Both proponents and opponents of abortion write as though the concept of personhood was much less well-defined and more hopelessly unclear than it, in fact, is. Jane English, for example, attempts to show that our concept of a person is unclear by listing an impressive array of traits in several categories, which are commonly associated with personhood.1 The traits on the list are given no relative weighting so that she ends by implying that "having a concept of self " is no more central to our notion of personhood than "having the capacity to use tools," or "having hands," or "being counted in the census." She disingenuously muddies the waters further by throwing in a cluster of legal factors, knowing full well that when oppressed groups or individuals proclaim their rights they invariably do so on the basis of their personhood, and not the other way around. They are aware that they have the moral right and ought to be given the legal right to certain treatment from their government and fellow citizens because they are persons, not that they are persons because they have the legal right to hold property or to be counted in the census.

Usually, the real difficulty such philosophers are having is not in defining the concept of a person, but in applying the definition. It is quite simple, really, to know, in a very general way, what sort of a being does or does not deserve full moral rights. It is much more difficult to know when a particular being ought or ought not to be labeled a "person." This is complicated by the fact that some persons may not be capable of communicating with others, so that it is difficult to know what traits they might possess internally. Most philosophers pick on one or two traits -- having brain waves, having a self-concept, having been conceived of humans -- not because these traits are, themselves, the definition of personhood, but because they hope to find some more easily identifiable trait which all and only persons possess. I shall return to this difficulty later.

A person is, in simple terms, "The subject of a life, " but the two elements of this definition need further spelling out, particularly the first term, "subject."

When an individual lays claims to the rights of a person, she contrasts her "right to be treated like a person," with being treated "like an object." For this reason, the term "subject" is particularly appropriate. She is liable to support her claim by pointing to certain psychological traits which subjects, but not objects, can possess -- her plans and dreams for the future, the pain she is suffering from your treatment of her, the desires she has which you are frustrating, her ability to understand and make decisions on the basis of the information you are withholding from her . . . Underlying all of these psychological traits is her subjectivity: a unitary consciousness or internal psychological perspective.2

In contrast with an object, a subject is affected by the actions of others in such a way that what happens to a subject matters to the subject. This is because there is something that it is like to be a subject, but not to be an object. No matter what is done to an object, it will not matter to the object, because an object has no internal perspective (it is not and has never been conscious).

If persons were not, above all else, subjects, then the close connection between rights and personhood would be missing, and with it much of the purpose behind defining personhood. It makes no sense to say that a being could have a right to be treated in one way, rather than another, if how you treated that being did not matterto it. It may be wrong to damage a beautiful painting, it may even be a violation of rights, but if it is it is a violation of the rights of the painting’s owner or the painter, or even of the future viewer of the painting. It is not a violation of the painting’s rights, because it does not matter to the painting what happens to it, good or bad.

However, in order to be a person, a being must be more than just a subject; it must be the subject of a life. By life I do not mean biological life. It is indeed highly possible that all subjects of lives are biologically alive, but that is a contingent, though perhaps connected, fact. I want to leave open the possibility that a being could be the subject of a life without being biologically alive -- an angel, a ghost or spirit, God, a very advanced robot. . .

More importantly, it seems clear to me that not everything which is biologically alive is a subject. Cancer cells, viruses, sperm and ova, are all biologically alive, but none is a subject. None of these has a psychological perspective. It does not matter to the cancer cell that it is cut out or irradiated, and it does not matter to either the viruses or the white cells who wins out. Woody Allen not withstanding, sperm are indifferent to where they are spilled. They are not anxious to find the ova or to join with it, anymore than it is disappointed to be denied a place in the womb or a partner in the sperm.

To be the subject of a life is to have a continuous and unitary stream of consciousness extended in time. The length of time is relatively unimportant. Some subjects of consciousness are not, it seems to me, subjects of a life, but rather are subjects of disconnected conscious experience. What unifies those experiences into a whole is both continuity in time and the entity’s ability to remember and/or to learn from those experiences. These criteria are largely Humean in nature, stemming from his recognition that we make a judgment of personal identity in our own case on the basis of the relationship of causation between our bundles, as discovered through memory.3 Some memory is probably a necessary condition for personhood, while learning is another legitimately causal relationship between the bundle of perceptions which a subject of experiences would be at T2, and the bundle of perceptions which the subject of experiences was at T1, even if no memory of the bundle at T1 is accessible to the subject at T2.

It is less clear why it matters that the being in question be the subject of a life than that it be a subject, but a few points about what matters to the being in question should clarify the need for this distinction. If the being in question is merely the subject of disconnected experiences, then only the quality of any given one of those experiences can matter to it. It cannot matter that the being’s life is ended, because that life had no continuity in the first place; it started anew with each passing minute. If one minute went poorly, this would not ruin the life which came to be in the next minute. The subject of a life, on the other hand, may have that life go well or poorly, and from thence has a right to continue that life and to make it go well.

