City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Persons as Self-consciously Concerned Beings Benjamin Abelson Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/824 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] PERSONS AS SELF-CONSCIOUSLY CONCERNED BEINGS by BENJAMIN ABELSON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 i © 2015 BENJAMIN ABELSON All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Graham Priest May 18th, 2015 ____________________ Chair of Examining Committee John Greenwood May 18th, 2015 _____________________ Executive Officer John Greenwood Linda Alcoff Jesse Prinz Marya Schechtman Supervisory Committee iii Abstract PERSONS AS SELF-CONSCIOUSLY CONCERNED BEINGS by BENJAMIN ABELSON Advisor: Professor John D. Greenwood This dissertation is an analysis of the concept of a person. According to this analysis, persons are beings capable of being responsible for their actions, which requires possession of the capacities for self- consciousness, in the sense of critical awareness of one’s first-order desires and beliefs and concern, meaning emotional investment in the satisfaction of one’s desires and truth of one’s beliefs. The persistence of a person over time requires uninterrupted maintenance of those capacities. This view is in conflict with the more popular account of persistence in terms of the continuity of distinctive psychological states. Furthermore, this account of personhood has the consequence that contrary to most alternative conceptions, the possession of rights to life and good treatment and the concern for others are neither necessary nor sufficient for being a person. In chapter one I explain and argue for my account of personhood in terms of self-consciousness and concern, illustrating that a being lacking either capacity would not be capable of responsible action and therefore would not be a person. In chapter two I argue for the claim that the persistence of a person requires only that those capacities are maintained uninterruptedly. Chapter three concerns the ontology of persons. There I argue for a Reductionist view of persons and defuse the objection that such a view necessarily slides into Eliminativism. In chapter four I draw a distinction between the concepts of ‘person’ and ‘self,’ arguing that the latter is not unique to persons and is best understood in neuro-cognitive terms. The fifth and final chapter deals with the implications of my account of personhood for ethics, as regards rights and concern for others. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation is dedicated to Raziel Abelson and Marie-Louise Friquegnon, who are my wonderful parents as well as masterful philosophers. I hope to have absorbed some small portion of the tremendous wisdom they have endeavored to impart to me throughout my life. I am extremely grateful for my supervisor, John Greenwood, without whom I could not imagine having put this thing together. Nor can I imagine having a more patient, encouraging and challenging guide for the journey. I am also very grateful for the rest of my committee: Linda Alcoff, Graham Priest, Jesse Prinz, and Marya Schechtman for being with me every step of the process, providing me with invaluable feedback on various drafts of the project. I am also greatly indebted to Christa Davis Acampora and David Rosenthal, the two philosophers who had the greatest influence on my thinking in my undergraduate and graduate studies, respectively. I am doubly thankful for my amazing girlfriend Ana Talushllari, not only for her being unbelievably loving and supportive, but also for contributing to the project by sharing her rich knowledge of animal behavior and cognitive ethology, providing me with cutting edge research in those areas, and for lending her graphic design talents to the construction of Figure 1, which appears on page 211 in chapter four. And a very special thanks to our uncanny cats Bisou and Casanova, who were a constant source of inspiration as well as live-in case studies for how fascinating, intelligent, and worthy of our concern non-persons can be, and to Ana’s parents Drita and Veri who were immensely accommodating and tolerant of my presence in their home while I wrote the vast majority of this work. Special thanks go to my older siblings, Gabriel and Maris, who have been fantastic exemplars of how not only to be a good person, but a cool one as well. And also to my nephews and niece: Bodhi, Harry and Samantha, who are my favorite developing persons in the whole world. Huge thanks to the following persons for reading and commenting on substantial portions of this work or otherwise influencing it enormously: Robert Black, Jonah Goldwater, Jessica Gordon- Roth, David Nagy, Nickolas Pappas, Arina Pismenny, and Richard Sorabji Thanks