moral personhood; the second about its structure; and the third about its basis.

To address these
questions, we shall, in the following sections, examine the minimum definition of moral personhood in
terms of possession of moral rights, the division of moral persons into moral agents and moral patients,
and the claims of the different theories of personhood. Moral Persons and Rights Moral persons are
beings or entities having moral status or standing. Being so, they are the appropriate objects of moral
concern. That is, they are the kind of entities or beings we ought to be concerned about with regard to
whether the actions that they do or the actions done to them are morally good or bad. But what is it
with moral persons that makes them objects of moral concern? Or what does being a moral person
entail such that it is an object of moral concern? In consideration of the fact that there are non moral
kinds of persons, like the legal ones (such as the corporations), a prior question is, what does it mean to
be a person? One standard way of defining personhood is in terms of possession of rights: to be a
person is to be a bearer of rights. A legal person, in this sense, is one who possesses legal rights. And
applying this to moral personhood, moral persons are those who possess moral rights. Consequently, it
is their possession of moral rights that makes moral persons objects of moral concern. It is, however,
important to note that the possession of moral rights is merely the minimum definition of moral
personhood; for, as we shall later on elaborate, there are moral persons who, in addition to having
moral rights, also have moral duties or obligations. In what follows, let us then elaborate on what moral
rights are. Let us begin by clarifying what rights are in general, after which let us look into the various
kinds of rights to see the unique features of moral rights.