June 13: Are Animals People?

What Defines a Person?

Today in class we collaboratively came up with a list of characteristics that makes something a person based off of how we define ourselves as people. In order to be a person, something must have some form of sentience, have reason, have the capacity to communicate, have emotions, and have some form of morals. By this definition, more things than just humans can be people; however, even some humans don't meet all these criteria, such as babies and people with cognitive disabilities. This definition of personhood brings up a couple of questions:

Do the rights of persons outweigh those of non-persons in every case?

If you do not meet all the criteria for personhood, does that mean you are not a person?

In relation to the first question, the example of animal abuse is a case where the rights of a typical non-person would morally outweigh the rights of the person doing the harm; however, by this new definition of a person, many animals would also be considered people, which changes the nature of this example to 'whose rights are more important'. In this case, it would be the person whose rights are being infringed upon, even if the other person's rights give it the freedom to infringe upon them.

In the second question, I believe that something can be a person even when it doesn't meet the criteria of a person if the rest of the subject's kind is supposed to be a person, or, in simpler terms, if it has the capacity to gain these criteria. Babies are an example. They do not come out of the womb with a moral compass or self-awareness, but because they can develop these things they age and gain experience, they are still people. However, the eventual development of all these criteria is necessary to gain full personhood.