to these persons, who impacted the project in various ways: Mark Alfano, Sophia Bishop, Charlene Blades, Frank Boardman, Brian Bollard, Richard Brown, Gregg Caruso, Ross Colebrook, Carl Craver, Bryan Danielson, Abraham Dickey III, James Dow, Cory Evans, Leonard Finkelman, William Fisk, Charles Goodman, Javier Gomez-Lavin, Richard Hanley, Katherine Hartling, Alan Hausman, Hyun Hochsmann, Eva Kittay, Thomas Kivatinos, Michael Levin, Eric Mandelbaum, Pete Mandik, Florence Nasar, Shaun Nichols, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Rick Repetti, John Richardson, Angelika Seidel, Elisabetta Sirgiovanni, Henry Shevlin, Leana Shugol, Sandeep Sreekumar, Thomas Teufel, Peter Unger, Denise Vigani, Alexis Vigo, and Thomas Whitney. v Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 Chapter One: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Personhood Page 32 Chapter Two: The Persistence of Persons Page 83 Chapter Three: The Ontology of Persons Page 154 Chapter Four: Self and Person Page 191 Chapter Five: Metaphysical and Moral Personhood Page 226 Bibliography Page 269 vi Introduction I. What is a Person? The question “What is a person?” might ring oddly in ears unfamiliar with the philosophical debates surrounding it. Someone who poses such a query is likely to receive a reaction of puzzlement or even ridicule. Among the more helpful responses to it is the counter-question, “Isn’t a person just a human being?” This is helpful because the philosopher asks the former question only when he or she has in mind a distinction between the concept of a person and that of a human being. To illustrate this distinction, the philosopher is likely to mention fetuses or individuals in irreversible vegetative comas, as examples of humans that are non-persons on the one hand, and intelligent space aliens, artificial intelligences, or superevolved non-human animals, as examples of non-human persons, on the other. The first hand holds examples of genetically human creatures that don’t seem to meet the criteria for personhood and the second hand holds examples of non-humans who do seem to be persons. Now the original question can be recast in light of these examples: What do the human non-persons lack and the non-human persons have in common that is essential to being a person? This question might sound a bit less odd to the layperson, particularly if he or she has had any exposure to science fiction or the more publicly represented bioethical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights, or legal issues concerning the status of corporations. Often one speaks of the qualities of ‘humanity’ when one really has in mind features that could be possessed by something that is not genetically homo sapiens. The assignment of ‘human’ to the biological species concept and ‘person’ to the more abstract metaphysical notion is a matter of philosophical convention, but there 1 is a conceptual distinction to be drawn that is not a matter of convention but represents a genuine difference in meaning between biologically specific humans and trans- specific persons. Thereby, I follow the philosophical tradition in stipulating that in the context of this study, ‘human’ denotes belonging to the biological species homo-sapiens and ‘person’ denotes belonging to the trans-specific class. For thinkers at the dawn of modern philosophy and science, particularly substance dualists such as Rene Descartes, Joseph Butler (1736), and Thomas Reid (1785), personhood was understood as depending on the possession of an immaterial, immortal soul. Persons were thought to be the unique possessors of minds, free will, and morality. According to Descartes, human beings are the only creatures to possess those characteristics (though he didn’t use the term ‘person’), by virtue of having a soul that is separate from their physical or mental components and properties, standing behind those components and properties, and evidenced by their unique capacity for language. He regarded all non-human creatures as mere mechanisms, without thought, will, or feeling. For him, only human beings oversee their own bodily mechanisms from the executive seat of the soul. The strict duality between soul-possessing persons and mechanical non-persons has since been rejected by most philosophers, and the notion of a separate soul with a causally undetermined will has been largely abandoned by philosophers with naturalistic inclinations. Even without such jettisoning, John Locke (1690), as a kind of proto-functionalist, saw that it didn’t matter what sort of stuff a being was composed of, but rather how that stuff was organized and what it could do. For a 2 non-physical substance to constitute a personal soul it would have to have the capacities constitutive of personhood.