Friendship,bitching, and the making of ethical selves: what it means to be a good friend among girls in a London school

This article explores the relationship between friendship, personhood, and ethics among girls in a London school. While a Western ideal of friendship is posited as a personal, private, and spontaneous relationship between autonomous individuals, I argue that girls’ friendships are a complex entanglement and interaction between forensic and mimetic dimensions of the self. Girls’ ideals of friendship, and practices of making friends, suggest forensic pre‐constituted selves acting with volition in order to become closer to other selves. However, bitching, exclusion, and breaking friendships foreground mimetic dimensions as girls shape each other and themselves according to gendered ethical criteria. Examining these analytical strands offers insight into how individuality is produced through sociality in everyday life.     

At the Margins of Moral Personhood

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR.     

A critique of the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’, grounded in African thought

I give an account how the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’ dominates the field of bioethics, and how it came to triumph over its competitors, ‘respect for persons’ and ‘respect for free power of choice’. I argue that ‘respect for autonomy’ is unsatisfactory as a basic principle of bioethics because it is grounded in too individualistic a worldview, citing concerns of African theorists and other communitarians who claim that the principle fails to acknowledge the fundamental importance of understanding persons within the nexus of their communal relationships. I defend the claim that ‘respect for persons’ is a more appropriate principle, as it is able to acknowledge both individual decision making and the essential relationality of persons. I acknowledge that my preference for ‘respect for persons’ is problematic because of the important debate around the definition of ‘personhood’ in bioethics discourse. Relying on Thaddeus Metz's conception of moral status, I propose a relational definition of personhood that distinguishes between persons with agency and persons without agency, arguing that we have different moral obligations to these distinct categories of persons. I claim that this conception of personhood is better able to accommodate our moral intuitions than conventional approaches, and that it is able to do so without being speciesist or question‐begging.     

IMMORTALITY, HUMAN NATURE, THE VALUE OF LIFE AND THE VALUE OF LIFE EXTENSION

The emerging discourse concerning the desirability of intervention in senescence to achieve radical life extension for persons has featured some striking blurring in traditional liberal and conservative commitments and positions. This affords an opportunity for re‐evaluation of these same. The canonical conservative view of the intrinsic value of life is re‐examined and found primarily to involve a denial of human prerogative, rather than an active underwriting of the value of life extension. A critique is offered of an attempted argument against aging intervention from a proto‐conservative worry about a purported threat to human nature. Immortality is found to be a red herring, but a revealing one. Further, the classic liberal view is examined and found wanting in terms of the gravity of its own commitment to, and fullness of its account of the value of life, and the value of life extension. An analysis of the liberal conception of personhood is proposed that both defines persons necessarily as processes, and demonstrates the inalienable quality of the value of life extension to persons so defined.     

A reply to Michael Coughlan

Ford's book on the question of when human personhood begins, When Did I Begin? Conception of the Human Individual in History, Philosophy and Science (Cambridge University Press; 1988), is reviewed by Michael J. Coughlan in this issue of Bioethics. Here Ford responds to Coughlan's review, focusing on three topics: the importance of rationality for personhood, how far back one can trace the ontological identity of what is indisputably a human individual and human person, and the difference between the awareness of the reality of human persons and the varying degrees of perception of their value in the family and society.     

Postmodern personhood: a matter of consciousness

The concept of person is integral to bioethical discourse because persons are the proper subject of the moral domain. Nevertheless, the concept of person has played no role in the prevailing formulation of human death because of a purported lack of consensus concerning the essential attributes of a person. Beginning with John Locke's fundamental proposition that person is a 'forensic term', I argue that in Western society we do have a consensus on at least one necessary condition for personhood, and that is the capacity for conscious experience. When we consider the whole brain formulation of death, and the most prominent defense of it by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, we can readily identify the flaws that grow out of the failure to define human death as the permanent loss of the capacity for conscious experience. Most fundamental among these flaws is a definition of human death that reduces persons to the capacity of the brain to regulate purely physiological functioning. Such a formulation would, in theory, apply to any member of the animal kingdom. I suggest that an appropriate concept of death should capture what it is about a particular living being that is so essential to it that the permanent loss of that thing constitutes death. What is essential to being a human being is living the life of a person, which derives from the capacity for conscious experience.     

