Robinson offers the ‘superior personhood’ approach (SPA) to capture the value of gestation and ground justice for women/gestators.1 SPA holds that women/gestators are more than mere persons given the reality of pregnancy and the vital role women/gestators play in reproduction.1 In this commentary, I speak to some background context perhaps relevant to SPA, lay out areas of agreement with Robinson and then raise four worries about the approach. In my view, the devaluing of gestation and injustice for women/gestators need (...) rectifying, but SPA is not the way. It is difficult not to read Robinson’s piece through the lens of 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the politics of abortion, with its focus on fetal status. This background offers a certain kind of sympathetic strategic/rhetorical reading of the motivation for SPA—one to which I found students and others with whom I discussed the piece quite open. Perhaps the goal here is to offer an ingenious defence of abortion rights: if women/gestators are more than one person, then the immorality of abortion cannot be easily grounded in claims about fetal personhood.2 However, Robinson downplays abortion, affirming only ‘my approach could support a wide range of positions on abortion’. This is curious. Is SPA compatible with significant restrictions on abortion? Assuming a realistic political context, this would involve mere persons (men/non-gestators) legislating how superior persons can …. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) arguments in the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and I will show how some of those arguments are flawed. Primarily, I will show that the right to bodily autonomy is a well-established right, both in the courts and in societal practices, and that the right to an abortion should be understood as an example of the right to bodily autonomy or bodily integrity. (...) Second, I will examine the justices’ arguments that viability is not a reasonable place to restrict abortion access, in contrast to both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and will offer arguments that defend viability as a valid point to limit abortion access. Third, I will highlight some politicians’ goals to enact a federal ban on abortion, and show how the attempt to pass Personhood Amendments is a pathway for doing so. The upshot of this essay to is show how the SCOTUS decision is flawed, and how granting personhood to “potential life” has consequences that extend beyond abortion access. (shrink)

Are we humans destined to become ‘posthuman’? In this paper, we question the claims of posthumanism, accepting some of its broader insights whilst proposing a more empirically and ethically appropriate ‘vitalist’ response. We argue that despite recent changes in styles of thought that question the uniqueness of ‘the human’, and despite novel technological developments for augmenting human bodies, we remain – fundamentally – persons. Humans, as persons, are constitutively embedded in and scaffolded by the material, social, semantic and cultural niches (...) they have constructed for themselves. An ‘ethopolitical’ response to our present that recognizes this fact not only requires us to engage with the consequences of making lives in the unequal niches that restrict and stunt the personhood of so many human beings at present, but also requires us to broaden the bandwidth of those who are recognized fully as persons. In our conclusion we briefly develop the theme that this emphasis on personhood can be seen as a vitalist – rather than a humanist – stance. (shrink)

This paper proposes an intermediate account of personhood, based on the capacity to participate in intersubjective interactions. We articulate our proposal as a reply to liberal and restrictive accounts, taking Mark Rowlands’ and Stephen Darwall’s proposals as contemporary representatives of each view, respectively. We argue that both accounts fall short of dealing with borderline cases and defend our intermediate view: The criteria of personhood based on the second-person perspective of mental state attribution. According to it, a person should (...) be able to participate in intersubjective interactions. We apply our proposal to the borderline cases of non-human primates and human infants. (shrink)

The question of the moral status of AI and the extent to which that status ought to be recognised by societal institutions is one that has not yet received a satisfactory answer from lawyers. This paper seeks to provide a solution to the problem by defending a moral foundation for the recognition of legal personhood for AI, requiring the status to be granted should a threshold criterion be reached. The threshold proposed will be bare, noumenal agency in the Kantian (...) sense. Agency has been identified by Alan Gewirth as the source of the rights claims of our own species and, at risk of contradiction, is a foundation that must be expanded to all agents or else we contradict the foundation of our own rights. This is something that ought to be recognised through the granting of legal personhood to all noumenal agents by any system that requires such personhood for the enforcement of rights, or else the rule restricting legal personhood cannot be seen as a valid legal norm. Having laid out the case, the paper will move on to defend this natural law conception against the narrower definition of legal personhood proposed by Bryson et al. with regards to AI. It will argue that bare agency is a sufficient, though not necessary, criterion for the ascription of legal personhood in any system that sees the status as necessary for the ascription of legal rights. The paper will conclude by analysing the proposals currently making their way through the legislatures of the UK and European Union. They will be assessed for their compatibility with the claim that a functioning legal system necessarily must recognise the legal personhood of all noumenal agents regardless of their origins, and whether they are future-proofed for the possibility that AI may meet this threshold. (shrink)

The article begins with a view of recent developments in the discipline of business law. A model useful in the study of business ethics is presented. Business ethics is the philosophical examination of the body of values and conceptions that influence business decision making as well as being pervasive components of the social environment in which businesses operate. Our model is a four-part framework for approaching business ethics which is sensitive to its implications for business law. The model's four parts (...) are: (1) ethical theory, (2) institutional frameworks, (3) organizational cultures, and (4) individual moral choice and responsibility. Topics, issues, and kinds of material appropriate for approaching each of these four are presented, and a list of scholarly articles, books, and court cases, is included as a source of additional classroom material. (shrink)

