Te Awa Tupua: standing granted to an entity satisfying none of the usual criteria.
Moral personhood
The status of being owed moral consideration in one's own right - and the question of what confers it.
- Theme
- Ethics and character
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- 1694
In plain terms
Some things can be wronged and some can only be damaged. Kicking a stone is not a wrong to the stone. Kicking a dog is.
Moral personhood is the name for whatever puts something on the first side of that line. And the difficulty is that every proposed criterion either lets in things we want to exclude or excludes things we want to include.
Rationality excludes infants and people with severe cognitive impairment. Species membership is arbitrary unless something about the species does the work. Sentience includes a great many animals, which most people's practice does not. Potential rationality includes embryos and raises questions nobody wants to open casually.
Which is why this is the concept underneath almost every contested moral question of the last fifty years.
As a philosopher would put it
The standard candidates are rationality, self-consciousness, sentience, having interests, being the subject of a life, and relational or community membership. Each is defended by someone and each has a well-known cost.
The argument from marginal cases is the pivot. If a capacity is what confers status, then humans lacking that capacity lack the status, and humans possessing less of it than some animals have less than those animals. Singer accepts the conclusion and revises the practice; others reject the criterion and appeal to species membership, which Singer calls speciesism and its defenders call a recognition that we are members of a moral community rather than instances of a capacity.
Gradualist accounts hold that status comes in degrees, which fits intuitions about insects and mammals and complicates the notion of rights. Relational accounts, including Ubuntu-derived ones and much feminist work, ground status in relationship and vulnerability rather than in an intrinsic property - which handles the marginal cases and struggles with strangers.
Where you meet it
In March 2017 the New Zealand Parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua Act, which declares the Whanganui River a legal person with all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of one.
The settlement followed the longest-running litigation in the country's history, and the legal form was chosen because it matched the Whanganui iwi's position that the river is an indivisible living whole and an ancestor, not a resource to be allocated. Two guardians act for it, one appointed by the iwi and one by the Crown, and the river can appear in proceedings in its own name.
What makes it philosophically interesting is that it is not a metaphor and not conservation law. A legal system granted standing to an entity that satisfies none of the usual criteria - no sentience, no rationality, no interests in the standard sense - because a relationship to a community was taken to confer it. Courts in India and Colombia have since made comparable orders, and each has had to say what it thinks personhood is for.
What is actually disputed
Whether status is intrinsic or relational.
Intrinsic accounts locate it in a property the being has - sentience, rationality, being the subject of a life - which makes status objective and independent of anyone's attitudes, at the cost of drawing lines that cut through cases everyone treats as settled.
Relational accounts locate it in standing within a moral community, which handles infants, the severely impaired and the dead comfortably and appears to make status depend on recognition - so that a group not recognised would thereby lack it, which is exactly the mechanism by which atrocities have been organised.
Defenders of the relational view reply that recognition is a normative rather than a descriptive matter: the failure to recognise is a failure, not a determination of status. Whether that reply works without smuggling in an intrinsic property is the unresolved point.
Commonly confused with
- legal personhood Companies and rivers have legal personhood. Moral personhood is about being owed consideration, and the two overlap without coinciding.
- being human The whole point of the concept is that the two questions can come apart, which is why it exists.
- having rights Rights are one way of protecting standing. A being can be owed consideration without any rights framework existing.
Defined against
- Objectivity Whether status is a fact about a being or a matter of recognition is precisely a question about how objective the moral landscape is
Philosophers
- John Locke Person separated from human being
- Immanuel Kant Rational nature as the ground of moral standing
- Peter Singer Sentience, and the argument from marginal cases
- Jeremy Bentham The question is not whether they can reason but whether they can suffer
- Achille Mbembe Personhood as relational, and its political denial
Works
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding The separation that opens the question
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Rational nature as an end in itself
- An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation The footnote extending the count to animals
- African Religions and Philosophy Personhood as constituted by community
- The Origins of Totalitarianism What follows when standing is removed
Schools
- British Empiricism Where person becomes a distinct category
- German Idealism Where rational nature confers standing
- Classical Utilitarianism Where sentience does
- Ubuntu Philosophy Where community membership does
- Personalism Where the person is the basic ethical category
Related concepts
Dignity 1785 · Autonomy 1785 · Ubuntu 1969 · Rights 1689 · The Other 1961
Locke's separation of person from human being is the move that makes the question askable; before it, the boundary is set by species and the interesting cases do not arise.