Persons

1. What is a person?

We can all tell persons apart from other kinds of thing, such as kangaroos, mountain ranges and billiard tables. We are also very good at re-identifying the same person at different times. These are cognitive skills we all possess and exercise effortlessly all the time. So we all know that Madonna is a person but the Empire State Building is not, and the 1990 Governor of Arkansas is the same person as the 1997 US President. But can we say anything at a general or abstract level about the grounds of these uncontroversial truths?

Whatever else might be required to be a person, it seems clear that a person is a mental being. A person is the type of entity that possesses a mind. (The mind does not have always to be conscious: a sleeping or comatose person is still a person.) We can be more specific. Not just any mental being is a person. My cat is a mental being – it can feel pain or hunger, for example – yet it is not a person. So a person is (at least) a being that possesses a particular sort of mind. A person does not just have sensations of pain and pleasure, but also intentional, world-directed, mental states like belief, desire, fear and hope.

Indeed, persons possess a range of particularly sophisticated mental states, including self-reflective mental states. I am capable of having not just the belief that it is raining but also beliefs about myself. These are not just beliefs about someone who happens to be me (as when I think ‘the person born on such-and-such a day is Scottish’, referring to myself but forgetting that I am that person). They are fully self-conscious beliefs about myself, the sort of beliefs I have when I say ‘I remember that it snowed last Christmas’ or ‘I intend to holiday in Fiji when this term is over’. Persons are self-conscious mental beings. This observation is confirmed when we reflect on how much of what matters in our mental life and social interactions presupposes the self-consciousness of ourselves and others.

This view of persons was expounded clearly by John Locke in the seventeenth century (see Locke, J. §8). Locke wrote that a person is ‘a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places’ (1689, 2 (27): 9). In this definition, Locke specifies some of the elements that comprise our concept of self-consciousness. In particular, he cites thinking, intelligence, reason, reflection and the ability to engage in tensed first-person judgements. These features he holds to be constitutive of our concept of a person. We now have the more abstract and general account we were seeking of why Madonna is a person and the Empire State Building is not. In addition, we also have a more abstract and general account of the grounds for our ordinary judgements of personal identity over time. On this view, the reason why the 1990 Governor of Arkansas is the same person as the 1997 US President is because a single stream of consciousness (continuity of character, beliefs intentions and so on) uniquely links the 1990 Governor with the 1997 President (see Personal identity §2).

An important feature of Locke’s account is that his definition of a person in no way presupposes the answer to a more traditional question: namely, to what ontological category do persons belong? That is, are persons immaterial (non-spatial) souls only contingently attached to their bodies (as Plato and Descartes believed)? Are persons wholly material beings? If so, are persons necessarily animals of a certain sort, or might there be robot persons? On Locke’s view, these questions cannot be answered simply by examination of our concept of a person. Reflection on what it is to be a person cannot alone decide the question of whether we are immaterial souls, animals or bionic beings. In order to decide that question we need to investigate ourselves empirically, albeit in a fairly undemanding way. On the strongest version of Locke’s view, not only is it not true a priori that all persons are animals, it is not necessary either. If all persons are human beings, this is just a contingent truth.