“I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am”, generally regarded as the guiding principle of African humanism, expresses the view that a person is a person through other persons and is closely associated but not identical with African communitarianism, or communalism. Against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s “unrestricted or radical or excessive communitarianism” Kwame Gyekye has proposed a “restricted or moderate communitarianism”. Whereas personhood, for Menkiti, is acquired over time, with increasing moral maturation, seniority and agency, Gyekye (...) considers it to arise automatically with being born human. The problem with Menkiti’s account of personhood is that it is at once too wide and too narrow. On the other hand, it remains unclear to what extent Gyekye’s is a communitarian view – and to what extent it is distinctly ‘African’. I conclude with a critical reflection on the implications of African communalism and personhood for non-human animals. Keywords: Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, African Communitarianism, Non-Human Animals, Personhood. (shrink)

Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a ‘tangible medium of expression’. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expansion of copyright protection shrinks the public domain. (...) While copyright has become more important for dancers and choreographers who wish to control the appropriation of their work that is now made available to millions of end-users online, it also potentially restricts them from engaging in a dialog with other dancers or building on inspiring dance moves across communities. This paper investigates notions of property that rely on both the commons and individual personhood in the context of dance. (shrink)

The author addresses speech restrictions on campuses, the axiom “A is A” as it applies to men and women, Roe v. Wade and its effect on examining the definition of personhood, and how this examination may have contributed to the anti-conceptual mentality that was already under way on campuses and elsewhere.

Late-term abortions are an issue of immense debate in India, where the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 permits abortions only up to 20 weeks of gestation. In special situations, such as pregnancy arising out of rape especially in the case of minors and the late diagnosis of congenital anomalies, there are no clear guidelines on the legal protocol that is to be followed, often resulting in a lack of consistency in terms of legal decision-making, as well as undue prolongation (...) of legal procedures. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act prohibits late-term abortions on the basis of personhood and viability of the foetus, to reduce sex-selective abortions and as it considers such abortions to be unsafe. However, a legal prohibition of late-term abortions does not prevent them, and this has led to a surge in the number of illegal, unsafe abortions that are detrimental to the health of women. There is also physical, mental and financial distress to women who are forced to continue their pregnancy, coupled with a lack of governmental support for the same. In comparison of India’s abortion laws with Singapore’s, which are more liberal, and Philippines, which are more restrictive, liberalisation of abortion laws appears to have a better outcome in reducing the incidence of unsafe abortions. This paper argues that the way forward is to liberalise the laws in terms of not only extending the gestational limit to at least 24 weeks but also making exceptions allowing no gestational limit in special cases that warrant them, such as rape victims and late foetal anomalies. The laws, drafted and implemented in consultation with medical professionals in the field, must also be lucid and not leave any room for misinterpretation by courts and health care providers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Consideration of the potentiality of human embryos to develop characteristics of personhood, such as intellect and will, has figured prominently in arguments against abortion and the use of human embryos for research. In particular, such consideration was the basis for the call of the US President's Council on Bioethics for a moratorium on stem cell research on human embryos. In this paper, I critique the concept of potentiality invoked by the Council and offer an alternative account. In contrast (...) to the Council's view that an embryo's potentiality is determined by definition and is not affected by external conditions that may prevent certain possibilities from ever being realized, I propose an empirically grounded account of potentiality that involves an assessment of the physical and decisional conditions that may restrict an embryo's possibilities. In my view, some human embryos lack the potentiality to become a person that other human embryos have. Assuming for the sake of argument that the potential to become a person gives a being special moral status, it follows that some human embryos lack this status. This argument is then used to support Gene Outka's suggestion that it is morally permissible to experiment on ‘spare’ frozen embryos that are destined to be destroyed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Menkiti's Moral Man by Oritsegbubemi Anthony OyowePolycarp IkuenobeOYOWE, Oritsegbubemi Anthony. Menkiti's Moral Man. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xii + 221 pp. Cloth, $100.00Oyowe critically examines the various threads in, issues raised by, and implications of Menkiti's maximal conception of personhood, against the backdrop of various criticisms, including his own. He indicates that, as "a repentant critic," he does "not deny the merits of these criticisms," but (...) he is "convinced that there are resources in Menkiti's general account for tackling them."In chapter 1, Oyowe examines how Menkiti uses the idea of community to foreground his normative view of personhood, in order to illuminate the African idea that one is a person because of, and through relationships with, other persons in a community. This indicates that one's existence or [End Page 356] identity has necessary external elements of cultural belonging, in addition to internal intrinsic elements. These cultural elements require ontological progression that involves a process of social-moral incorporation into communal practices and norms. Oyowe argues that while this conception is plausible, it raises questions regarding oppressive cultures and their effects on individuals. He indicates that the kind of person that emerges from this conception is a "soft" social entity.Chapter 2 examines the issue of the nature of the relationship between persons (as soft social entities) and community, and the implications for individual autonomy, practical reasoning, and moral agency. Oyowe argues that the pertinent issue is not whether the individual should have moral or ontological priority over the community or vice versa, but the aspect of individuality that is conducive to what we cherish about the community. This is because Menkiti presupposes that in order to be a maximal person, one must have intrinsic capacities for moral agency to take on communal functions and duties. But the community creates the conditions for individuals to express individuality and autonomy, engage in practical reasoning, and make the choice to conform with communal norms in order to be recognized as persons.So, the maximal conception of personhood raises issues about the nature of entities that deserve a moral status. Chapter 3 examines the moral status of infants, people with cognitive impairment, the senile, nonhuman animals, and the moral duties that people have toward these entities. If we understand personhood as failing to extend moral status to these entities, such a view might be charged with speciesism and anthropocentrism. Oyowe argues that a plausible interpretation of personhood, in the context of the communal priority of duties, suggests that people have certain responsibilities toward human and nonhuman nonpersons. This interpretation is grounded in Menkiti's distinction between "deserving justice"—which is not based on having certain intrinsic properties, moral capacities, or cognitive abilities—and "being a person." Because Menkiti insists that persons ought to be able to use their capacities to perform requisite communal duties, personhood must involve an obligation to consider the interests of nonpersons and a community of respect for those who deserve justice.Chapter 4 examines the dilemma created by the social architecture of a community's cultural traditions, institutions, expectations, norms, and practices that are necessary for personhood and social identity. While such architecture is capable of supporting the achievement of personhood, it could also be restrictive. He uses Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, to illuminate how the structures for recognizing persons that are oppressive of and biased against women could be disguised. Although Menkiti does not address this issue, his conception of personhood highlights the problem of social justice for women because relevant social architecture may exclude women from equal and full communal recognition and participation. An appreciation of this problem [End Page 357] introduces an alternative way of understanding social justice in terms of communal recognition or lack thereof.In chapter 5, Oyowe uses the intuitions underlying Locke's distinction between "person" and "human being" to illuminate Menkiti's account of personhood. Person and human being are not identical because they have different persistent conditions. Persons persist by virtue of mental capacities and practical relevance that are developed after one is identified as a human organism. This raises the issues of (a) whether being a... (shrink)

Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) worry that assumptions about fetal personhood used to justify states’ restrictions on a pregnant person’s right to request certain interventions (i.e. abort...

Despite the prominence of person‐centred care (PCC) in nursing, there is no general agreement on the assumptions and the meaning of PCC. We sympathize with the work of others who rethink PCC towards relational, embedded, and temporal selfhood rather than individual personhood. Our perspective addresses criticism of humanist assumptions in PCC using critical posthumanism as a diffraction from dominant values We highlight the problematic realities that might be produced in healthcare, leading to some people being more likely to be (...) disenfranchised from healthcare than others. We point to the colonial, homo‐ and transphobic, racist, ableist, and ageist consequences of humanist traditions that have influenced the development of PCC. We describe the deep rooted conditions that structurally uphold inequality and undermine nursing practice that PCC reproduces. We advocate for the self‐determination of patients and emphasize that we support the fundamental mechanisms of PCC enabling patients' choice; however, without critical introspection, these are limited to a portion of humans. Last, we present limitations of our perspective based on our white*‐cisheteropatriarchy** positionality. We point to the fact that any reimagining of models such as PCC should be carefully done by listening, following, and ceding power to people with diversity dimensions*** and the lived experience or expertise that exists from diverse perspectives. We point towards Black, queer feminism, and critical disabilities studies to contextualize our point of critique with humanism and PCC to amplify equity for all people and communities. Theory and philosophy are useful to understand restrictive factors in healthcare delivery and to inform systematic strategies to improve the quality of care so as not to perpetuate the oppression of groups of people with diversity dimensions. *We purposely capitalize Black and use lower case for white to decentre whiteness and as an intentional act of antiracism (see White Homework a podcast series by Tori W. Douglas). **Cisheteropatriarchy describes people with intersecting identities of dominant social groups; cisgender is the gender identity that aligns with the gender you were assigned at birth, hetero means heterosexual, and patriarchy refers to structural systems of power based on maleness where women are often excluded and hold less power. ***With diversity dimensions, we refer to subjective lived experience and material realities of people that exist outside the ‘dominant minorities' of white‐cisheteropatriarchy, meaning groups of people in society who historically and currently hold more power and through this, structurally dominate the norms and possibilities of living for other people. (shrink)

