Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2010) 13:421–437

DOI 10.1007/s10677-009-9214-2

Humanizing Personhood

Adam Kadlac

Accepted: 25 October 2009 / Published online: 11 December 2009

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract This paper explores the debate between personists, who argue that the concept of
a person if of central importance for moral thought, and personists, who argue that the
concept of a human being is of greater moral significance. On the one hand, it argues that
normative naturalism, the most ambitious defense of the humanist position, fails to identify
moral standards with standards of human behavior and thereby fails to undermine the moral
significance of personhood. At the same time, it contends that a more focused attention on
the morally relevant features of human life may indeed play a crucial role in enhancing our
moral understanding.

Keywords Personhood . Moral theory . Humanism . Personism . Moral status

Colloquially, there seems to be little difference between the terms ‘person’ and ‘human
being.’ Upon being asked to describe the state of affairs across the room, one might say,
“Well, there are just a bunch of people over there hanging out by the water cooler.” And
one might equally, if somewhat more stiffly, say, “There are just a bunch of humans over
there hanging out by the water cooler.” The latter expression might draw a few wry smiles
because of its awkwardness since we don’t, in general, talk that way. But no one would
think that a fundamentally different state of affairs had been described. The difference in
such expressions would be viewed as merely terminological.
Even in contexts where something particularly important is at stake, few would take
there to be an important difference between ‘person’ and ‘human being.’ If someone tells a
fireman that there are human beings in a burning building, we would be surprised to hear
the fireman ask whether there are also people in that same building. That there are would
have already been communicated to him in the witness’s initial report.
Despite this general equivalence, many philosophers have contended that there is an
important difference between the concept of a person and the concept of a human being. On
such a view, which entities should be labeled as human beings is determined by which entities

A. Kadlac (*)
University of Tennessee, 806B McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA
e-mail: ajkadlac@gmail.com
422 A. Kadlac

should count as members of the species Homo sapiens. Used in this way, ‘human being’ thus
serves to mark out a certain class of living entities—members of Homo sapiens—as distinct
from non-human animals. One might, for example, think all kinds of things about monkeys:
that they are rational, self-conscious, possessed of moral worth, and so on. But no one would
conclude from these facts that monkeys are human beings.
The concept of a person, on the other hand, is, roughly, the concept of an entity that has
a set of properties that cannot, in principle, be confined to human beings and most
commonly, properties such as rationality and self-consciousness are singled out as person-
making in this way. Thus, while one would be hard-pressed to convince others that
monkeys are human beings, on this way of thinking it would be possible to convince others
that monkeys are persons. One would simply have to establish conclusively that they
possessed the relevant person-making properties.
Philosophers have thus argued for the respective importance of each of these notions in
moral thought. According to personists, it is the concept of a person that lies at the heart of
morality and while it may be that all of the persons of whom we are aware are also human
beings, this is a contingent feature of our present circumstances rather than an important
conceptual truth. Though she does not endorse it, Cora Diamond helpfully characterizes
personism as follows:
What makes us human is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making
us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other
hand, we define being human in terms which are not tied to biological classification,
if (for example) we treat as the properties which make us human the capacities for
reasoning and self-consciousness, then indeed those capacities may be morally
relevant, but if they are morally significant at all, they are significant whether they are
the properties of a being who is a member of our species or not. And so it would be
better to use a word like ‘person’ to mean a being that has these properties, to bring
out the fact that not all human beings have them and that non-human beings
conceivably have them (1991, p. 35).
While personists may differ regarding exactly which properties are constitutive of
personhood, they are nevertheless united in thinking that merely biological considerations
should not be counted among them. Personism has secured broad allegiance and as a result
has tended to dominate prominent lines of debate concerning, for example, the morality of
abortion (where the biological species of the fetus is not in doubt and therefore is not
thought to be a morally sufficient consideration in determining its moral status) and animal
rights (where accepted differences in biological species are not thought sufficient to
determine the moral status of non-human animals).1
Recently, however, some philosophers have argued for a humanism that rejects this line
of thought and argues that personism fails to sufficiently illuminate the appropriate basis
and scope of moral concern. While there are important differences among these figures,
they are united in thinking that the concept of a human being, adequately fleshed out, is
better suited than the concept of a person to accomplish such a task. It is in this vein that
Philippa Foot advocates a naturalism according to which our moral judgments are a subset
of judgments regarding the natural flourishing and defect of all living entities. On this view,
the distinctive properties of humans as a biological species do play an important role in
fixing the content of morality and the kinds of moral judgments that can be appropriately

1
Prominent personists include McMahan 2002; Regan 1983; Singer 1993; Tooley 1972 and Warren 1973.
Humanizing personhood 423

applied to them.2 Similarly, Michael Thompson has attempted to provide a theoretical

