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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5pqmp6 wrote

Reply to comment by token-black-dude in On Whether “Personhood” is a Normative or Descriptive Concept by ADefiniteDescription

What is so special about homo sapiens then? We're just one kind of animal among many. So in order to say we're special, you'd better have some solid reasoning other than "but we're hUmAN!"

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Mustelafan t1_j5pyvg7 wrote

Most people would point to the great 'achievements' of the human race in fields such as philosophy, architecture, astrophysics, aeronautics etc.

...But then you have to wonder what justifies the supposed superiority of the 98% of humans that have made no such great achievements.

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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5q0qfz wrote

Exactly.

To draw a circle that includes all of the humans we would like to include as persons (children, elderly, average citizens, people with varying degrees of mental disabilities), it becomes unavoidable to include many animals in that same circle.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5qmvnv wrote

I mean, only homo sapiens would be capable of formulating your question, or of providing an answer to it, which is the answer in and of itself

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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5qtgl1 wrote

Only some homo sapiens. And certainly not all the homo sapiens we would want to include under the category of persons. So the definition of a person needs to be a different one.

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MouseBean t1_j5rby5r wrote

Yes, the definition should be expansive enough to include rivers and mountains and individual viruses and whole herds of deer.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5s3kyx wrote

I don't know that it does, really. We include certain groups of humans that that doesn't apply to - namely very young children and the mentally deficient - largely because they tend to matter very greatly to one or more people to whom it does apply.

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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5tq2jm wrote

You don't think disabled people and children are inherently valuable/have personhood?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5uwxnh wrote

No, of course not. I don't believe the idea of an inherent value is even coherent. Everything is always valuable to someone for some reason. You can't grind something up and extract x grams of value from it - it's not some objective physical property of a thing.

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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5v4ifu wrote

>You can't grind something up and extract x grams of value from it - it's not some objective physical property of a thing.

This is a strange analogy. There are many objective things in the universe that don't have mass.

>Everything is always valuable to someone for some reason.

I don't see how relational value would work without the anchoring of inherent value. In other words: if the valuer doesn't matter, why would his or her valuing matter?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5vf827 wrote

>I don't see how relational value would work without the anchoring of inherent value. In other words: if the valuer doesn't matter, why would his or her valuing matter?

To whom? And for what? Your valuing of things might well not matter at all to someone else.

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