More on Personhood

With permission, I am posting an interesting exchange on personhood (see below) between Professor Larry Solum and Chris Green, a philosopher at Notre Dame:

Green to Solum:  Your discussion of moral personhood does not explain what relationship a being must have to intelligence, autonomy, communication, and self-awareness to be a moral person.  Dreamlessly-sleeping people or the reversibly comatose are certainly moral persons, but aren't presently exhibiting any of them.  A duplicate of a dreamlessly-sleeping person hasn't ever exhibited any of them, but would certainly be a moral person too, I think.  You have to go to capacity, or potency, or some other notion in that neighborhood to explain these sorts of cases, and if you do, it seems to me the human fetus will likely get included too.

Solum to Green:  I take the point--wonderfully concise in expression, too.  I wonder about the duplicate of dreamlessly sleeping person example.  Suppose the duplicate pops into existence & snoozes for a while & then pops out.  Is it clear that there was a moral person?  I'm not sure I have any strong intuitions about that case--it is so odd.  As is your duplicate case.  Fetuses lack the capacity for the marks of personhood but have the potentiality--isn't that what makes the case hard?

Green to Solum:  I would have pretty clear that the duplicate coming into and out of existence would be a moral person whose loss should be mourned; it seems to me that whether a being is a person at a time should depend only on the facts pertaining to the being's state at that time, so I have pretty clear intuitions that the duplicate is as much a person as the original.  I'm not sure what the difference is between a capacity and a potentiality; a potentiality just seems like a relatively long-range capacity, and someone in a long-term coma could be just as far away from exhibiting the criteria.

Solum to Green:  Again, wonderful points.  As to the duplicate who winks in and out, I notice that you say "should be mourned," but not, I think, "would be mourned."  I suspect you would agree that such entities would not be warned.  If there were very many of them, I would doubt that we even should mourn them.  It is far from clearl to me that such transient entities with the never realized capacity for functioning as persons would have the same moral status as those who have so functioned.  Is potentiality the same as capacity?  This one seems clear.  No, these are two different concepts.  It is possible to blur them--as it is possible to blur many concepts--by creating intermediate cases and pointing to the line drawing problem, but I am always suspicious of this move, which can be used to erase many important moral distinctions.

Rick