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XiphosAletheria t1_j5qmvnv wrote

Reply to comment by Ill_Department_2055 in On Whether “Personhood” is a Normative or Descriptive Concept by ADefiniteDescription

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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