, autonomy, and rationality. Yet the objection would not get off the ground if one took as a starting point many non-Western philosophies of persons. African personhood, for example, highlights relationships with others and the community. It often finds expression in pithy sayings, such as, a person is a person through other persons, and I am because we are, and because we are, therefore I am. Shutte juxtaposes African and Western views, noting,

In European philosophy of whatever kind, the self is always envisaged as something “inside” a person, or at least as a kind of container of mental properties and powers. In African thought it is seen as “outside,” subsisting in relationship to what is other, the natural and social environment. In fact, the sharp distinction between self and world, …so characteristic in European philosophy, disappears (Shutte 1993, p. 47).

Rather than showing that personhood is useless, perhaps the concerns Blumenthal-Barby flag show problems with Western personhood, which is a reason to broaden our gaze, not to veto “personhood” entirely.

Future Cases

A third concern is that “person” is not up for the heavy lifting we assign to it as a host of novel cases come our way. It is a blunt tool for addressing novel challenges like cyborgs, digital twins, uploaded minds, monkeys whose brains have been injected with human stem cells, and human embryos suspended outside the human body. Bioethicists ought to deploy a subtler moral vocabulary and ask normative questions more directly.

In reply, moral notions are hardly fixed; they bend and flex to meet the needs of a particular time and place. While Blumenthal-Barby note that “person” did not enter the lexicon of bioethics until the 1970s, “person” has an ancient pedigree. The Latin persōna, referred to a “mask used by a player, character in a play, dramatic role,” or “the part played by a person in life, character, role, position” (Oxford University Press 2023). These ancient Western ideas accentuated public performance and conduct directed to others. By contrast, in the West today, the term has swung away from performative acts and other-directed conduct, becoming associated with the Judeo-Christian soul, or in secular renderings, an inner worth, status, or dignity. Denotations of the term have also altered appreciably over time. While ancient and medieval people dedicated energies to deciphering the personhood of celestial beings and angels, today’s debates address the personhood of brain organoids and interspecies chimeras. Such practical challenges shape our understandings of what it means to be a person, and the notion evolves. As bioethicists and philosophers, we commit to helping shape the concept in ways that better speak to the challenges of our day.

RELATIONAL ALTERNATIVES

Blumenthal-Barby briefly considers relational-based alternatives put forth by two American philosophers, Lindemann (2014) and Kittay (2005), as a possible way around their objections. While admitting that relational views are potentially inclusive (overcoming the second objection), they insist they remain vulnerable to the other charges—introducing species bias and not giving us anything we can’t get by presenting ethical reasons directly.

Yet, our arguments suggest that before jettisoning “person,” Blumenthal-Barby ought to ask how this concept is understood outside the borders of Western thought. African views ascribe personhood to many nonhuman beings. They offer a relational understanding that differs from Western relational views, such as care-focused feminism. African ethics holds that becoming a person requires not only caring, but richly sharing an entire way of life (Metz 2022).

CONCLUSION

The concerns Blumenthal-Barby raises are crucially important. Do they demonstrate a problem with “personhood”? We think not. Instead, they point to a deeper problem with the way bioethics is practiced. Looking beyond the West, the depiction of personhood Blumenthal-Barby assumes quickly becomes unrecognizable, and the problems they pinpoint seem less obvious. The example of African personhood is illustrative of wider concerns that a truly global approach to personhood must consider. A global approach must look not only to accounts of personhood in North America, Europe and Africa, but Asia, South America, and Oceania. The fact that conceptions of personhood outside the West were not entertained becomes especially problematic in light of twenty-first century global bioethics concerns, such as generative AI, germline genomic editing, environmental degradation, and the rise of emerging infectious diseases and zoonoses. Rather than ditching “person,” a better way forward is charting a global strategy that better equips bioethicists with tools they need to face down twenty-first century challenges.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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Funding

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Notes

1 We use “African” to indicate views widely held among Black people south of the Sahara and captured in the works of academic philosophers. The views in question are not held by all people in this region, and some people outside the region hold the views in question. We do not mean to suggest that they are “pure” or untouched by outside influences.

2 “Speciesism” is a term coined by Ryder (not Singer, as Blumenthal-Barby claims) and popularized by Singer. (See Gruen, L. 2021. The moral status of animals. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/moral-animal/.