Animals aren’t persons, but is it time for a neologism?

It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category of the person is restricted to self-aware creatures: in effect humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I shall argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.

Rowlands argues that animals have implicit pre-reflective awareness and that this is adequate to create the unity of conscious thought required for personhood. For him pre-reflective awareness does not include intentionality and is probably an unconscious process. I suggest that his sense of implicit leads to significant difficulties for his argument and that including intentionality in the definition of a first-person perspective provides a stronger base for viewing animals as persons.

Mark Rowlands's (2016) target article invites us to consider individuals in a broad subset of the non-human animal world as genuine persons. His account features animals reacting to salient environmental stimuli as Gibsonian affordances, which is indicative of " pre-reflective self-awareness. " He holds that such pre-reflective self-awareness is both " immune to error through misidentification " (Shoemaker, 1968) and a necessary precursor to reflective consciousness and personhood. I agree. In this commentary I hope to extend Rowlands's work with a view in which agency is an even more fundamental precursor and one can (and should) consider individuals throughout the entire animal kingdom as agents.

Rowlands applies the two organizing ideas of the Lockean concept of personhood — mental life and unity — to animals as potential persons. Especially valuable in this context is his descriptive phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness as a fundamental form of mental life that necessarily entails unity. Rowland describes certain fundamentals of mental experience that exist across species boundaries, challenging assumptions of early modern philosophers regarding the definition of human personhood and affirming the principle of evolutionary continuity. This opens the door to a broader and deeper set of questions, related to whether we should continue to attempt to apply to other animals — or to ourselves — philosophical models that are ancient and revered but contradicted in significant measure by contemporary scientific findings, especially in evolutionary biology. 1. Philosophical Models of Personhood. Rowlands (2016) begins his target article by noting that concepts of personhood are variously defined as legal, moral, and metaphysical. He addresses the metaphysical specifically as defined by Locke. Pragmatically speaking, the legal case for animal personhood is advancing in the absence of metaphysical foundation — case by case, as the sciences shape our understanding of other animals and as real life situations make moral demands upon us for remediation (Benvenuti, 2016). Rowlands produces a convincing metaphysics of personhood satisfying the requirements of the Western philosophical tradition, particularly as advanced by Locke. We must remain aware of the distinction between satisfying the requirements of Western metaphysics as a human cultural artifact and making a true declaration about reality. The Western philosophical tradition has placed high value on the human capacity for rational abstraction. I (Benvenuti, 2014, 2016) have repeatedly argued that this evaluation of our capacity for rational abstraction — especially as contrasted with affective awareness — lacks merit. Human cognition has

Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Humans are animals; humans are machines. The current academic and popular dialogue on extending the personhood boundary to certain non-human animal species and at the same time to machines/robots reflects a dialectic about how “being human” is defined, about how we perceive our species and ourselves in relation to the environment. While both paths have the potential to improve lives, these improvements differ in substance and in consequence. One route has the potential to broaden the anthropocentric focus within the West and honor interdependence with life systems, while the other affords greater currency to a human-purpose-driven worldview–furthering an unchecked Anthropocene. The broadening of legal personhood rights to life systems is underway with a ruling for dolphins in India, for a river in New Zealand and with Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Many philosophers, ethicists, and ethologists define personhood within the confines of the dominant anthropocentric par...

Environmental Ethics

A common Western assumption is that animals cannot be persons. Even in animal ethics, the concept of personhood is often avoided. At the same time, many in cognitive ethology argue that animals do have minds, and that animal ethics presents convincing arguments supporting the individual value of animals. Although "animal personhood" may seem to be an absurd notion, more attention needs to placed on the reasons why animals can or cannot be included in the category of persons. Of three different approaches to personhood-the perfectionist approach, the humanistic approach, and the interactive approach-the third approach is the strongest. Personhood defined via interaction opens new doors for animal ethics.

Can Animals be Persons?, 2019

This is the penultimate version of the opening chapter of my book Can Animals Be Persons? (New York: Oxford University Press, May 2019).

2014

Humans are animals; humans are machines. The current academic and popular dialogue on extending the personhood boundary to certain non-human animal species and at the same time to machines/robots reflects a dialectic about how “being human” is defined, about how we perceive our species and ourselves in relation to the environment. While both paths have the potential to improve lives, these improvements differ in substance and in consequence. One route has the potential to broaden the anthropocentric focus within the West and honor interdependence with life systems, while the other affords greater currency to a human-purpose-driven worldview–furthering an unchecked Anthropocene. The broadening of legal personhood rights to life systems is underway with a ruling for dolphins in India, for a river in New Zealand and with Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Many philosophers, ethicists, and ethologists define personhood within the confines of the dominant anthropocentric para...

In this paper I will argue for a third way beyond animalism and constitutionalism regarding the identity of persons. In doing so, I will use a concept of a personal life form that avoids the problems of both theories and mediates between animalism and constitutionalism. The question of whether we are essentially persons or animals will thus prove to be incorrect: We are living beings as persons (against constitutionalism), but we are different from other living beings regarding the form of our lives (against animalism).

Humans are animals; humans are machines. The current academic and popular dialogue on extending the personhood boundary to certain non-human animal species and at the same time to machines/robots reflects a dialectic about how “being human” is defined, about how we perceive our species and ourselves in relation to the environment. While both paths have the potential to improve lives, these improvements differ in substance and in consequence. One route has the potential to broaden the anthropocentric focus within the West and honor interdependence with life systems, while the other affords greater currency to a human-purpose-driven worldview–furthering an unchecked Anthropocene. The broadening of legal personhood rights to life systems is underway with a ruling for dolphins in India, for a river in New Zealand and with Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. Many philosophers, ethicists, and ethologists define personhood within the confines of the dominant anthropocentric paradigm, yet alternate eco-centric paradigms offer an inclusive model that may help dismantle the artificial wall between humans and nature. In this paper, I explore these eco-centric paradigms and the implications of an associated worldview for human perceptions, self-awareness, communication, narrative, and research.