komponisto comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PhilGoetz 20 March 2009 08:33PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (33)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: komponisto 21 March 2009 03:26:58AM 4 points [-]

Do you think that personhood is really an 'empirical fact'?

I wouldn't claim that current science easily resolves all questions about personhood; but it does locate the phenomenon within the brain as opposed to anywhere else. Neurons (or, more broadly, things with a similar function) are a necessary condition that may or may not be sufficient. The extent to which a fetus, toddler, or Alzheimer's patient possesses personhood may be legitimately debatable -- but the question of whether or not an embryo is a person is surely settled: it isn't.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 21 March 2009 07:40:15AM 1 point [-]

I think you have a different concept of 'person' in mind than needed. We can define 'person' as "that which can think, reason, and has personality" or something similar (this is roughly what I think you mean by 'person'), but that isn't really relevant to the question. Like Carl said, we are looking for a value laden definition here - something to tell us whether we should use those embryos or not.

Honestly, all of this definition nonsense is misleading. We don't really care about the definition of 'person.' What we want is to sort out our values. Embryo's certainly aren't in my utility function, and that's all that matters. Defining 'person' is superfluous.