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Part II: Thinking Animals and Personalities

The last issues to be discussed in Part A of this class may be seen by many traditionally minded philosophers as less essential to the issue of person than the ones presented in our class so far. The first issue is whether any animals are persons. This question prompted many discussions in environmental ethics and moral philosophy; indirectly it is also relevant for medical ethics. Now we are able to just scratch the surface of this important problem.⁶

I introduce the second issue due to the confusion of my students in several classes where I taught philosophy of person. In our everyday thinking we do not distinguish clearly enough between two different senses of the term personality. Fortunately the confusion is easily avoidable.

Can animals be persons?

Traditionally philosophers thought that people are persons since they are more rational than animals; the idea was that we can think while animals cannot. However, today this is a controversial proposition. Although some philosophers, prominently Donald Davidson, still believe that there are some important theoretical reasons why the cognitive functions performed by animals cannot be called thinking [see Davidson, Donald: "Thinking Animals"], most philosophers today agree that some animals can perform more advanced cognitive functions than, at least, some retarded human beings. For instance, a chimpanzee can muster over 240 words in sign language, whereas some moderately retarded human beings, some of them able to function in a society, may be unable to learn this number of words. If we were to use solely the criterion of rationality to distinguish persons from non-persons, we would face a dilemma. Either we would have to classify some intelligent animals as persons, or we would need to classify some human beings as non-persons.

Each of these options has some implausible consequences. Many environmentally minded authors want to include animals among persons. This may sound like a good idea if we think about apes, dolphins and some pets, but we encounter a slippery slope here: It is not clear where the argument should stop. If apes were to be seen as persons, why not monkeys? if monkeys too, why not squirrels? or rabbits? or rats? and so on, all the way to the simplest animals? If we accept the conclusion of such a slippery slope argument, this would mean, not only that all animals are persons, but that all of them are persons to the same degree. Alternatively, we would have to speak about higher and lower persons, but this is a dangerous idea. Usually we want to see the concept of persons as an all or nothing concept -- one either is or is not a person. The notion of one being more or less of a person may lead to justifying all kinds of inequalities of treatment of persons, which sounds like a bad philosophical idea (it was last explored seriously by the Nazi's with their idea of them being super-humans). It does not mean philosophy must reject every inequality among persons. We may be inclined to accept various inequalities among people, for instance based on their different talents, or even a lack thereof, but never on the fact that some of us are more persons than others.

The other option, which would tell us not to treat all humans as persons, is also very spurious. It is also prone to a different version of the slippery slope argument; there is no clear cut-off point between persons and non-persons. For instance, if people (and apes) able to use at least 200 words were to be seen as persons, and those unable to do so where not, then a person or an animal able to use 199 words would not qualify. But then it is not clear why this one word would make such a radical difference. And this problem replicates however high or low we set the threshold of being a person.

We will not solve the issue of whether any animals are persons in any plausible way. Many people, both within religious and humanist tradition, want to think about human beings as so special that only they can be attributed with personhood. However, every tradition has its dissenters on this issue. In Christianity Saint Francis of Assisi and some Nordic saints, attributed personhood and many features of the soul, to animals. Also, folk beliefs in many Christian countries refer non-metaphorically to animals as rejoicing and greeting Jesus. This personification of animals is by far more prominent in Buddhism and animist religions.

In our century the most radical defense of the status of animals came from atheist philosophers, usually representing the utilitarian tradition. Remember that for utilitarianism a moral value of certain action depends on the balance of pleasure and pain. A number of utilitarians, prominently Peter Singer, noticed that pleasure and pain which by their standard is the main subject of ethics, does not need to be restricted to human beings. Animals also feel pleasure and pain. Moreover, since Darwin demonstrated that animals are our close cousins (e.g. chimpanzees share 98% of our genotype), we have good reasons to count animal pleasures and pains as morally relevant just as human pleasure and pain are.

To avoid the slippery slope, which is that if we admit some animals as morally relevant we would need to accept them all, it is often argued that, due to less developed nervous system, lower animals may have less capacity to experience pleasure and pain. Therefore considering their feelings, though relevant morally, may count less and less as we descend down the evolutionary chain.