underpinning for ethical naturalism that is “marked off by the central place [it gives] to the
concept human in practical philosophy, as its highest concept and the index of the
generality of its most abstract principles” (2004a, p. 69).
What I argue in the essay that follows is that both humanist and personist camps have
somewhat overstated their cases. While a more focused attention on the morally relevant
features of human life may indeed play a crucial role in enhancing our moral understanding,
such attention cannot succeed in confining a distinctively moral concern to the realm of the
biologically human. And if moral concern cannot be confined to that realm, then there
seems to be an important place in our moral vocabulary for the concept of a person,
however, precisely, we should spell out that concept. At the same time, reflection on our
shared lot as human beings—as members of a particular biological species that
characteristically follow a certain pattern of life and characteristically relate to one another
in certain ways—cannot be disregarded as morally irrelevant. Indeed, it seems that the most
compelling accounts of what it is to be a person—and why being a person should be
thought morally significant—grow out of reflection on what, exactly, it means to be human.
Thus, while my explicit aim is to defend the moral importance of the concept of a person, I
hope to do so in a way that takes some lessons from the humanist project.
My discussion proceeds in three stages. In Part I, I try to clarify the structure of the
debate between personists and humanists in an effort to determine what might count as a
successful defense of either view. In Part II, I turn to the most theoretically ambitious
attempt to establish the centrality of the concept of a human being for moral thought:
normative naturalism. While the work of the normative naturalists provides a fascinating
account of the concept of life and the potential importance of naturalistic considerations for
our understanding of the behavior of various entities, I argue that it nevertheless fails to
confine morality to the realm of the human. I then conclude in Part III by sketching a
proposal for the way in which reflection on what it means to be human can help to shape a
personism that is morally insightful and also informed by the realities of life as the
particular sorts of creatures we are.

1 Humans, Persons, and the Moral Community

If humanism is to be viewed as a compelling alternative to personism, it is important to be

clear about exactly what sort of alternative it is supposed to be. Because of the contexts in
which personist and humanist positions are typically defended—abortion, animal rights,
questions about the end of life, and so on—the issue is often thought to be one of how to
demarcate the moral community. Thus, Mary Anne Warren writes the following concerning
the abortion debate:
The question which we must answer in order to produce a satisfactory solution to the
problem of the moral status of abortion is this: How are we to define the moral community,
the set of beings with full and equal moral rights, such that we can decide whether a human
fetus is a member of this community or not? What sort of entity, exactly, has inalienable
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Jefferson attributed these rights to all
men, and it may or may not be fair to suggest that he intended to attribute them only to
men. Perhaps he ought to have attributed them to all human beings (1973, p. 52).

2
In Foot 2001.
424 A. Kadlac

Warren goes on to point out that at least some individuals employ ‘human being’ “to mean
something like ‘a full-fledged member of the moral community’” (1973, p. 53).
But clearly humanism cannot be a substantive view about the boundaries of the moral
community if it is taken to be the view that ‘human being’ just means “full-fledged member
of the moral community.” For that would simply amount to the view that full-fledged
members of the moral community are full-fledged members of the moral community—a
non-starter, if there ever was one. To be sure, the fact that we also use ‘human being’ to
refer to members of Homo sapiens may obscure this aspect of certain moral arguments,
making it appear as though one has reached a substantive conclusion when, in fact, one has
simply begged the key questions at issue. Warren thus notes that
the term ‘human’ has two distinct, but not often distinguished, senses. This fact
results in a slide of meaning, which serves to conceal the fallaciousness of the
traditional argument that since (1) it is wrong to kill innocent human beings, and (2)
fetuses are innocent human beings, then (3) it is wrong to kill fetuses. For if ‘human
is used in the same sense in both (1) and (2) then, whichever of the two senses is
meant, one of these premises is question begging. And if it is used in two different
senses then of course the conclusion doesn’t follow (1973, p. 53).
Humanism thus seems to be an interesting thesis only insofar as it is the view that
some non-moral conception of humanity also provides the boundaries of the moral
community. In other words, humanists have to provide compelling reasons to think
that morality is something that concerns only those entities that are biologically
human.
It is in precisely this respect that the structure of personism differs from the
humanist project. After rejecting the notion that the moral community is made up of
all and only human beings, Warren suggests instead that it “consists of all and only
people” and then goes on to ask what “characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a
person” (1973, p. 54). Here, the term ‘person’ is being used to mean “full-fledged
member of the moral community” and the discussion is about what properties or
characteristics justify bringing an entity under that concept. Because the focus is on
properties that can, in principle, be found in a wide variety of entities, it is left somewhat
open precisely which entities will qualify. For any being that satisfies the relevant criteria
will thereby be entitled to personhood, regardless of the biological species to which they
belong.
Of course, it could turn out that an inquiry into the properties that are constitutive of
personhood settles on “member of the biological species Homo sapiens.” That is, there is
nothing inherent in the structure of personism that rules out the possibility that all and only
human beings are persons. Such a view would simply be a kind of humanist personism
which could then come it two distinct varieties. One might think that there is a necessary
connection between the concept of a person and the biological species Homo sapiens and
that it is therefore a necessary truth that all and only members of Homo sapiens are persons.
In Kripkean terms, ‘person’ would be a rigid designator for which “member of Homo
sapiens” would then provide the essence. This would still be a substantive discovery in the
same way that our discovery that H20 is the essence of water is a substantive discovery,
even though both are discoveries of necessary truths.3
Alternatively, one might think that while members of Homo sapiens are the only persons
of whom we are aware, this is a merely contingent fact about our world or the limits of our

