personhood
30 Aug 2026 - 04 Sep 2026
- I've had a long-standing interest in the question of personhood. It's obviously a close cousin of the fundamental driver of this website (what is agency). Personhood is agency from the outside, typically – it's determining the set of things you need to treat as agents. It brings along all sorts of moral and legal issues.
- See group agency, egregore, metapersons and no doubt other pages.
- It came up on the Weird Studies Discord in reference to Weird Studies/Artworks are People.
- How about, nothing inherently is or is not a person? Instead, persons are created by other persons relating to them as such. That is, in fact, how human persons are made*, and how some animals (pets) become persons. So there is no yes or no fact of the matter. Personhood is not a sharp category, it's a n inherently relational, fictional, dramatic, constructive process. This is different from pareidolia in its usual sense, because that implies that the personhood is merely illusory. Instead I mean that personhood is kind of a fiction that we enact and thus becomes real. Under this theory, trees and artworks are people if they are treated as such. That might sound a little too pat, as if we are projecting something onto them that isn't real. But it is more than that, since treating them as people means being open to their genuine autonomy.
- See eg Kenneth Kaye (The Mental and Social Life of Babies, 1982) which made attributed / presumed intentionality the core argument: parents systematically over-attribute understanding, and that pretense is what pulls the infant into actually having it. The "as if" is a self-fulfilling scaffold rather than a charming error.
Earlier
- Omniorthogonal: Nobody believes in embryonic personhood
So moral prescriptivism aside, from a purely descriptive stance zygotes and other pre-birth forms of the human organism are not treated as people, even by those who hold an ideological position that defines them as such. – me
Personhood is not an innate biological property but a biologcally-grounded social construct. So while there is not much difference in cognitive capacity between a fetus immediately before birth and a neonate immediately after, they have a different social, moral, and legal status. Again, this is just how things are. The point of the post is that even extreme anti-abortonists have a gradated view of personhood. – me, in comments
at some point the state does have the power to intervene to protect a child, to force parents to support a child, for instance. But where does a blob of cells stop and a person begin? The boundary of viability that you propose doesn't work very well, so birth is the bright line that society seems to be converging on. – me again, in comments
Nonpersons
- Under slavery, were slaves considered persons? No doubt this is a complex issue, but what's the top-level view Ask Claude
- Here's the top-level picture on slavery and personhood:
Slavery and Personhood: The Top Level
- The short answer is: slaves were treated as neither fully persons nor fully non-persons, but occupied a legally constructed intermediate category — which is itself a vivid illustration of your relational/constructive theory.
The Default: Property, Not Person
- The law formally categorized enslaved individuals not as persons, but as chattel personal — movable property, similar to livestock or tools — which stripped them of any recognized legal personhood and denied them fundamental rights and protections.
But It Was Never Clean
- The contradictions are exactly what your theory would predict.
- Courts endowed individuals bound by slavery with a liminal sort of legal personhood, defined by a constellation of concepts — person, personal property, real property — that limited access to humanity.
- The most telling contradiction:
- American legal doctrine granted the status of "persons" to slaves in order to prosecute them — recognizing them as criminally responsible, but not as having civil rights.
- So personhood was selectively switched on or off depending on what the system needed. This is thoroughly relational and instrumental, not an intrinsic fact.
The Three-Fifths Problem
- Even at the constitutional level the incoherence is visible: slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for apportionment purposes — personhood as a fraction, deployed for the political interests of slaveholders, not the slaves themselves.
Legal vs. Social Personhood
- A political and legal reformation of slaves as persons did not fully become a social one of slaves as people
- — a crucial distinction. Even after emancipation,
- the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments expanded the scope of legal personhood for African Americans and gave them access, at least in theory, to legal rights that many other persons long enjoyed
- — "in theory" doing a lot of work there.
Relevance to Your Theory
- Slavery is actually a strong case for the relational/constructive view. The slaveholder system didn't deny that enslaved people had minds, feelings, intentions, or moral agency (it couldn't — it needed them to work, to be held responsible for crimes, to be managed as social beings). What it did was refuse to extend the relational stance of personhood in the morally and legally consequential directions. Personhood was withheld as a political act, not discovered to be absent as a natural fact.
- This maps well onto your Kaye-inspired framing: the "as-if" of personhood was actively withdrawn, and that withdrawal had real constitutive effects — not just labeling people as non-persons but partially producing the social conditions of non-personhood (no contracts, no testimony, no legal standing).