This paper examines Aquinas’s epistemological treatment of the disembodied soul in order to reveal (1) its relationship to the person it once was, and (2) the nature and extent of its self-knowledge. I argue first that disembodiment entails not only loss of personhood, but severe restriction of one’s concept of self. Consequently, individual self-consciousness is minimized. By contrast, I argue that the soul’s knowledge of its nature is likely to be realized more perfectly in the separated state, not so (...) much because of freedom from the body as the infusion of pure intelligibles. Thus, the roles of these two types of self-knowledge (particular and universal) are reversed from the case of the embodied soul, where self-consciousness is an effortless concomitant to thought and self-knowledge requires a painstaking labor. I conclude by wondering whether the cognition enjoyed in the separated state has some utility for the soul’s future, re-embodied existence. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Edmund Husserl’s views on the differences between human and animal consciousness, with particular attention to the experience of temporality.In the first section, I situate the topic of animal consciousness in the broader context of Husserl’s philosophy. Whereas this connection has been often neglected, I argue that a phenomenological analysis of non-human subjectivities is not only justified, but also essential to the Husserlian project as a whole.In the second section, I introduce two notions (...) Husserl resorts to when describing the essential difference between human and animal subjectivities, namely “strata of consciousness” and “person.” Drawing on textual evidence, I argue that Husserl does not simply see animals as excluded from the sphere of personhood. Rather, he draws a distinction between two modes of personal life, one of which is said to be unique to human adults.What holds these two modes apart, according to Husserl, is a subject’s relation to time. In the third section, I delve deeper into this topic, asking how we should understand Husserl’s claim that animals live in a “restricted temporality.” I argue that this has less to do with an inability to remember, imagine, or anticipate future events, and more with an inability to explore temporal horizons stretching before one’s birth or after one’s death. By contrast, humans gradually overcome these limitations during ontogeny, thanks to the practice of linguistic communication. This also has consequences for our capacity to engage in genuinely theoretical thought. (shrink)

In this essay, Soble addresses the various attempts in the philosophical literature to solve the "Kantian sex problem"—people's mere instrumental use of each other (and allowing themselves to be used as such by others) during sexual activity and the diminishing of one's sexual rationality and autonomy when experiencing sexual desire. The problem won't be solved by denying Kant's account of sexuality or the validity of his Formula of Humanity, but by fashioning a sexual ethics consistent with Kant's views. Soble critically (...) discusses and rejects various proposed solutions to this problem, from behavioral and psychological internalist solutions to minimalist and extended externalist solutions. Soble also scrutinizes the writings of Kant to make sense of the passages in which Kant himself tries to solve the problem that he created. Soble concludes that Kant's restriction of sex to marriage derives as much, if not more, from the duty to protect one's own personhood from the noxious objectifying nature of sexual desire, as from the duty to protect the personhood of those whom one sexual desires and interacts with. (This is a revised version of the essay from previous editions of the book.). (shrink)

:This essay explores the meaning and normative significance of Locke’s depiction of individuals as proprietors of their own person. I begin by reconsidering the long-standing puzzle concerning Locke’s simultaneous endorsement of divine proprietorship and self-ownership. Befuddlement vanishes, I contend, once we reject concurrent ownership in the same object: while God fully owns our lives, humans are initially sole proprietors of their own person. Locke employs two conceptions of “personhood”: as expressing legal independence vis-à-vis humans and moral accountability vis-à-vis God. (...) Humans own their person in the first sense. As original proprietors of their own person, individuals are entitled to subject themselves to self-chosen authorities, thereby incurring obligations of obedience. But they may not choose just any authority. Divine ownership of human life delimits personal self-ownership by restricting the ways in which humans can dispose of their persons: we cannot possibly consensually subject ourselves to absolute and arbitrary power. Locke’s rights-forfeiture theory for crime makes slavery and despotism nonetheless potentially rightful conditions. I argue that, paradoxically, divine dominium of human life underpins both the impermissibility of voluntary enslavement and the justifiability of penal slavery. My analysis helps explain why modern Lockean theories of self-ownership that reject Locke’s theological premises have adopted an ambiguous stance toward despotic rule. (shrink)

This paper critically discusses the argument from objectification – as recently presented by Elizabeth Shaw – against mandatory direct brain interventions targeting criminal offenders’ values as part of rehabilitative or reformative schemes. Shaw contends that such DBIs would objectify offenders because a DBI “excludes offenders by portraying them as a group to whom we need not listen” and “implies that offenders are radically defective with regard to one of the most fundamental aspects of their agency”. To ensure that offenders are (...) not objectified, Shaw first maintains that we should restrict rehabilitative/reformative schemes to attempts at rational dialogue because such an approach respects the offender’s personhood. Second, Shaw claims that we should not portray offenders as radically defective because such treatment would only negatively impact offenders’ already tenuous relationship with society. Third, Shaw contends that we should not confer the state the power to change an offender’s values because the state lacks insight into what constitutes the right values. I contend that none of these arguments should prevent the use of value-targeting DBIs. First, I show that the dialogue requirement for rehabilitative schemes is insufficient ground from which to oppose the use of these DBIs. Second, I show that it is doubtful that the use of DBIs as proposed would damage the relationship between offenders and society. Finally, although the state may often lack insight into what constitutes the correct values, this lack of insight should not by itself prevent value-targeting DBIs from being employed on certain groups of offenders. (shrink)