3
See Kripke 1980.
Humanizing personhood 425

experience. The former (Kripkean) view would count as a robust humanism because it
would seem to limit the possible scope of the moral community to human beings. The latter
view would justify according a special value to human beings but would not qualify as
humanism because that value would not be a direct result of membership in Homo sapiens.
Rather, it would be that members of Homo sapiens happened to satisfy criteria of
personhood that it is also possible for other entities to satisfy.
Because of the way in which personists typically advance their views, it is usually
assumed that any plausible list of properties that are constitutive of personhood will rule out
a strictly humanist criterion of the sort envisioned by the Kripkean interpretation. Warren’s
list is representative of the kinds of properties that personists cite as being constitutive of
personhood:
(1) consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in
particular the capacity to feel pain;
(2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems);
(3) self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or
direct external control);
(4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of
types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on
indefinitely many possible topics;
(5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both
(1973, p. 55).
Strictly speaking, Warren doesn’t think that an entity has to have all these properties in
order to be a person.4 What is important for my purposes is that however one formulates
such a list, it is unlikely to apply to all humans and might possibly apply to some non-
humans. And even if it somehow turned out that all and only human beings satisfied the
personist criteria, that would be a contingent fact about what sorts of entities happen to
exist, or what sorts of entities we happen to have encountered, not a necessary or
conceptual truth about the relationship between a distinctively moral concern and our
biological species. In what follows, I will therefore assume that personism involves the
denial of the notion that moral concern can, in principle, be confined to members of Homo
sapiens.
One further complication before turning to evaluate the prospects for the humanist
project. As I have thus far presented it, personism and humanism are alternative views of
the boundaries of the moral community. But there is, perhaps, some ambiguity in the notion
of the moral community that makes it unclear exactly what boundaries are being drawn. For
one might take the moral community to be the set of all and only moral agents. As Tom
Regan elaborates the concept, moral agents are “individuals who have a variety of
sophisticated abilities, including in particular the ability to bring impartial moral principles
to bear on the determination of what, all considered, morally ought to be done and, having

4
She writes: “We needn’t suppose that an entity must have all of these attributes to be properly considered a
person; (1) and (2) alone may well be sufficient for personhood, and quite probably (1)–(3) are sufficient.
Neither do we need to insist that any one of these criteria is necessary for personhood, although once again
(1) and (2) look like fairly good candidates for necessary conditions, as does (3), if ‘activity’ is construed so
as to include the activity of reasoning. All we need to claim, to demonstrate that a fetus is not a person is that
any being which satisfies none of (1)–(5) is certainly not a person. I consider this claim to be so obvious that
I think almost anyone who denied it, and claimed that a being which satisfied none of (1)–(5) was a person
all the same, would thereby demonstrate that he had no notion at all of what a person is—perhaps because he
had confused the concept of a person with that of genetic humanity” (1973, pp. 55–6).
426 A. Kadlac

made this determination, to freely choose or fail to choose to act as morality, as they
conceive it, requires” (1983, p. 151). On this view, when we speak of the moral community,
we are speaking of those who are capable of acting morally and immorally—i.e., those
whose behavior can be cogently evaluated by moral standards.
Alternatively, one might think of the moral community as the set of all moral patients,
those who “can be on the receiving end of the right or wrong acts of moral agents” (Regan
1983, p. 154). This set will likely include all moral agents, since most of us think that all
moral agents are also moral patients. But, depending on how one characterizes what it is to
be a moral patient, that concept may also apply to entities that are not moral agents.
Given this conceptual terrain, there seem to be several ways in which the concepts
“person” and “human being” may be thought relevant to the boundaries of the moral
community. The most plausible options seem to be as follows:
(1) The moral community consists of all and only moral agents and all and only persons
are moral agents.
(2) The moral community consists of all and only moral patients and all and only persons
are moral patients.
(3) The moral community consists of all and only moral agents and only human beings
are moral agents (though not all human beings are).
(4) The moral community consists of all and only moral patients and all and only human
beings are moral patients.
(5) The moral community consists of all and only moral patients and all human beings are
moral patients (though some non-human beings are moral patients as well).5
This list assumes that if an entity is a moral agent, then it is also a moral patient.
Moreover, it leaves aside the theoretically cogent option that the moral community
consists of all and only moral agents and that all and only human beings are moral agents.
While humanists may wish to defend a close relative of this position in (3), I know of know
one who thinks that all human beings possess moral agency. One week-old infants are
clearly human beings—in the sense of belonging to Homo sapiens—but are nevertheless
completely incapable of performing actions for which they are morally responsible.
If what I have said thus far is on target, then a plausible humanism will succeed in
defending either (3) or (4). (5) does not seem to count as a robust humanism because it does
not accord a status to human beings that can in principle be denied to other entities. And, as
I have argued, defenses of (1) or (2) which add the proviso that all and only human beings
are persons either lapse into (3) or (4) or highlight a contingent feature of our experience
rather than a conceptual truth about the scope of moral concern.

2 The Humanist Ambitions of Normative Naturalism

A representative statement of the central thesis of normative naturalism is given as follows

by Philippa Foot:
I believe that evaluations of human will and action share a conceptual structure with
evaluations of characteristics and operations of other living things, and can only be
understood in these terms. I want to show moral evil as ‘a kind of natural defect.’ Life

5
(1) seems to be the view of Warren 1973 and, I hazard somewhat more cautiously, both Locke and Kant.(2)
more aptly characterizes the personisms of McMahan 2002; Regan 1983; Singer 1993 and Tooley 1972.
Humanizing personhood 427

