Why do we have trouble defining what a "person" is? The answer may lie in human evolutionary antiquity.
Recent efforts by radical pro-life conservatives to establish a definition of personhood that specifically includes the embryo at the moment of conception have failed both in at least three ways. First, they have been rejected by voters in Colorado (twice) and Mississippi. Second, they have failed to win the hearts and minds of most cultural conservatives themselves, with even respected leaders like outgoing Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour withholding an enthusiastic endorsement. Third, moderate voters worried about the implications for contraception and fertility treatments. The Mississippi initiative defined a person as "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof."
The ambiguous language of "humans", "human beings" and "persons" is too rarely noticed as a key factor in the ways that people talk past each other. Progressives might blanch at the intuitive implications of calling a human embryo a human being, but (as a leading conservative intellectual pointed out to me years ago), it is surely not a non-human being. Conversely, conservatives worry about the arbitrariness of "person" or "personhood" that could result in dehumanizing those with impaired cognition (like Terri Schiavo), or those who don't measure up based on some racial or other social prejudice, or of course embryos. For them the term might also be too inclusive, as it might apply to our higher primate relatives or perhaps someday to super-intelligent machines with self-awareness.
Is the idea of personhood like pornography? Do we know it when we see it? As the neuroscientists Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein put it in a 2007 paper, "personhood is a concept that everyone feels they understand but no one can satisfactorily define."
Farah and Heberlein note that there is evidence our brains are "hard-wired" to distinguish between persons and non-persons. They cite a rare condition called prosopagnosia. People with this disorder cannot recognize a human face, yet some of them can still recognize an animal face. Brain imaging has even given evidence that there is a specific brain region, called the fusiform gyrus, for human face recognition. Other experiments show that the sight of human bodies themselves, even with the faces obscured, is associated with the activation of the fusiform gyrus and another brain region. Another brain area is active when actions are perceived to be intentional and still another when we just think about someone else's mental state; in other words, when we think about someone else thinking.
So it seems evolution has set us up to see the world as divided between persons and non-persons. But here's the problem: we evolved in a world in which we rarely encountered ambiguous cases. As Farah and Heberlein wrote in 2007, during 200,000 years of hunting and gathering, "Sonograms did not show us our fetuses; people did not live long enough to develop Alzheimer's disease, and vegetative states were fatal. " They continue:
It is interesting that infants and young children may be the one class of ambiguous cases that our ancestors did encounter on a regular basis, and for these cases it would be adaptive to attribute personhood even in the absence of intelligence and self-awareness. Protohumans who accurately judged their offspring to be lacking in the various traits associated with personhood and accordingly treated them as non-persons would not have many surviving descendents!
It seems that the neuroscientific and evolutionary evidence for a hard-wired but increasingly dysfunctional idea of personhood is compelling (and of course one can accept the neuroscience data without accepting the evolutionary explanation).
In The Body Politic I argue that this kind of disconcerting boundary-erasure is one of the reasons that the new biology, including neuroscience, has stimulated a new biopolitical era. The advocacy group Personhood USA is not giving up, with efforts like the failed Colorado and Mississippi ongoing in other states. And presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has reportedly advocated a federal law that would define a person as present at conception. Although Personhood USA blames Planned Parenthood and the radical left for its defeats, the fact is that the vast majority of voters in a culturally conservative Southern state rejected their campaign.
The possibility that people are giving the matter deeper thought than simply following a convenient ideological line is encouraging. The problem of personhood is even deeper than gaining agreement about the beginning of life. The challenge it presents is the beginning of wisdom, one for which evolution has, we may hope, also prepared us.
Follow Jonathan D. Moreno on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pennprof
perhaps the whole "person" definition issue is a bit of a sideshow.
The opposition of many of the Christian denominations comes as much from the old-fashioned belief that sex, in particular when procreation is not the object, is a 'sin' as it does from the belief that "all human life" is sacred. This is also their real reason for opposing contraception.
Such old fashioned views have no place in the laws of a secular society, and have even less of a place in dictating the foreign aid programmes of said societies.
This is not so much "should abortion be allowed?" as "when should abortion be allowed?"
I don't see any reasonable argument against abortion in cases where carrying the foetus will be detrimental to the health of the 'mother', nor in cases where the pregnancy is the result of sexual violence -such as rape.
There are other cases, however where things are not so clear cut - for example should abortion be allowed in cases where the child has a disability?? is so which disabilities are acceptable?? what about if the child is the "wrong" sex? has the 'wrong' hair/eye colour????
My exercise here is not simply one of trolling - as I see it a distinction should be made between the banning of abortion outright, and the (for want of a better word) regulation of abortion.
• Biology is irrelevant to the concept of a person. Xian pro-birth (not pro-life) ideology is a faith-based political dogma claiming control over women and children. Male supremacy is a Big Lie not a supernatural value.
• A person exists only in an artificial environment, a culture that mediates all contact with the natural world and other persons. A human being *becomes* a person when a culture bestows membership on someone formerly outside the group.
Zygotes are not persons. Abortions are not murder. Culturally accepted (and medically safe) birth control and induced abortion will continue despite attempts to prohibit them by theocrats.
• No one has yet encountered a non-human animal, an artificial life form, an extra-terrestrial being, or a god “who” from a distinctly non-human cultural perspective could engage with our culture as an object of interest, concern, or reciprocal communication -- involving use of an abstract reality like language or mathematics.
ET and Mr. Data, "God” and BofA are non-human, but they are persons.
• Every rational viewpoint, especially women’s, in a secular and open society must be represented in alterations to public policy refining the concept of a person and the more narrow legal concept of a person.
the anti_supernaturalist
Footnote to fundies -- your "God" was never a zygote. And, “Jesus” is an even more perplexing case.
Will a dead embryo go to heaven? Will it stay an embryo forever in heaven and praise the lord?
It's a lot easier to believe in an idea than to carry a fetus to term. Whose beliefs should come first when a society is evenly split?