Furthermore, the subject of a life, but not the subject of disconnected experiences, can make plans for that life and carry them out. Only the subject of a life is leading a life, and thus only the subject of a life can be harmed by someone else’s interference in the direction that life takes. If I say that you have a moral duty not to interfere in the course of someone’s life against his or her wishes, I imply that the being has a life which is running a course, and that the course of that life is influenced by (even caused by) his wishes. A being cannot have a right to life unless the being is already leading a life.

What makes this definition of personhood so difficult to apply in concrete situations is nothing more than the problem of other minds. We can never be certain of the personhood of anyone other than ourselves because we can never be aware of what it is like to be anyone other than ourselves. Language can help us to bridge that gap to a certain extent, but it may be possible one day to program a computer to give brilliant, vivid descriptions of its internal perspective, without its actually having one. More frighteningly, it is easy to imagine examples of beings which, without having any language, are still clearly subjects of a life. There have been, for example, people who because of sensory deficits (deafness and muteness) or cerebral palsy, were unable to communicate their internal perspective to others. Some of these people, despite their abilities to think, reason, desire, feel pain, love, etc. were taken to be without an internal perspective -- were treated like objects.

Many philosophers have dealt with this difficulty by trying to find some physical traits or psychological/behavioral capacities which indicate the presence of an internal perspective which is extended in time. Here is where the real variety of answers comes in, all of which seem to me to be more or less inadequate to reliably determining when a being does or does not have a consciousness extended in time through learning and memory -- is or is not the subject of a life.

By saying that a person must be "conceived of humans," for example, John T. Noonan picks out a trait which is common to most of the persons who communicate their internal perspectives to us, but I think points to an arbitrary trait, and one which turns out to be neither necessary nor sufficient to being the subject of a life.4 Sometimes humans conceive balls of tissue which, though biologically alive, never even have the capacity to become subjects of disconnected experiences, much less of a life. Some beings which are not conceived by humans may still be persons. If we traveled to a distant planet and found space creatures with all of the basic capacities we ourselves have (intelligence, emotions, plans and projects. . . ) we would be wrong not to call those persons and to extend them rights; as wrong as white men were in believing that the people they found when they reached the Americas were not persons, and could thus be treated in any way and be made use of as one would objects, because they were "uncivilized" (lacked a notion of the ownership of land, had not built permanent structures and institutions, did not have a written history. . .).

Considering the great number of obvious mistakes we have made on the issue of personhood in the past, it is clear we ought to pause and be very careful about the traits we look for in determining who is to be labeled a "person, " and what is not to be so labeled. More recent

philosophers have turned away from looking at behavioral traits such as developing social structures (which by the way groups of ants and bees seem to have perfected far better than any group of humans to-date, anyway) and toward traits like "having brain waves" which can be readily determined. Tom Regan holds that the key to discovering who is the subject of a life and what is not lies in "What we know about the brain and evolution."5 I am somewhat sympathetic with this view. We already understand how the brain stores and retrieves memories, and we are beginning to understand (according to Patricia Churchland of UCLA) how consciousness arises.6 Other studies are being done on how learning takes place. Once we have increased our knowledge in these areas, it will be much easier to see who has or does not have the necessary structures, and then to see using various techniques (e.g. PET scans) whether those structures are functioning. This should give us a good, solid clue as to whether or not the being in question is the subject of life.

But let me interject here that at this point the metaphysical dispute begins to color the moral dispute. Many people believe in the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. For these people, the presence of that mind or soul is the key to whether or not the being in question is the subject of a life. The brain might be the only way for that being to express its internal perspective in the world; it may even be the key to its sentience or the prerequisite of its biological life, but it would not be the person or consciousness itself. In order to know whether or not you are dealing with a person you would first have to know whether or not the being in question has a mind or a soul, but that will be much, much more difficult for two reasons. First, the mind or soul, being immaterial, cannot be seen or scanned. Its structure and function are invisible and undetectable. Secondly, in order for the mind or soul to evince itself, it will need certain structures, so that whenever there is no brain there will also be no behavior which indicates an internal perspective. Thus, a being’s failure to have any physical or psychological trait whatsoever, on this view, would never be sufficient evidence upon which to say that that being is not a person (the subject of a life). Worldwide, there are people who believe that souls inhabit or can inhabit cows, rats, insects, airborne creatures, fetuses, . . . Whenever it is possible for the soul or mind to inhabit a creature, that creature may be a person, and if it is that creature will have full and equal moral rights.

Obviously, this complicates the abortion issue. It also complicates a variety of other issues (e.g. the animal rights issue). Tom Regan believes that, based on the structure of their brains and what we know about evolution, most mammals and birds are persons (that is they are subjects of a life).7 Someone who lived in India might believe that, based on the likelihood of its having a soul, all cows are persons but no pigs are. Someone who lived in the United States might believe that all frozen embryos are persons but no fully-grown chimpanzee is.