The wrongful disability problem arises whenever a disability-causing, and therefore (presumptively) wrongful, procreative act is a necessary condition for the existence of a person whose life is otherwise worth living. It is a problem because it seems to involve no harm, and therefore no wrongful treatment, vis-à-vis that person. This essay defends the nonconsequentialist, rights-based, account of the wrong-making features of wrongful disability. It distinguishes between the person-affecting restriction, roughly the idea that wrongdoing is always the wronging of some person, (...) and the harm principle, the idea that all wrongings are harmings. It argues, first, that the harm principle should be rejected, in light of offending intuitions in salient examples. Rejection of the harm principle is not only independently plausible, but also paves the way for a nonconsequentialist diagnosis of wrongful disability. This diagnosis conceives of wrongdoing as a failure to express adequate respect for the humanity or personhood inherent in the person created. The paper defends a theory of humanity-respecting rights that accommodates plausible intuitions about satisficing and fairness, without resorting to consequentialist premises that lead to well-known impossibility results and paradoxes. (shrink)

A liberal antinomy of parenting exists: strong liberal intuitions militate in favor of both denying special resources to parenting projects (on grounds of project-neutrality) and granting them (on grounds of respect for personhood). I show that we can reconcile these two claims by rejecting a premise common to both--viz. that liberalism is necessarily committed to extensive procreative liberties--and limiting procreation and subsequent parenting to adults who meet certain psychological and especially financial criteria. I also defend this argument, which provides (...) a Kantian complement to utilitarian arguments for restricting procreation, against a variety of objections. (shrink)

. Although the courts have ruled that companies are legal persons, they have not yet made clear the extent to which political free speech for corporations is limited by the strictures legitimately placed upon corporate commercial speech. I explore the question of whether or not companies can properly be said to have the right to civil free speech or whether corporate speech is always de facto commercial speech not subject to the same sorts of legal protections as is the right (...) to civil free speech. In the absence of clearly defined legal precedent, I emphasize moral reasons for determining the appropriate limits of corporate civil free speech. Appealing to arguments typically used to justify individual rights to civil free speech, I examine the extent to which this sort of justification may or may not be legitimately extended to corporations. I conclude that corporate rights to civil free speech must be restricted because granting rights of free speech to institutions may, in practice, undermine the moral rationale and practical feasibility of guaranteeing rights of civil free speech to individuals. Furthermore, I argue that granting corporations full rights to civil free speech will undercut attempts to develop good moral character in corporate institutions by undermining the efforts of watchdog organizations. (shrink)

The importance of Thomas Hobbes?s account of personation and representation can hardly be overstated. And his intellectual debt to one of his classical foes, Marcus Tullius Cicero, can hardly be ignored. This paper compares Hobbes?s ideas on personhood of the state with Cicero?s notion of persona civitatis, and attempts to describe how Hobbes reshaped Cicero?s guidelines for presenting legitimate authority into a prop for defending any effective authority. Hobbes absorbs Cicero?s influential argument and builds on the idea of civic (...) representation as guardianship done by role-playing, while tearing down Cicero?s account?s ethical foundations. In contrast to Cicero?s magistrate, the social role of Hobbes?s sovereign is not scripted by ethical constrains: its purpose is not to restrict license, but to present it. (shrink)

Visiones antropológicas divergentes en artículos científicos de bioética en Brasil Divergent Anthropological Views in Scientific Articles on Bioethics in Brazil The aim of the study is to characterize Brazilian bioethics outputs anthropologically, specifically scientific articles. The guiding question of this research is: What is the anthropological characterization present in scientific articles on bioethics in Brazil? Prominent bioethical theories show restrictive anthropology indicators; i.e., dignity is given only to members of the human species that have certain attributes, including conscience and self-consciousness, (...) as opposed to comprehensive anthropology indicators in relation to human beings; i.e., dignity is equally assigned to all members of the Homo sapiens species. In conclusion, comprehensive anthropology indicators and theoretical divergence in relation to the origin of life, especially between utilitarianism and personalism, prevail. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Sanches MA, Monteiro TM. Visões antropológicas divergentes em artigos científicos de bioética no Brasil. Pers Bioet. 2019; 23: 64-83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.1.5 Recibido: 09/10/2018 Aceptado: 20/03/2019. (shrink)

One powerful argument against self-ownership is that it degrades personhood by leading individuals to view themselves and others as mere instrumental goods, alienable commodities to be exchanged in markets like other products and services. In general terms, this line of criticism (called the “commodification argument”) maintains that a direct and causal relationship exists between certain legal institutions (self-ownership) and certain attitudes (instrumentalism) and that the undesirability of the latter justifies restrictions on the former. In this article, I will critically (...) examine Margaret Jane Radin’s book Contested Commodities (1996), which presents a well-developed, compelling version of the commodification argument. I will advance three central points over the course of the article: first, the purported causal connection between self-ownership and instrumentalism is either weak or nonexistent; second, the commodification argument does little independent moral work, tending instead to be parasitic on arguments against economic, racial, and gender inequality; and third, what independent moral work it does do seems to be directed not so much at self-ownership as at liberal neutrality. I will conclude by showing that the weaknesses of Radin’s diverse defenses of the commodification argument cast doubt upon the anticommodificationist enterprise as a whole. (shrink)

