Abstract

Holding that there is a distinction between persons in the metaphysical sense and persons in the moral sense, I show that the conditions for personhood is inadequate to capture the notion of the person in the moral sense. The proposed conditions for personhood are: consciousness, rationality, self-consciousness, the ability to adopt and reciprocate a personal attitude toward another being, complex communication, self-motivated activity, and free will. ;A person in the metaphysical sense is defined as an intelligent, conscious, feeling agent. The problem I find is that this set of conditions has been taken to be adequate for moral as well as metaphysical personhood. A person in the moral sense is defined as a being with both rights and responsibilities. The question, "What must a being be like to have rights and responsibilities?" is not answered by laying out the above list. If we run through each of the proposed conditions, we find that none point to any connection between possessing the characteristic and being held morally responsible for the actions we commit. ;Even if we consider the sum of all the conditions, we can come up with an individual who possesses each of them and is still not to be considered a moral person. It is the sociopath, one who is self-conscious, rational, free, and so on, but cannot make out the difference between right and wrong, who is unable to understand the concept of doing something because it would be morally right to do it, or not do it because it would be morally wrong; in short, the individual who simply has no idea what those concepts mean and entail. ;It is just here, in my characterization of the sociopath, that I argue for a necessary and sufficient condition for moral personhood, i.e., the moral consciousness lacking in the sociopath. It is argued that no being can be held morally responsible for any action where that being is, in principle, unable to recognize the action as valuable or disvaluable, good or bad, moral or immoral. Moral personhood, then, requires moral consciousness. It is also shown that having moral consciousness entails having many, if not all, of the other conditions for personhood