What is a person?

• Verfasst von: Jecker, Nancy S. [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Atuire, Caesar A. [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: What is a person?
• Titelzusatz: untapped insights from Africa
• Verf.angabe: Nancy S. Jecker, Caesar A. Atuire
• Verlagsort: New York, NY
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• E-Jahr: 2024
• Jahr: [2024]
• Umfang: 1 online resource.
• Gesamttitel/Reihe: Philosophy across borders
• Gesamttitel/Reihe: Oxford scholarship online
• Fussnoten: Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on September 11, 2024)
• ISBN: 978-0-19-769095-6
• DOI: doi:10.1093/oso/9780197690925.001.0001
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Erscheint auch als : Druck-Ausgabe
• Sach-SW: Philosophy
• Sach-SW: Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge
• K10plus-PPN: 1925302466
• K10plus-PPN:
  Universitätsbibliothek
• Lokale URL UB: Zum Volltext

Abstract

This text introduces a provocative new view of personhood that philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire call Emergent Personhood. It builds on philosophies from Africa and the West to argue that individuals' moral worth emerges through ocial relational processes with other human beings. The authors show the implications of Emergent Personhood for human beings across the lifespan, animals, nature, and non-living lands, soil, and rocks on earth and in space. The book considers the possibility of ascribing moral standing to machines, including large language models and social robots. Jecker and Atuire's collaboration represents the first-time philosophers from Africa and the West have joined forces to consider personhood. Their new philosophy of persons combines strengths of African and Western thought.

Abstract

"Stepping back from the above analysis, it is helpful to ask whether the shift to a more individualistic conception of persons carries traction for those who do not share its religious underpinnings. Judeo-Christian personhood was grounded on the idea that all and only human beings are made in the image of God (imago dei); for contemporary secular philosophers, there seems to be no corollary justification for claiming that all and only human beings qualify as persons. Some contemporary Christians, such as Noonan, have sought to defend an exclusive moral status for human beings by arguing that possessing the human genetic code affords the secular underpinnings for such a position. Yet, this proposal was eventually rebuffed as 'speciesist.' 'Speciesism,' a term coined in the 1970s by Ryder and popularized by Singer, is the position that assigning moral standing on the basis of species membership is morally arbitrary"--