Critics of this position argue that it leads to paradoxes. If the moral value of animals is of the same kind as that of human beings, there would emerge situations in which it would be morally justified to let a human being suffer or die in order to avoid suffering (or produce pleasure) in some animals. This position looks very implausible although this is what many of us do in practice. Prevalence of this position is made clear by the booming market for gourmet foods for pet animals, especially in the US and Western Europe, whereas many people (even those living in the same countries) go undernourished and lack needed medical attention. I raise this point not because I am in a position to claim that this attitude is morally wrong. My aim is rather to point out that those who claim in theory that it is morally wrong to put saving an animal above saving a human being are inconsistent if they do not follow this moral belief in practice.

We shall come back to the issue of the moral value of persons in Part C of this class.

Personalities
Some people identify the concept of person with that of personality. We may, for instance, hear that small children and demented people, not to mention fetuses and humans in a persistent vegetative state, are not persons because they lack their specific personalities.

What is a personality? You sometimes say :This person has a strong personality? or That is an interesting personality? What do you mean by this? We also speak about personality disorders. Finally, we may speak about development of personality. All these sentences involve a certain notion of personality. What is it?

Personality can be defined as a set of qualities that make a person "what he is, as distinct from other persons; distinctive personal or individual character especially of a notable kind" [The Oxford English Dictionary same edition p. 727]. This sense should be distinguished from other historically common uses of this term such as "the quality, character or fact of being a person" [loc. cit.]. In philosophy it is prudent to avoid using the term personality in the latter sense. This is because these two senses are distinct -- one may be a person without having any special or very distinct personality features. The whole excitement about human cloning comes in part from the confusion between these two senses of the term personality. The idea is that if two human beings do not have very distinct and different personalities in the first sense, they may not be distinct personalities in the second sense (which means, they would not be fully persons). But this is confused and confusing. If I have two identical chairs, or nearly identical doublets, or human clones, it does not mean that they become the same objects. Just like different material objects can be of the same type and they are still different tokens, human beings in order to be distinct persons do not need to be distinct types of persons. (In Christian philosophy angels are characterized as persons who are also distinct types. By this definition each angel is a distinct personality and therefore angels could not be cloned; however, at least for the last one thousand years, no respectable Christian philosopher believed that human beings are like angels in this respect). We shall see in part B of this class that the idea to treat people as tokens and not as types, proposed by Aristotle and developed by Aquinas, has not outlived its usefulness.

It seems that the connection between the concept of person and personality goes only one way. Arguably only persons can have personalities. But the claim that every person must have a personality is either false or vacuous. Should it mean that every person must have a distinct, well-developed personality, the claim is false. While some people may fail to develop any personality to speak of, this would not deprive them of their status as persons (though it can make them less interesting persons). Also it is possible, in principle, that two or more persons might develop roughly identical personalities; this would not make deprive them of their status as persons either. On the other hand, should this statement be interpreted in its weak form, it would mean only that every person has some minimal characteristics attributable to her. This claim is vacuous. Every object in the universe has some characteristics, and it explains nothing to say that persons have personal characteristics (just as it would not help our knowledge about dogs to learn that they have doggish characteristics). We learn nothing from this claim in its weak form.

Conclusions
Our discussion strongly indicates that no single definition of persons satisfies all of the most important philosophical intuitions concerning this term. This is why in this class we shall gradually construct a multi-level definition of persons. Such definition belongs to philosophical anthropology (or the philosophy of person). It incorporates physical, mental and social definitions, treating them as aspects of a broader definition of persons. This definition will be presented by the end of Part B. of this class. In Part C we shall use this multi-level definition of persons in order to add to it a normative aspect. Thus we shall achieve a conception of multi-level, normative philosophical anthropology.

It is important to understand clearly the differences and similarities among various concepts of person used in philosophy and still other ones used in law and other domains. Otherwise, in a philosophical discussion, we might think that we disagree on a certain issue in philosophy of persons (for instance whether computers, angels or fetuses are persons) whereas we might be in fact referring to different understandings of persons.

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