will be at the center of my discussion, and the fact that a human action or disposition
is good of its kind will be taken to be simply a fact about a given feature of a certain
kind of living thing (2001, p. 5).
It is in this way that Foot thinks moral judgments share the conceptual structure of our
judgments regarding the proper function, deformity, and defect of non-human life forms. In
the same way that we can be justified in saying that a tiger is defective if it only has three
legs, we are also justified in concluding that a human being is defective if it chooses to rob
a bank.6
There are, of course, differences between these judgments. To begin with, the former
concerns a purely physical feature of an entity’s makeup while the latter concerns an
entity’s behavior. But Foot doesn’t think that judgments of natural defect are illegitimate
simply because they sometimes concern behavior. She says, for example, that “it will surely
not be denied that there is something wrong with a free-riding wolf that feeds but does not
take part in the hunt, as with a member of the species of dancing bees who find a source of
nectar but whose behaviour does not let other bees know of its location” (2001, p. 16). The
wolf that doesn’t help other members of his pack find dinner simply isn’t behaving like
wolves should behave; he isn’t doing what wolves characteristically do or, indeed, what
they need to do in order to survive and flourish as wolves. Thus, the “free-riding individuals
of a species whose members work together are just as defective as those who have defective
hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion” (2001, p. 16).
The particular content of these kinds of judgments is a function of what Michael
Thompson has called Aristotelian categoricals (1995, p. 267).7 The classic example of such
a statement, first noted by Elizabeth Anscombe, is “Human beings have 32 teeth.”8 It is, of
course, not true of every human being that it has 32 teeth; many have less and some,
presumably, have more. Nor is 32 a statistical average of the number of teeth that human
beings have: because the number of humans with less than 32 teeth is greater than the
number of humans that have more, that average will also be lower than 32. Nevertheless,
taken as a remark about a characteristic feature of the human species, the statement is true:
it captures a quality that is possessed by creatures “of this kind.”
It is, then, against the background of Aristotelian categoricals that Foot thinks we make
judgments about the ways in which particular entities are either defective or functioning
properly. We would not, for example, characterize a panda as defective because of its failure
to eat meat. Pandas are vegetarians and any evaluative assessment of the dietary habits of a
particular panda must take this feature of its species into account. Similarly, understanding
the distinctive characteristics of the human species will help fill out our understanding of
their proper functioning and, by implication, the ways in which particular human beings can
be judged defective.
To be sure, the characteristic abilities of humans to use language and reason significantly
complicate any assessment of human flourishing or defect. As Foot notes, “it is important
not to underestimate the degree to which human communication and reasoning change the
scene. The goods that hang on human cooperation, and hang too on such things as respect
for truth, art, and scholarship, are much more diverse and harder to delineate than are
animal goods” (2001, p. 16). Thus, just as we would not judge a panda defective for not

6
In addition to Foot and Michael Thompson, Rosalind Hursthouse seems also to be pursuing the naturalist
project. See Hursthouse 1998, Part Three and Thompson’s own characterization of his project (2004a, p. 58).
7
Thompson elaborates his view of Aristotelian categoricals in Thompson 1995 and Thompson 2004a, Part
One.
8
In Anscombe 1958.
428 A. Kadlac

eating meat, we wouldn’t judge it defective for failing to appreciate Shakespeare. While the
latter is not any part of the good lives available to pandas, it is more plausibly viewed as an
aspect of such lives for humans. The characteristic ability of humans, say, to read and
reflect on literature thus changes the set of judgments to which particular human beings are
subject.
Two features of the naturalist project are or particular significance for the debate
between personists and humanists. The first is that the human beings that are subject to the
kinds of normative judgments at the heart of the naturalist’s account of morality are
members of Homo sapiens as biologists might be inclined to define that species. Thompson
is at pains to make this explicit when he writes:
The idea of the human that these writers propose to make central to ethical theory is
not the abstract idea of a rational being or a person; it is not what Kant meant in
speaking of ‘humanity’. Like human beings, the Martians and other so-called
humanoids of science fiction would be ‘persons’ and ‘rational beings’, for sure, but
they wouldn’t be covered by the concept of a human being that is in question. That
concept expresses something more specific: it would not even cover those so-called
‘twin-humans’ whom philosophers sometimes imagine. These are (on some versions)
creatures exactly similar to us, living on a planet, Twin Earth, which developed
independently of ours, but which nevertheless came to be like Earth in any respect
you care to mention. The twin humans are bearers of a different life form, viz. twin
human, just as the languages they speak are different languages, even if it is part
of the story that they are qualitatively the same as the languages we speak (2004a,
pp. 58–9).
He then concludes:
The concept human as our naturalist employs it is a concept that attaches to a definite
product of nature, one which has arisen on this planet, quite contingently, in the
course of evolutionary history. For our naturalist, this product of nature is in some
sense the theme of ethical theory as we humans would write it (2004a, p. 59).
Humanity, as it figures in normative naturalism, is thus very much a biological phenomenon
and in this respect contrasts sharply with personist approaches.
Second, the content of the normative judgments that are central to our moral
understanding apply only to the creatures identified by the naturalistic employment of the
concept ‘human being.’ Thompson again highlights this feature of the naturalist account
rather clearly:
For a normative naturalist our fundamental practical evaluative knowledge is, as we
have seen, substantive knowledge of what makes for a good will and a good practical
reason in a specifically human being. What would be a virtue in the bearers of
another intelligent life form we don’t know. We have no more insight into what
would count as a ‘reason for action’ among Martians, for example, than we have into
what would make for good eyesight among them, supposing they have eyes. The
mind goes blank at the approach of the question (2004a, p. 60).
On this view, the gap between humans and non-humans is quite wide. It is not merely that
we conclude that the standards of practical reason that apply to human beings do not apply
to non-humans. According to Thompson, the problem is that we cannot even make sense of
what would count as a good exercise of practical reason for creatures that have a natural
history independent of the history shared by Homo sapiens here on Earth. And if that is the
Humanizing personhood 429