Postmodern Personhood: A Matter of Consciousness

The concept of person is integral to bioethical discourse because persons are the proper subject of the moral domain. Nevertheless, the concept of person has played no role in the prevailing formulation of human death because of a purported lack of consensus concerning the essential attributes of a person. Beginning with John Locke's fundamental proposition that person is a 'forensic term', I argue that in Western society we do have a consensus on at least one necessary condition for personhood, and that is the capacity for conscious experience. When we consider the whole brain formulation of death, and the most prominent defense of it by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, we can readily identify the flaws that grow out of the failure to define human death as the permanent loss of the capacity for conscious experience. Most fundamental among these flaws is a definition of human death that reduces persons to the capacity of the brain to regulate purely physiological functioning. Such a formulation would, in theory, apply to any member of the animal kingdom. I suggest that an appropriate concept of death should capture what it is about a particular living being that is so essential to it that the permanent loss of that thing constitutes death. What is essential to being a human being is living the life of a person, which derives from the capacity for conscious experience.     

Understanding the 'conservative' view on abortion

The philosophical literature would have us believe that the conservative view on abortion is based on the claim that the fetus is a person from the time of conception. Given the widespread acceptance of this analysis, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that it conflicts with a number of major arguments offered in support of the conservative view. I argue, in the present paper, that a careful examination of these inconsistencies establishes that the personhood analysis is mistaken: the conservative view is based on the natural process of fetal development, not the personhood of the fetus.     

The Beginning of Personhood: A Thomistic Biological Analysis

‘When did I, a human person, begin to exist?’ In developing an answer to this question, I utilize a Thomistic framework, which holds that the human person is a composite of a biological organism and an intellective soul. Eric Olson and Norman Ford both argue that the beginning of an individual human biological organism occurs at the moment when implantation of the zygote in the uterus occurs and the ‘primitive streak’ begins to form. Prior to this point, there does not exist an individual human organism, but a cluster of biological cells which has the potential to split and develop as one or more separate human organisms (identical twinning). Ensoulment (the instantiation of a human intellective soul in biological matter) does not occur until the point of implantation. This conception of the beginning of human personhood has moral implications concerning the status of pre‐implantation biological cell clusters. A new understanding of the beginning of human personhood entails a new understanding of the morality of certain medical procedures which have a direct affect on these cell clusters which contain human DNA. Such procedures discussed in this article are embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, procured abortion, and the use of abortifacient contraceptives.     

Death,Biography, and the Mapuche Person

The amulpüllün biographical oratory which takes place at Mapuche funerals in southern Chile is said to ‘complete’ the person. Such a perspective challenges the assumption that mortuary practices necessarily constitute a form of analysis, a division of the component parts of the social person. In this paper I explore what it is about the Mapuche person which needs to be ‘completed,’ and how funeral oratory achieves this goal. Utilizing Bakhtin's concepts of consummation and transgredience, and Ricoeur's concepts of emplotment and narrative identity, I suggest that it is only from the position of outsidedness that the necessary totalization of the deceased's person can occur. These processes of synthesis and totalization cast light upon an apparent contradiction between the importance which Amerindians place upon biography as an oral form, and theoretical approaches which stress the instability and divisibility of an Amerindian personhood predicated upon the incorporation of the other. Rather than viewing the totalization which occurs in biography as a critique of such an approach, I see it as a solution to the ontological problem which such an approach describes.     