In this article, I compare Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Dietrich von Hildebrand’s analyses of the look of the other to argue that personhood is more fundamental than individuality. Sartre restricts subjectivity to individual consciousness, which, qua individual, is defined as not being what others are. As a result, both freedom and selfhood for Sartre are defined as “nihilation.” By contrast, for von Hildebrand, the experience of the loving interpenetration of looks reveals both the self and the other as concrete values (...) precisely insofar as they are persons. I conclude with the implications of this primacy of person over individual for understanding freedom. Both Sartre and von Hildebrand recognize our “fundamental” freedom of choosing our ends, which corresponds to our being individuals. However, only von Hildebrand recognizes that the highest freedom is not found in individual choice but, rather, in the “cooperative freedom” of personal love. (shrink)

Two foundational ethicists of care, Nel Noddings and Eva Feder Kittay, limit the moral community of care to humans. Noddings claims that the reciprocity required for her care ethic cannot be universally present in human relationships with non-humans. Kittay advances that her care ethic requires the cared-for’s assent, or “taking up” of the care, in response to the carer’s actions, which she claims is impossible with non-human cared-fors. But these claims can be disputed. I offer a few examples to contend (...) that ethically meaningful reciprocity is possible in some human relationships with more-than-human entities and that some non-human cared-fors can assent to carers’ actions. Following from the work of Mary Anne Warren and others on moral personhood, “humans” and “persons” can refer to different things: biological organisms and a designation of moral status respectively. There can be persons that are not humans (e.g., legal persons like corporations and chimpanzees, and moral persons like whales and dolphins). Because the concerns of Noddings and Kittay can be addressed and there are non-human persons, I argue that we should reject the human restriction within care ethics. Humans have morally significant relationships with non-human persons and we need to open the realm of care ethics to legitimize and enhance these other relationships in our rich communities. (shrink)

