Personhood
Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a legal person (either a natural or a juridical person) has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.[1]
Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood, and the beginning of human personhood.[2] In the 21st century, corporate personhood is an existing Western concept; granting non-human entities personhood, which has also been referred to a "personhood movement", can bridge Western and Indigenous legal systems.[3]
Processes through which personhood is recognized socially and legally vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood are not universal. Anthropologist Beth Conklin has shown how personhood is tied to social relations among the Wari' people of Rondônia, Brazil.[4] Bruce Knauft's studies of the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea depict a context in which individuals become persons incrementally, again through social relations.[5] Likewise, Jane C. Goodale has also examined the construction of personhood in Papua New Guinea.[6]
Research[edit]
As an application of social psychology and other disciplines, phenomena such as the perception and attribution of personhood have been scientifically studied.[23][24] Typical questions addressed in social psychology are the accuracy of attribution, processes of perception and the formation of bias. Various other scientific and medical disciplines address the myriad of issues in the development of personality.
Unborn[edit]
Ireland[edit]
In 1983, the people of Ireland added the Eighth Amendment to their constitution that "acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right." This was repealed in 2018 by the Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland.
United States[edit]
A person is recognized by law as such, not because they are human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to them. The person is the legal subject or substance of which the rights and duties are attributes. An individual human being considered to be having such attributes is what lawyers call a "natural person".[25] According to Black's Law Dictionary,[26] a person is:
Women[edit]
In the United States, the personhood of women has important legal consequences. Although in 1920 the 19th Amendment guaranteed women in the right to vote, it was not until 1971 that the US Supreme Court ruled in Reed v. Reed[67] that the law cannot discriminate between the sexes because the 14th amendment grants equal protection to all "persons".[68][69] In 2011, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia disputed the conclusion of Reed v. Reed, arguing that women do not have equal protection under the 14th amendment as "persons"[70][71]
because the Constitution's use of the gender-neutral term "Person" means that the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex, but also does not prohibit such discrimination, adding "Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that."[72] Many others, including law professor Jack Balkin disagree with this assertion. Balkin states that, at a minimum "the fourteenth amendment was intended to prohibit some forms of sex discrimination – discrimination in basic civil rights against single women."[73] Many local marriage laws at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified (as well as when the original Constitution was ratified) had concepts of coverture and "head-and-master", which meant that women legally lost rights upon marriage, including rights to ownership of property and other rights of adult participation in the political economy; single women retained these rights, however, and voted in some jurisdictions.
Other commentators have noted that some of the ratifiers of the US Constitution (in 1787) also, in contemporaneous contexts, ratified state level Constitutions that saw women as Persons and required them to be treated as such, including granting women rights such as the right to vote.[74][75] Professor Jane Calvert argues that the 17th and 18th Century Quaker concept of Personhood applied to women, and the prevalence of Quakers in the population of several colonies, such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, at the time that the original Constitution was drafted and ratified likely influenced the choice of the term "Person" for the Constitution instead of the term "Man", which was used in the Declaration of Independence and in the contemporaneously drafted French Constitution of 1791.[76]
The personhood of women also has consequences for the ethics of abortion. For example, in "A Defense of Abortion", Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that one person's right to bodily autonomy trumps another's right to life, and therefore abortion does not violate a fetus's right to life: Instead abortion should be understood as the pregnant women withdrawing her own body from use, which causes the fetus to die.[77]
Questions pertaining to the personhood of women and the personhood of fetuses have legal and ethical consequences for reproductive rights beyond abortion as well. For example, some fetal homicide laws have resulted in jail time for women suspected of drug use during a pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, like one Alabama woman who was sentenced to ten years.[78]
Original peoples[edit]
The legal definition of "person" has excluded indigenous peoples in some countries.
Children[edit]
The legal definition of persons may include or exclude children depending on the context. The US Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 provides a legal structure that those born at any gestational stage that are either breathing, have heartbeat, umbilical cord pulsation, or any voluntary muscle movement are living, individual human persons.[79]
Disabled[edit]
Adults with cognitive disabilities are regularly denied rights generally granted to all adult persons such as the right to marry and consent to sex,[80] and the right to vote. They may also lack legal competence. Philosophical arguments have been made against the cognitively disabled being able to have moral agency.[81] In many countries, including the US, psychiatric illness can be cited to imprison an adult without due process.
Those who become disabled later in life often experience a change in how they are perceived, including others infantilizing them or assuming cognitive disability due to the existence of physical disability.[82] The concept of disability as being worse than death can be seen as a denial of disabled people's personhood, such as when medical professionals suggest euthanasia to non-suicidal disabled patients.[83]