Forensic uncertainty,fragile remains,and DNA as a panacea: an ethnographic observation of the challenges in twenty-first-century Disaster Victim Identification

This is an account of ethnographic research examining the specialist scientific processes known as ‘Disaster Victim Identification’ (DVI) in three settings: Québec, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In cases of multiple deaths, a series of actions accompanied by a plethora of tools are often invoked, housed at a disaster scene, forensic laboratories, a family assistance centre, and a mortuary. In this article, I examine a process dedicated to connecting the biological remains of the deceased with a confirmed validation of personhood. I describe a situation where responders/scientists will attempt multiple testing and re-testing of human remains, often pushing boundaries of available science. I argue that the search for certainty in identification lies at the heart of the activation of DVI processes, particularly when it is connected to DNA testing. Observing intimate forensic settings and the bricolage of the forensic anthropologist's labour has allowed me to track the production of the science of identity. I then reflect on the wider implications of these observations for affected communities and the responding scientists. Finally, I argue that there is complexity and ambivalence surrounding the increased use of technologies when applied to identification of victims.     

The Breivik case and what psychiatrists can learn from it

In the afternoon of July 22, 2011, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 persons, many of them children and youths, in two separate events. On August 24, 2012, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison. Breivik went through two forensic evaluations: the first concluded that he had a psychotic disorder, thus being legally unaccountable, whereas the second concluded that he had a personality disorder, thus being legally accountable. This article first describes Breivik's background and his crimes. This is followed by an overview of the two forensic evaluations, their methods, contents and disagreements, and how these issues were handled by the court in the verdict. Finally, the article focuses on some lessons psychiatrists can take from the case.     

The core of affects: namer and named in Bahia (Brazil)

This article is a study of personal naming using drawings made by secondary school students from two small towns in coastal Bahia (Brazil) of the persons who gave them their names. The article explores the relation between namer and named as one of continued identity created by imaginative processes of surrogation akin to pretend‐play. In early ontogeny, the person is constituted through a series of mutualities of being that come to constitute a core of affects. The article aims to contribute towards a better understanding of the processes of constitution of personhood in the context of human relatedness.     

Sorcery and the dividual in Australia

In this article I present an analysis of Australian Aboriginal sorcery, applying concepts from the New Melanesian Ethnography. My starting‐point is Keen's approach to magic among the Yolngu, which engages Strathern's concept of the dividual, but which focuses on the extension of partible aspects of the person in space and time. Building on Keen's analysis, I draw on ethnographic material from Cape York Peninsula to argue that Aboriginal sorcery might be understood not only as the extension of partible aspects of the person, but also in terms of the interplay between the internal divisions and external connections of dividual personhood, linking that interplay to the various invasive techniques understood to be employed by sorcerers. On that basis, I argue that, in the central Peninsula, sorcery beliefs are best understood as forms of ‘indigenous analysis’ (Strathern) or ‘naïve critique’ (Kapferer) that simultaneously articulate and obscure the anxieties that inhere in postcolonial Aboriginal sociality.     

Proximate personhood as a standard for making difficult treatment decisions: imperiled newborns as a case study

... The standard of personhood is gaining increased attention and prominence. The essential claim is that only individuals with capacities for significant cerebral functioning possess a morally unique claim to existence. Persons are defined as individuals who are self-aware and capable of self-direction (Engelhardt), able to enter meaningful relationships (McCormick), capable of minimal independent existence (Shelp), and in possession of a minimal 20-40 I.Q. (Joseph Fletcher). These are "high standard" personhood positions (those holding higher-brain related criteria). It is a commonplace with most such positions that newborns -- all newborns -- are not, strictly speaking, persons. That is, newborns are not self-aware, intentionally choosing individuals.... The thesis of this essay is that a developing individual's right to life increases as he or she approaches the threshold of personal life. That is, the more a newborn approximates -- or is proximate to -- undisputed personhood (e.g. the status of readers of this essay), the greater his or her claim to life. The two pivotal criteria for determining personhood are the potentiality for and development toward becoming an undisputed personal being. I am presupposing, for purposes of argument, that the handicapped infant would not be an excessive familial burden or an inordinate financial load for society, one an ancient and the other a modern criterion. That condition granted, this essay contends that if an imperiled newborn is reasonably projected to reach at least minimal personal capacity, treatment should be given.     