In 1971, Judith Jarvis Thomson published what was then and still often is regarded as a trailblazing philosophical defense of a woman’s right to have a lawful abortion. It is time to revisit Thomson’s paper. The aim here is not to engage Thomson’s pro-choice conclusions, which are indeed mistaken, but to show that her question—to what extent can abortion be morally justified, assuming that it is the deliberate killing of one person by his or her mother—is the question today in (...) American law concerning abortion. Pro-life people and groups argue among themselves about the prudence of political efforts to roll back Roe v. Wade by personhood initiatives, that is, by seeking to enact laws expressly recognizing that a human being with an equal right not to killed comes to be at fertilization, thereafter to pursue abortion restrictions as a matter of equal protection for all against unjustified uses of lethal force. Many if not most pro-life activists and bodies oppose such efforts as precipitous and almost certainly politically counterproductive. This article argues that, on the contrary, the unborn are already recognized as persons with a right not to be killed, and that the constitutional question of equal protection of unborn persons is already in the courts. Thomson’s question is, in other words, ripe and urgent, and it has been brought to the fore not by direct attack upon abortion rights, but indirectly by and through the many feticide laws enacted across the country since around the year 2000. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration by Kristin E. HeyerVictor CarmonaKinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration By Kristin E. Heyer WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. 198 PP. $29.95Heyer renders an important service to the discipline, which has not seen a book-length account of a Christian immigration ethic since Dana Wilbanks’s Recreating America (1996). In Kinship across Borders, Heyer provides a nuanced and comprehensive (...) theological ethical analysis of undocumented immigration and argues that “a Christian immigration ethic calls believers to promote structures and practices marked by kinship and justice” (4). To that end, she advances four distinct theses in as many chapters—interpretations of personhood, sin, family, and solidarity—each appropriating a specific resource from the Christian tradition in order to reorient immigration policies from a “paradigm centered on national interest, expediency, or economic efficiency” to one that is person centered (4). Her project challenges American Christians to reckon with their responsibility in advancing structures and furthering ideologies that sustain forced migrations, including economic refugees, in the Western Hemisphere.Chapter 1 relies on Margaret Farley’s “obligating features of person-hood”—namely, autonomy and relationality—to identify the prevailing immigration paradigm, which views immigrants as economic commodities, security threats, and/or foreigners to be assimilated (21). This paradigm reflects internalized ideologies and a series of external structures that weaken the personal agency of immigrants who, in significant ways, “are unable to [End Page 194] determine the direction their lives will take” (22). Chapter 2 turns to Catholic social encyclicals and liberation theology to develop a dialectical interpretation of personal and social sin. Heyer posits that though persons are responsible for their actions, they “remain subject to external [structural] influences” that limit the ways in which they may exercise their agency (46). She uses this idea not to accuse undocumented immigrants but rather to highlight the sinful ideological blinders that often limit American Christians’ capacity to act hospitably towards them. “Given the relationship between the United States and sending countries in geographic, economic, and political terms,” she writes, “US citizens may be willfully negligent of or indirectly responsible for the conditions that give rise to undocumented migration across their borders” (46).Chapters 3 and 4 provide robust accounts of cross-border kinship in the context of the family and globalization, with their rich visions of human relationships that break open the prevailing immigration paradigm. For example, though familismo among Latin American immigrants may lend itself to restrict women’s personal agency, it nevertheless offers an “extensive and malleable understanding of kinship networks, … [with] boundaries among members that remain fluid and transcend genetics,” thus broadening the relationships within which to flourish (82). To address global kinship, Heyer develops an account of institutional, incarnational, and conflictual solidarity that breaks free from the tendency to frame the immigration debate in the United States as a purely domestic issue that lacks meaningful global implications. Chapter 5 concludes the book by identifying implications for reorienting immigration policy and rhetoric as well as Christian ethics so that they better account for the immigrant experience by developing the necessary resources, including a more robust understanding of moral agency in the midst of marginalization.The argument is strongest in chapters 2 and 3, which develop a crisp critical analysis of the sources and insightful interpretations of often overlooked ones, including immigrants’ experiences. Furthermore, Heyer adeptly engages multiple US Hispanic theologians and Christian ethicists in ways that sharpen her argument throughout. The argument is weakest in chapter 5 because it does not fully integrate earlier insights on cross-border familial and global kinship while accounting for civic kinship. I strongly recommend Kinship across Borders for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on Catholic social thought, Protestant social ethics, and theology and/or ethics of migration. [End Page 195]Victor CarmonaOblate School of TheologyCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:216 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Sealing Cheng Pikachu’s Tears: Children’s Perspectives on Violence in Hong Kong How do children experience the sudden onset of massive unrest, violence, and police brutality? It has been difficult even for many adults to process how Hong Kong—a cosmopolitan city known for its stability and low crime rate—descended overnight, on June 12, 2019, into tear gas and (...) violent confrontations. What began as a mass protest against amendments to a bill that would have facilitated the extradition of fugitives in Hong Kong to mainland China for trial turned into a protracted struggle for universal suffrage and investigations into police brutality. In the process, countless scenes of excessive police violence against protestors have challenged any dichotomous, black-and-white worldview of good cop/bad criminal; the geography and tempo of the city have been remade by protests, crackdowns, and transportation shutdowns; and social and familial tensions and divisions about the source of the violence have plagued the routines of everyday life. Children, like adults, have to find new ways of being and becoming in the city during this political upheaval. Their existential liminality, however, provides children with a unique perspective from which to sense, experience, and engage with the volatility around them. Careful listening allows children’s “small voices” to speak to “big issues.”1 1. Allison James, “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007): 261–72. Sealing Cheng 217 Unmooring children from “the restrictive and constricting frameworks of innocence and/or victimhood” with “incomplete moral and social personhood,” Karen Lury analyzed the child as a version of Berlant’s “infantile citizen,” whose “‘stubborn naïveté’ gives her/him enormous power to unsettle, expose, and reframe the machinery of national life.”2 I offer reflections below as an observer of the ways my children participate in their changing world as socio-moral beings. I write as a mother who searches for her own ethical anchor with and through my children in a collective project of engaging with our fears, hopes, and possibilities. “Will the Government Talk to Us?” I am a mother of two girls, ages six and nine. My daughters usually want to go swimming on Sundays, but since June 9, 2019, our family has instead spent many Sundays at marches and protests against the anti-extradition law and police brutality, reiterating the “five demands” of the movement. Our family has participated in protest marches before, but the prospect of walking in a crowd through the city streets for hours in the summer heat—rather than swimming in the pool—was highly unappealing to my kids. I had to explain to them why it was important. I said that if amendments to the Extradition Law passed, we could be accused of committing a crime under mainland Chinese laws, and we would lose our rights to do many of the things we had taken for granted. As an example, I explained that they would not be allowed to watch Winnie the Pooh again because President Xi did not like that people likened him to the cute bear. My daughters found it puzzling why anyone would object to such an innocuous comparison. I also said that if the law passed, we might no longer be free to say the words “8964” commemorating the June 4, 1989, Massacre on Tiananmen Square. (While these changes might not really happen, they speak to Hongkongers’ utter distrust of the judicial system in China.) I explained to my daughters that we needed to tell Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her government that we did not want this law passed. They agreed. 2. Karen Lury, “Children in an Open World: Mobility as Ontology in New Iranian and Turkish Cinema,” Feminist Theory 11, no. 3 (2010): 284; Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays of Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 29, quoted in Lury, “Children in an Open World,” 284–5. 218 Sealing Cheng When we joined our first anti-extradition march toward the government headquarters on June 9, we were among one million people who... (shrink)

As with many human desires, transhumanist hope often lapses into transhumanist hype, but that recognition usually seems to come from those who fear the prospects. As a result, denunciations are frequently as vague as they are dismissive. Yet, despite potential benefits in the transhumanist agenda, there are legitimate reasons for questioning some of its particular projections and doing so can help distinguish between the hope and hype. Focusing on inherent limitations to cognitive enhancement, for instance, is instructive because that arena (...) is so intimately connected to personhood and is also the gateway to other envisioned forms of improvement. Identifying those restrictions is also germane to considerations of Christian engagement with the realities of a transhumanist future—a future whose “superior” beings can never escape faith. (shrink)

This paper addresses several questions related to the nature, production, and use of animal-human (a-h) chimeras. At the heart of the issue is whether certain types of a-h chimeras should be brought into existence, and, if they are, how we should treat such creatures. In our current research environment, we recognize a dichotomy between research involving nonhuman animal subjects and research involving human subjects, and the classification of a research protocol into one of these categories will trigger different ethical standards (...) as to the moral permissibility of the research in question. Are a-h chimeras entitled to the more restrictive and protective ethical standards applied to human research subjects? We elucidate an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical framework in which to argue how such chimeras ought to be defined ontologically. We then examine when the creation of, and experimentation upon, certain types of a-h chimeras may be morally permissible. (shrink)