case, then insofar as moral thought involves applying standards of behavior to particular
individuals, morality is an exclusively human affair. Moral judgments, as a subset of
judgments regarding the natural flourishing and defect of a single biological species, apply
only to human beings.
Thompson has written extensively to defend this view against what he calls “an
exaggerated empiricism” regarding “our representation and knowledge of the
specifically human life-form” (2004a, p. 47).9 I will not pursue that particular line of
argument here. For even if Thompson is right about the way in which we identify and
understand what is distinctively human, there remains the question of whether he has
sufficiently established that the moral is a subset of the human in the way he suggests.
And here, it seems that whatever its other virtues, normative naturalism is on rather
shakier ground.
The attention of the normative naturalist is on the role played by a creature’s
species in determining the appropriate standards for evaluating the flourishing and
defect of that creature. Though the distinctive capacities of human beings entail that
the content of those evaluations will be rather different than they will be for plants
and non-human animals, the structure of those evaluations is nevertheless the same:
particular entities are judged according to the Aristotelian categoricals furnished by
their species nature.
To say, then, that morality is confined to the realm of the human is to say that the
standards for human life and conduct—the standards by which we determine whether a
particular human being is good or bad—are necessarily species-dependent. And this is why
Thompson concludes that Calliclean or Thrasymachean ideals may very well hold for non-
human life-forms.
Thrasymachus and Callicles, in Plato’s dialogues, argued in different ways that justice
as we ordinarily understand it is mere convention only, and that to take its
considerations seriously is a vice in human beings. The so-called just agent is a
human bonsai, or worse. Anscombe, Hursthouse, and Foot all earnestly deny this,
insisting that it is the unjust agent who is twisted and unsound. But I think they
should grant that those immoralist teachings might be exactly right for our imagined
Martians. Perhaps, that is, our writers should confess to immoralism about the
Martians (2004a, p. 60).
If attributions of flourishing and defect are species-dependent, then there is nothing, in
principle, that rules out the possibility that a hedonistic tyrant of the sort exalted by
Callicles might be the highest expression of some, as yet undiscovered, type of creature. In
that case, what would be a bad and immoral life for humans could be the best sort of life for
an alien species.
Such a line of thought isn’t altogether outrageous. After all, we regularly note that
behavior that is immoral for humans can be perfectly appropriate for certain non-
human animals. A woman who killed and ate her husband would be jailed as a moral
monster. But we level no such assessment at the Black Widow spider. And on the
normative naturalist’s schema for evaluating behavior, recognizing a Calliclean ideal
in some race of Martians need be no more unsettling than the Black Widow. Tyrants
may make for morally repugnant human beings. But they might make fantastic and
praiseworthy Martian rulers.

9
This is the central concern of Thompson 2004a and Thompson further elaborates the a priori and
conceptual nature of such thought in Thompson 2008, Part One.
430 A. Kadlac

On this way of viewing the conceptual terrain, morality can therefore be confined to the
realm of the human because “morality” is just another way to talk about the standards of
human life and conduct. And since all standards of life and conduct are species-dependent,
such an identification is not question-begging. To single out the moral life is just to single
out the good human life from the good lives that are available to other creatures. Or, if one
is uncomfortable equating the good life and the moral life, to single out the moral life is to
single out a part of the good life for humans.
If we then ask how this view fits into the list of personist and humanist positions
outlined above, it seems to constitute support for option (3), the view that the moral
community consists of all and only moral agents and only human beings are moral
agents (though not all human beings are). Morality is a set of ideals of behavior;
behavioral ideals are determined by the species to which a creature belongs; and the
concept of a human being is therefore central to morality because Homo sapiens furnishes
the ideals of behavior for its members. Moral judgments are then judgments of
specifically human flourishing and defect. However, while there may be many ways in
which all human beings can be judged defective—for example, with respect to the
number of fingers or teeth they possess—morality seems to concern an aspect of human
flourishing that involves the will. As Foot says, “to speak of a good person is to speak of
an individual not in respect of his body, or of faculties such as sight an memory, but as
concerns his rational will” (2001, p. 66). And since we don’t think that all human
beings possess a will—very small children, for example—it seems that humanity is
more relevant to evaluating agency than it is to determining which entities are moral
patients.
While the naturalist thesis is at its most powerful as a defense of (3), it is not
implausible to think that a substantive feature of the flourishing of any creature will
involve according some special regard to the members of its own species. For
example, it would be hard to describe, as an instance of human flourishing, a mother
who made no effort to provide for her offspring. ‘The human mother nurtures and
facilitates the development of her children’ is as good a candidate for an Aristotelian
categorical as you might find and thus, while the moral may concern the ideal
flourishing of human agents, being moral may require certain kinds of treatment of
human beings who are not agents. If that is the case, then while normative naturalism
is most directly a defense of (3), it may offer indirect support for the moral
significance of all human beings. If this is not exactly an argument for thesis (4)
above—the notion that the moral community consist of all and only moral patients
and all and only human beings are moral patients—it is in the vicinity.
Whether it is best interpreted as a thesis about moral agents or moral patients, I
think the normative naturalist approach suffers from a more fundamental problem,
namely that it fails to provide sufficient reason for thinking that morality can, in
principle, be confined to human behavior. Even if Aristotelian categoricals provide
interesting standards of flourishing and defect, and even if the content of Aristotelian
categoricals is species-dependent in the way Thompson suggests, it does not follow
that moral norms are necessarily human norms. And if moral norms are not
necessarily human norms, then there would seem to be an important place in our
moral thought for the concept of a person.
Imagine, then, in the fashion of those science fiction inspired thought experiments which
are so common in philosophy, that a group of aliens comes to Earth. However one imagines
these creatures happen to look, we can suppose that they have evolved in complete
independence from Homo sapiens, that they have their own alien history replete with origin
Humanizing personhood 431

