Philosophy 224 Persons and Morality: Pt. 1

Ah Ha! Dennett starts by addressing an issue we’ve observed in the past: the tendency to identify personhood with biological humanity. As Dennett understand it, this is explained by local coextensivity. The people we call persons just happen to be human beings, but what about Data?

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions The philosophical tradition of which Dennett is a part tends to approach conceptual analysis as a matter of identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for employing the concept. To say something is necessary and sufficient condition is to say that the condition is required and that it is all that is required for the concept to apply.

So, what ’ s the holdup? As Dennett immediately acknowledges, the task of identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of ‘ person ’ has not proven easy to accomplish. The problem, as Dennett diagnoses it, is in the concept. It turns out that there are actually two concepts at issue: metaphysical personhood and moral personhood (228c1). While, clearly, there is significant overlap between them, the failure to distinguish them helps explain the difficulty philosopher ’ s have been having.

There ’ s more to the story Failure to rigorously distinguish metaphysical and moral personhood is not the only barrier to developing a necessary and sufficient account of personhood. As Dennett will go on to argue, the concept of ‘ person ’ is a difficult one to specify sufficiently. However, we can and need to be much clearer on the necessary conditions for personhood.

Six Necessary Conditions 1.Persons are Rational Beings. 2.Persons have States of Consciousness. 3.Persons are appropriate objects of specific attitudes. 4.Persons are capable of reciprocating these attitudes. 5.Persons are capable of verbal communication. 6.Persons are possessed of a special sort of consciousness.

Ordering the List Dennett makes clear that the order of this list is not contingent, but rather expresses a series of dependency relations between the members of the list. The first three conditions are mutually interdependent, “ …being rational is being Intentional is being the object of a certain stance ” (229c1). The others build on these first three, the earlier members of the list being the necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter.

Intentional Systems Dennett expresses the unity of the first three conditions on his list with the notion of an “ intentional system ” (IS). As Dennett defines it, an IS is anything to which we can correctly ascribe intentional states (beliefs, desires, expectations, etc.). Clearly, the category of IS is much broader than the category of person, extending under certain circumstances to a whole range of natural phenomenon.

We Need a Little Reciprocity The breadth of the notion of an IS makes it unfit for specifying the concept of moral personhood. We get a little more traction when we recognize that some forms of IS are different than the rest in that they can themselves recognize things as ISs. Dennett calls these “ second-order ISs. ” Here too, however, the net seems cast too widely.

You Talk too Much A group of entities who clearly exhibit second-order IS, but go a step further are those that can communicate their intentions to others they recognize as ISs. He employs a theory of communicative language which makes explicit reference to not only speech acts, but also intentional reception and understanding. The real upshot of this account is to underscore the intersubjective character of language use (and thus of any appropriate account of personhood).

Consciousness and Evaluation The account of communicative language that Dennett relies upon implicitly relies on an account of consciousness. But it ’ s not just any consciousness. As Dennett argues, the necessary character of the consciousness in question is that it is evaluative. It doesn ’ t just have intentions, it is capable of reflectively considering whether or not those intentions are satisfactory in a number of different ways.

Evaluative Consciousness and the Normative With this notion of an evaluative consciousness, we finally achieve both a full set of conditions necessary for the ascription of personhood, and a clear indication of why this set is not sufficient. Evaluation presupposes an ideal in terms of which the evaluation takes place. If this evaluative capacity is part of the necessary structure of personhood, then personhood itself is an ideal. So, personhood is not something we merely have or achieve, it is something we aim for.