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The Concept of Person and the Normativist Fallacy

One of the longest-lasting debates in social ontology and the ontology of ethics, with allegedly grave consequences for the booming field of bioethics, is the debate over the criteria of personhood. Although typically seen as central and foundational for bioethics, the concept of person has proven hopelessly vague and intangible, resisting a clear-cut definition in terms of necessary and/or sufficient conditions. For some authors, this is an unmistakable sign of its non-empirical, metaphysical foundation. For others, it is a consequence of the concept’s intuitive, folk-psychological origin, explainable by conditions of our evolutionary past – conditions selectively favoring representational systems that classify objects into “persons” and “non-persons”. Now these two interpretations needn’t be seen as mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is ever more evidence that they should be treated as complementary since the philosophical concept of personhood functions as a kind of theoretical proxy of our genetically preprogrammed, automatically executable classificatory practice. This view is backed up by recent findings in the fields of evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience – findings that have led to a postulation of a specialized mechanism in our brain called “person representation network” or the “social brain”. (Farah & Heberlein). The interesting thing about the person recognition mechanism (PRM) is that it is not an exclusively cognitive device. By classifying stimuli as persons the mechanism simultaneously produces implicit “value judgments”, i.e., represents person-like objects as possessing a kind of “moral status”. This insight could be relevant for the personhood debate for the following reason: it is perhaps no surprise that past attempts did not yield a theoretically satisfying concept of person since the criteria specifying such an entity cannot be objectively founded, i.e., independently of the normative import of representations generated by PRM. If this is so, then a kind of “normativist fallacy” seems to be at work whenever we make allegedly factual judgments (e.g. in our folk-psychological behavior explanations) about objects represented as “persons”. I intend to examine the plausibility of this assumption and its possible consequences.

criteria of personhood; evolutionary psychology; cognitive neuroscience; normativist fallacy

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