The history of corporations in the United States (U.S.) is much older than the country, as it must be understood in the context of the history of peoples of Europe who eventually dominated the North American continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These European settlers came, in part, to achieve economic prosperity for themselves and, in many cases, for early forerunners of the modern corporation. These business organizations had predecessors in Europe millennia earlier as ancient Romans had developed a (...) functional and successful form of corporation for the purpose of conducting commerce in the Roman Empire. In the decades that followed the founding of the U.S. in 1776, corporations evolved from rare, small, closely controlled business organizations with a multitude of restrictions to very large, very powerful modern institutions that enjoy many of the legal rights of humans. With this evolution came ethical issues, as (1) the ethical distance was altered between corporate decision-makers and those affected by those decisions, and (2) many of the legal rights of individual humans were extended, through litigation, to corporations. This article explains the historical development of the U.S. corporation and identifies 20 Critical Events in the Ethics of Corporation History (CEECH). An understanding of these historical events may facilitate comprehension of many of the current ethical issues associated with a legal organizational form that profoundly affects business and society. (shrink)

Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. -/- The real key to (...) Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work. Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand genuinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic programming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects, that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for moral agency. -/- Like contractarians and Kantians more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot themselves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.” But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives. -/- In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy,focused on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral” domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential” and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community, respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the remarkable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is supposed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global community. -/- . (shrink)

The proposition that a decreasing sequence of ordinals necessarily terminates has been given a new, and perhaps unexpected, importance by the rôle which it plays in Gentzen's proof of the freedom from contradiction of the “reine Zahlentheorie.” Gödel's construction of non-demonstrable propositions and the establishment of the impossibility of a proof of freedom from contradiction, within the framework of a certain type of formal system, showed that a proof of freedom from contradiction could be found only by transcending the axioms (...) and proof processes of that formal system. Gentzen's proof succeeds by utilisingtransfinite inductionto prove that certain sequences of reduction processes, enumerated by ordinals less than ε (the first ordinal to satisfy ε = ὡ) are finite. Were it possible to provethe restricted ordinal theorem, that a descending sequence of ordinals, less thanε, is finite, in Gentzen's “reine Zahlentheorie,” then it would be possible to determine a contradiction in that number system. In his paper, Gentzen proves the theorem of transfinite induction, which he requires, by an intuitive argument. There is also a method of reducing transfinite induction, for ordinals less than ε, to a number-theoretic principle given by Hilbert and Bernays, and a similar method by Ackermann. None of these proofs of transfinite induction isfinitist. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that, if we are committed to accepting a threshold approach to personhood, according to which all beings above the threshold are persons with equal moral status, there are strong reasons to also recognise a second threshold that would be reached through human pregnancy, and that would confer on pregnant women a temporary superior moral status. This proposal is not based on the moral status of the fetus, but on the moral status of the pregnant (...) woman. It is not only the fetus which is an organism sui generis: the pregnant woman, also, is a unique being. Following almost any view on the moral status of the fetus, the pregnant woman should be regarded, herself, as more than a singular individual. She is, herself, ‘more than one’. Pregnant women are also necessary for the continued survival of the human species, and there are important justice-based reasons to recognise the higher status. Furthermore, the recognition of a superior moral status for pregnant women does not imply that pregnancy should always be viewed as desirable, or imply any position on the permissibility of abortion. My proposal is not as radical as it might seem, as it does not require that pregnant women should always receive superior treatment, but only that they should to some extent. It could have a range of potential positive practical consequences. Finally, my approach does not threaten, but rather promotes, human equality. (shrink)

Under what circumstances if ever ought we to grant that Artificial Intelligences (AI) are persons? The question of whether AI could have the high degree of moral status that is attributed to human persons has received little attention. What little work there is employs western conceptions of personhood, while non-western approaches are neglected. In this article, I discuss African conceptions of personhood and their implications for the possibility of AI persons. I focus on an African account of (...) class='Hi'>personhood that is prima facie inimical to the idea that AI could ever be ‘persons’ in the sense typically attributed to humans. I argue that despite its apparent anthropocentrism, this African account could admit AI as persons. (shrink)

Openness is one of science’s fundamental ethical norms, but it should not take precedence over the obligation to protect the confidentiality of data. Deidentifying the data obtained from human genomic research as a condition of providing open access to research data is a strategy to promote scientific openness while protecting research participants’ confidentiality interests. However, given recent advances in methods of reidentifying individuals whose deidentified data are in genomic databases, the best way to balance scientific openness and protection of human (...) subjects in genomic research is to permit access to genomic data on a restricted basis. (shrink)

In this paper I show that Elga’s argument for a restricted principle of indifference for self-locating belief relies on the kind of mistaken reasoning that recommends the ‘staying’ strategy in the Monty Hall problem.