myths and stories, and that they have a complex language and culture. Suppose further that
these creatures are entirely peaceful and that they are able to assimilate relatively easily into
human society: their appearance is not off-putting to humans, they can learn our language
(and we theirs), they can hold jobs, go to school, play with our children, and discourse with
us about a variety of different subjects with ever-increasing felicity. In a relatively short
period of time, our two species would have created what seems to be a highly integrated
society.
What should we say about the normative standards governing the relationships among
these different kinds of creatures? According to the normative naturalist, we are faced with
two mutually exclusive sets of Aristotelian categoricals, and as a result, two mutually
exclusive standards of flourishing and defect. Moreover, only one of these—the set
applying to Homo sapiens—would count as distinctively moral. The others would be
normative in their own ways but not, it seems, moral.
However, this does not seem to be an adequate description of the situation. To
begin with, figuring out how to engage our envisioned aliens will not be a
straightforward matter of deciding what we should do to, or with, them. When
considering the relationship between human beings and non-human animals, for example,
Bernard Williams has suggested that human beings will always act as the trustees of non-
human life and that “in relation to them the only moral question for us is how we should
treat them” (2006, p. 141). For while “other animals are good at many things,” they are
not good at asking for or understanding justifications“ (2006, p. 141). But in the scenario
I am envisioning, humans can, ex hypothesi, deliberate with certain non-humans about
what to do and participate with them in all manner of joint pursuits: work, play,
conversation, perhaps even art and literature. That is, we can engage them in ways that
are more or less indistinguishable from the ways we engage other human beings. And if
that is the case, then the structural asymmetry that obtains in our relations to non-human
animals would not obtain in our relations with these alien creatures.10 They would be
perfectly capable of taking up for themselves and asking us to justify our various ways of
relating with them. One would therefore have to justify any privileging of human beings
either on the basis of biological considerations or by making reference to other ways in
which the proposed aliens might be thought deficient. But once the door is opened to this
kind of argumentation, one must then wrestle with the question of whether these
deficiencies are morally relevant.
Put differently, once the aliens and humans begin to engage in deliberation and
reflection about how to co-exist—as well as about what sorts of considerations might
be relevant to justifying their behavior to one another—they would seem to be in
search of the values or reasons which should serve as appropriate standards of
interaction. Given the degree to which the lives of these species have been woven
together, it is unclear why there could not be such values. They might, for example,
agree that killing each other simply to avoid something like public embarrassment
would be wrong. And given their shared economic lives, they might also share ideals
of conduct with respect to property: no stealing, no fraud, no exploitation. And if
these values and standards governed the evaluations that various individuals made of
one another’s behavior, and perhaps were used to justify the legal practices that would

10
Williams frames this issue in his characteristically colorful way when he notes that human beings who
encountered such creatures and “thought that it was just a question of how we should treat them has seriously
underestimated the problem, both ethically and, probably, prudentially” (2006, p. 148).
432 A. Kadlac

inevitably result, they would seem to be values, standards, and ideals that have every
right to be thought of as moral.11
To be sure, there could still be abiding differences in the lives of the species. Perhaps the
aliens would be a relatively docile species—too physically fragile for much vigorous
physical activity. Were that the case, then the kinds of athletic ideals that inform our
understanding of human life would simply not apply. The aliens might enjoy American
football and hockey games, and be amazed at the exploits on the field and ice, without
being able to contemplate pursuing the athletic life for themselves. Similarly, one can
imagine that their independent history might include important cultural rituals that would be
central to their communal life with one another but would have no place in the lives of
humans. However, these differences, though important for the mutual understanding of the
species, would not be morally determinative and would not undermine the possibility of a
broad swath of shared ideals and values—values that would lie at the heart of the lives
humans and aliens came to share.
To think of the imagined scenario in this way is thus to think that morality consists, at
least in part, of an irreducibly relational component and that it cannot therefore be confined
to a set of standards for judging particular instances of Homo sapiens. As T. M. Scanlon has
suggested, morality may not consist solely of “what we owe to each other” but it does not
consist of less than that (1998, pp. 6–7).12 And provided that we can see how the lives of
humans and non-humans might come together in a way that makes cogent the notion of
shared values, ideals, and justifications, it seems perfectly appropriate to extend the moral
beyond the realm of the human.
In creating an integrated and multi-species society, at least some humans and at least
some aliens would have become agents guided by a shared system of values and ideals.
And to the degree that it was thought that additional members of those species should be
treated in certain ways, those members would have become moral patients as well. The
precise extent of agency and patiency is not as crucial, in the context of the debate between
personists and humanists, as the fact that members of both species could be included under
those respective concepts. For if either agency or patiency can be extended to non-humans,
then there would seem to be a legitimate and important place for the concept of a person in
moral thought.
It might be objected at this point that the fanciful, and clearly counterfactual, nature of
the thought experiment undermines its philosophical significance since we have not, as of
yet, encountered creatures that at all resemble those described in the example. Moreover,
while our understanding of the lives of non-human animals continues to deepen, it does not
hold out the ready possibility that non-human animals might someday be integrated into
human society in the way our fictional aliens form a new society with human beings. Thus,