The crisscrossed agency of a toast: Personhood,individuation and de‐individuation in Luzhou,China

This article addresses debates over individuation in China through consideration of guanxi‐relational feasting in Luzhou, Sichuan. I draw on Ortner's theorisation of subjectivity and agency to probe the often taken‐for‐granted question of cultural personhood which informs social action. Although the social imaginary in Luzhou is increasingly colonised by symbolic individualism, I propose that dominant local notions of personhood and agency, operating within feast practice, continue to define this process. By attending to three aspects of Yan's ‘individualisation thesis’, I demonstrate how local models of person and agency are indispensible to a fuller understanding of social life. Considering the important role ritual speech habits (largely trained in de‐individuating feasting) continue to play in socialising actors to economic institutions and power relationships more generally, individuation in China today remains a largely nominal and aspirational, if symbolically potent and potentially transformative, project.     

Other‐than‐humans and the remaking of the social

This article takes its starting‐point from an elderly Bardi woman's observation that elders ‘used to frighten’ younger generations with stories about various spirit beings. The beings she referred to are a group of malevolent beings inhabiting particular locations in her country, located in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia. Beginning with her observation that this is something that ‘used’ to happen, I consider the relationship between persons and different kinds of spirit beings amidst historical impetus for change. Political, economic, ecological, technological, and other impacts have occurred within the shifting context of progressive engagements with Western colonialism, capitalism, and the market economy, with implications for local ontologies. I suggest that these spirit beings are becoming less differentiated and consider the implications of this in terms of personhood and the constitution of the social, arguing that the disappearance of some of these beings is suggestive of a contraction of temporal and spatial extensions of personhood, with implications for relations with country.     

Documented lives: fear and the uncertainties of law during the second Palestinian intifada

This article examines the role of identity documents in producing the particular texture of relationships between persons and states in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For many people in the region the forms of legal identification they hold are central to their life chances. Considerable efforts are therefore made in trying to accumulate and manipulate documents for political and economic advantage. However, the implications of holding identity documents are always partial and unstable. This article argues that identity documents penetrate into the lives of those who hold them, not as reifying abstractions, but as an unpredictable and unstable technique of governance, producing fear and uncertainty for all those subject to their use. Although the production of identity documents creates a separation between the legal and the physical person, these two aspects of personhood are recombined as, through their anxieties, people come to embody the indeterminacies of the documents that they hold. In this way documents produce legibility and illegibility, stability and instability, coherence and incoherence.     

Governing anticipatory technology practices. Forensic DNA phenotyping and the forensic genetics community in Europe

Forensic geneticists have attempted to make the case for continued investment in forensic genetics research, despite its seemingly consolidated evidentiary role in criminal justice, by shifting the focus to technologies that can provide intelligence. Forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) is one such emerging set of techniques, promising to infer external appearance and ancestry of an unknown person. On this example, I consider the repertoire of anticipatory practices deployed by scientists, expanding the concept to not only focus on promissory but also include epistemic and operational aspects of anticipatory work in science. I explore these practices further as part of anticipatory self-governance efforts, attending to the European forensic genetics community and its construction of FDP as a reliable and legitimate technology field for use in delivering public goods around security and justice. In this context, I consider three types of ordering devices that translate anticipatory practices into anticipatory self-governance.     

Potentiality and human embryos

Consideration of the potentiality of human embryos to develop characteristics of personhood, such as intellect and will, has figured prominently in arguments against abortion and the use of human embryos for research. In particular, such consideration was the basis for the call of the US President's Council on Bioethics for a moratorium on stem cell research on human embryos. In this paper, I critique the concept of potentiality invoked by the Council and offer an alternative account. In contrast to the Council's view that an embryo's potentiality is determined by definition and is not affected by external conditions that may prevent certain possibilities from ever being realized, I propose an empirically grounded account of potentiality that involves an assessment of the physical and decisional conditions that may restrict an embryo's possibilities. In my view, some human embryos lack the potentiality to become a person that other human embryos have. Assuming for the sake of argument that the potential to become a person gives a being special moral status, it follows that some human embryos lack this status. This argument is then used to support Gene Outka's suggestion that it is morally permissible to experiment on 'spare' frozen embryos that are destined to be destroyed.