11
Thompson does consider the encounters we might have with other kinds of creatures in Thompson 2004b.
The argument there is dense and complex, but the core seems to be that there is no context sufficient to
ground a shared morality among life-forms that have developed independently. For while life-forms that have
developed independently may participate in practices with identical content, those practices will nevertheless
be distinct. And as distinct practices, it will not be possible for them to share norms that govern them, even if
those norms appear to have the same content. If the scenario I have outlined is possible, then it will represent
a possible counterexample to Thompson’s conclusion. Moreover, he does not seem to me to sufficiently
consider the possibility of creating new practices among various life-forms that would carry with them values
or standards that could likewise be shared.
12
Scanlon’s work thus focuses on the aspect of morality that involves interpersonal relations. A criticism of
those who view morality primarily in terms of our obligations is leveled by Bernard Williams in Williams
1985. I don’t intend to argue here for the inclusion or exclusion of any particular ideals in the realm of the
moral. My point is merely that the moral includes our relationships to others, whatever else it includes.
Humanizing personhood 433

the facts on the ground—facts with which moral theorist should always be concerned—do
not present us with non-human persons that might require us to extend the moral
community beyond Homo sapiens.
In response, it should be noted that I have not attempted to suggest that the moral
community in fact includes any creatures that are not human beings. Indeed, I have not
attempted to suggest that the moral community includes any particular entities at all. The
goal of the foregoing discussion has been merely to probe the concept of the moral
community in a way that shows how that concept might possibly extend beyond Homo
sapiens and in so doing, to highlight the moral significance of the concept of a person as
distinguished from the concept of a human being. It may be, for all I’ve said, that the only
persons who exist are human beings, and that would surely be a significant fact about the
extent of the moral community and the attendant shape of our moral lives in the actual
world.
Moreover, highlighting the moral significance of personhood can have an important
philosophical payoff even if it does not ultimately identify the currently existing moral
community differently than a humanist criteria. For while accounts of the moral community
are no doubt designed to tell us which entities are of moral significance, the most
compelling of such accounts will also deepen our understanding of why such entities have
the particular significance they have. Put differently, the debate between humanists and
personists is not just a debate about where to draw the appropriate moral lines; it is also a
debate about why the lines should be drawn in one way rather than another. Thus, even if it
turns out that the most plausible version of personism includes all and only human beings
in the moral community in the actual world, we will still have gained some insight into the
particular value those species possess. Adjudicating possible moral conflicts might be one
aim of moral theorizing. But deepening the understanding we have of ourselves and our
place in the world is surely an aim that is of equal importance.

3 The Possibility of a Humanist-Inspired Personism

I have argued that normative naturalists have failed to provide a compelling case for
limiting the moral community to Homo sapiens. However, exactly, we are to understand
morality, it seems to be something that we might possibly share in a robust way with non-
humans. And insofar as that is a possibility, then there is an important place in our moral
thought for the concept of a person—a concept demarcating members of the moral
community that does not appeal to species membership.
But how should one then proceed to fill out an adequate conception of personhood? As I
have suggested, philosophers have traditionally attempted to enumerate lists of the
properties that are constitutive of personhood along the lines put forward by Warren.
These criteria in place, determining the extant of the moral community is simply a matter of
seeing which entities possess the relevant properties. That process may be complicated by
conceptual difficulties inherent in the properties themselves. It may, for example, be
difficult to specify precisely what conditions must be met in order for entity to be rational.13
And one may encounter empirical difficulties in determining whether an entity has a given
property, even if the nature of that property can be adequately specified. For example, I
might know what I’m talking about when I’m talking about rationality but may still be in
doubt about whether a particular dog is rational. Regardless of these difficulties, however,

13
This type if difficulty is explored in Dennett 1976.
434 A. Kadlac

the structure of the inquiry is relatively straightforward: identify the criteria and apply those
criteria to putative persons to see if they are satisfied.
However, there seem to be other options for fleshing out the concept of a person, options
that focus less on impersonally identifiable properties of the sort highlighted by Warren and
more on the relational qualities of our interactions with others. For if, as I have argued, it is
the possibility of sharing a certain kind of life with others that is central to our
understanding of the boundaries of the moral community, then perhaps a more focused
examination of that common life is more important for filling out a conception of
personhood than the capacities or properties of creatures viewed in isolation.
The general outline of this approach is stated powerfully by Stephen Mulhall in his
review of Jeff McMahan’s The Ethics of Killing (2002). McMahan’s tract stands squarely in
the personist tradition and while Mulhall’s critique is multi-faceted, his objection to
McMahan’s project centers on the way it abstracts from the particularities of our lived
experience. Commenting on McMahan’s analysis of the real life case of Abigail and
Brittany Hansel—dicephalic twins who are conjoined from the neck down—Mulhall thus
writes:McMahan’s blithe treatment of this ‘case’ fails to appreciate that the nature of their
embodied lives cannot be broken down and distributed between biological union and
psychological distinctness in any straightforward way. If a sense of the separateness of
persons is part of our concept of personhood, and that sense would be radically disrupted in
the case of dicephalic twins, then so would our concept of personhood. Our ordinary
concept of a person has the sense and the significance it has because it is embedded in the
normal circumstances of our embodied lives with others; alter those circumstances, and our
ordinary concept will not simply carry over, and hence its structure cannot be illuminated
by their study (2002).
The assumption of many personists is that if we can identify the properties that are
constitutive of personhood, we will be able to apply these criteria straightforwardly to so-
called tough cases. Once these criteria are applied, we will have the needed metaphysical
basis for a cogent moral judgment about the case in question.
But Mulhall suggests that the expectation of many personists for a clear verdict about
certain cases is undermined by the patent difficulty in rendering our normal judgments.
When, for example, two brains share a body, we are not quite sure what to say about things
that would normally be commonplace: “Neither girl can ever play on her own with other
children, have a happy or tearful private conversation with her mother, retreat to her room
to rage or sulk or think in solitude, or go out alone with a boyfriend” (2002). According to
Mulhall, these are not merely contingent facts about what might result from statistically rare
biological abnormalities. They are the very phenonmena that require us to reconsider what
personhood means for a life-form—Homo sapiens—that has so many different manifes-
tations. While there is, no doubt, a typical range of human development and experience—
intellectual, physical, emotional, social—when the facts on the ground deviate from these
regularities, it simply won’t do to persist in interpreting these facts through an
independently articulated paradigm of personhood. Rather, they are the very facts that
should force us to reconsider our conceptions.
Moreover, approaching personhood as an abstract metaphysical notion that is capable of
deciding tough moral questions ignores the fact that personhood is itself a moral concept, a
concept the content of which must therefore be conditioned by the totality of our moral
lives. Mulhall continues:

It is not as if we develop a concept of a person (say, as a psychologically continuous

entity), and then relate to those we identify as persons in ways we judge appropriate
Humanizing personhood 435

to their metaphysical genus, so that those relations might be evaluated for their
consistency with our independently given nature. Rather, our concept of a person is
constituted by, and finds its life and sense in, the context of the normal forms of our
lives with other persons—with embodied, flesh-and-blood creatures inhabiting
structures of language and culture. And since those lives have a moral dimension,
since their commonality and variety cannot adequately be characterized except in
terms which invite ethical questions and issues (as Abigail’s relations to her sister, her
parents and her children plainly do), the same is true of our concept of a person.
Personhood is not the foundation of an interpersonal ethics; it is itself an ethical
notion. To attempt to analyse it while remaining morally neutral is bound to produce
exactly the air of conceptual mad science found in McMahan’s description of his
Dicephalus case (2002).

Personhood is thus a part of the culturally embedded lives we share with others. And
because moral ideals and values are a central part of those lives—i.e., because our relational
lives are unrecognizable apart from the values that guide and govern them—we distort
personhood into something it is not when we move it out of the very context in which it has
its sense. To do so is like trying to develop an account of art without making reference to
the myriad values that inform artistic practices. We might have some account of certain
physical processes that yield visual or auditory experiences. But we would not thereby have
understood art: the aims of the artist or the means by which those aims might be
accomplished. But the same token, to elaborate personhood without appealing to the values
that are central to our relational lives is to give an account of some physical or metaphysical
truths but not, alas, to give an account of personhood.
Mulhall’s aim in the limited forum of a review is not to offer a fully developed theory of
personhood. Nevertheless, if he is right in turning our attention away from the impersonally
identifiable and morally neutral properties on which personists tend to focus, and toward
the lives we share with others everyday, then I think the framework is in place for a
personism that is nevertheless structured by our characteristic ways of engaging members
of Homo sapiens. The resulting account would still be personist in that it would not, in
principle, limit persons to Homo sapiens. Moreover, it would highlight whatever particular
significance attaches to human beings in ways that could also apply to members of other
species. And yet, approaching personhood in this way would have a thoroughly humanist
flavor because it would proceed by reflecting on the lives that human beings are capable of
sharing, both with one another and with members of other species. We may not be able to
exclude the possibility of non-human persons. But since it is human persons with whom we
are most often and most directly concerned, and since the forms our individual and
communal lives take are most directly impacted by other members of our species, our
understanding of the relevant features of personhood will undoubtedly flow from sustained
reflection on human life. As Mulhall therefore puts it, “our concept of a person is an
outgrowth of our concept of a human being; and that concept is not merely biological but
rather a crystallization of everything we have made of our distinctive species” (2002). A
humanist theory of personhood takes the common life of humans as central and works
outward from there.
One should not underestimate the degree to which this approach thoroughly humanizes
personhood. While it may be a contingent fact that the only persons of whom we are aware
are human beings, it is not a trivial or insignificant fact. The lives of human persons are
very much structured and constrained by features of our species nature. And as a result, the
lives we are capable of sharing with others—the degree to which we are able to integrate
436 A. Kadlac

others into a world that can plausibly be governed by moral considerations—are likewise
governed by features of our respective species natures. Even putting it in terms of “sharing
our common life with others” puts human life at the center of the conversation.
As Williams suggests, this may bring into view qualities that are usually thought by
personists to be morally irrelevant. Thus, consider physical appearance. Williams poses the
following scenario about a possible species of aliens:
The arrivals might be very disgusting indeed: their faces, for instance, if those are
faces, are seething with what seem to be worms, but if we wait long enough to find
out what they are at, we may gather that they are quite benevolent. They just want to
live with us—rather closely with us. What should we make of this proposal? . . . [S]
uppose their aim, in their unaggressive way, is to make the world more, as we would
put it, disgusting? And what if their disgustingness is really, truly, unforgettable?
(2006, p. 149).
An inability to overcome our revulsion at the worms may be an insuperable obstacle to
integrating such aliens into human life and culture. Provided that they have no hostile
intentions, we may be able to treat such creatures well enough. But the kind of coexistence
required to extend personhood to them may be unattainable.
By the same token, we can imagine a race of aliens that looks very much like human
beings but that reproduces asexually. There may be no aesthetic barrier to integration in
such a case. But there may nevertheless be an inability to sympathize with their life
experience that proves to be of equal difficulty to overcome. A life unstructured by the
realities of having both a father and a mother may inhibit the kind of sympathy that often
animates our moral concern for others. “Having a father and a mother” does not typically
fall on the list of properties that are thought to be constitutive of personhood. But given the
way in which that truth about Homo sapiens shapes the trajectory of human life, perhaps it
should.
My aim here is not to argue that any particular species characteristic is relevant or
irrelevant to the potential personhood of its members. Indeed, I am inclined to think that a
determination of those characteristics is largely an empirical matter that requires critical
reflection on the quality of possible relationships, both among members of our own species
and with other life-forms. What I hope to have shown is that while personhood is of central
importance to morality, it by no means follows that being human is morally irrelevant.

Acknowledgements I would very much like to thank Talbot Brewer, Charles Matthewes, and Rebecca
Stangl, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments on this paper. I am also indebted to the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia for their collegial and financial
support.

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