The further wrinkle in the abortion issue is that, although it is true that all persons have full and equal moral rights, it is not true that only persons may have moral rights. There are a variety of types of nonpersons, some of which may have moral rights, and others of which, it will be wrong to treat in certain ways for other reasons. I shall proceed by making a list of categories of nonpersons and discussing the grounds upon which either we could declare that they have rights or we could declare that they ought to be treated as though they had rights.

VARIETIES OF NONPERSONS

1. Subjects of Disconnected Consciousness or Experiences

2. Potential Persons

3. The Body Continuous with The Body of a Person

4. Former Persons

5. Temporary Nonpersons

Any sentient being who does not have a life (possibly determinable by looking at the being’s capacity for learning and memory) would be a subject of disconnected consciousness or experiences, as I mentioned earlier in my discussion of what it is to be the subject of "a life." Probably most insects fall in this category. They have enough ganglia to detect flowers, scamper under counters and away from food when the kitchen light is turned on, carry out preprogrammed life activities, kill intruders, and any number of other activities necessary for their biological lifespans to run out. They probably experience pain, since pain is an indicator which tells an organism to avoid certain stimuli. The structure and function of their brains would indicate that they are not the subjects of a life, however.

At a certain stage, fetuses are also structurally roughly the same. They will react to certain direct stimuli in the same way that the fly reacts to the shadow of the fly swatter or the cockroach reacts to the kitchen light being turned on. But, they do not yet have enough of a brain to learn or remember, and they may not have enough of a brain for aversive stimuli to be experienced as pain or unpleasantness. Suppose that aversive stimuli are experienced as unpleasantness, though, so that for ants and fetuses alike, certain actions on my part might feel bad or good to the ant or the fetus. Even though there is insufficient brain for the being to carry out a life which could be aversely affected by this momentary experience, the being’s ability to have the experience might be sufficient to make it wrong for me to wantonly inflict it upon the being in question. If this is true, then flies have a right not to have their wings torn off, and snails have a right not to be salted, and early fetuses have a right not to be aborted for no reason whatsoever. But such rights would be easily overridden whenever they come in contact with the rights of actual persons. If the ant must be injured in order for the person to lead his life as he sees fit, the rights of the person would quickly override the rights of the ant. Thus, the benefit that those who cultivate pearls derive might easily override the pain of the clam, if the aversive stimuli created by the sand caused momentary pain to the clam. I doubt, by the way, that it does, although the clam certainly reacts to the sand, and certainly has some sensory apparatus.

The fetus is more than an ant or a clam, however, because it is a potential person, even before it becomes a subject of disconnected experiences. The potentiality of the fetus extends back

even further than that. A sperm is a potential person, and so is an ova, for given the right conditions, it will eventually develop into a person. True enough, a sperm has much less of a chance of ever fulfilling that potential than a zygote does, but it also has much less of a chance of doing so than a given ova does, and a zygote has much less of a chance before implantation than it does after implantation. The frozen embryo has much less of a chance than the embryo at the same stage of development which is already inside a woman, and the embryo inside a woman who is subject to continual miscarriages has much less of a chance of fulfilling its potential than the one which is inside a woman who has not miscarried before. If we want to say whether or not the being has rights, then those rights should not depend on how great the being’s potential for gaining traits it does not already have are. My right to be allowed to live past the age of 80 is not greater or lesser depending on whether or not my parents did, although my potential for living past 80 probably is.

I do not see, however, how one can derive actual rights from potential personhood. If the being is not yet a person, and not even yet the subject of disconnected experiences, then nothing that could happen would matter to it. True, it may later be glad to be alive, but that is not the same as having had a right to become alive, nor is it the same as having had a right to be kept biologically alive in order to eventually become a subject of a life. So far as I know, nothing has the right to become a subject of a life, and if it did, certainly the life already in progress would need to have its rights respected first. This does not exhaust the possibilities though, for although the potential person may not have rights, it may have value.

One possible value is the value it may have for persons in the world. The society or some member of the society may place great value on the life of a potential person. In some cultures, because of problems maintaining the population, sperm and ova have been greatly valued, and it has been considered wrong to waste them (e.g. by using contraception). Still, sperm and ova are not the possessions of the culture but of the persons whose bodies generated them. If the persons who own these bodies have different plans for their possessions, and do not value them, it would seem that out of respect for their personhood, we ought to respect their right to lead their lives as they please and to dispose of their possessions as they please. If a man gives up some of his genetic possessions to a woman, then the resultant zygote may be hers alone or theirs together (dependent upon the conclusion of an argument I am not here prepared to outline), but as it is not yet a person, it is still a possession, and not the possession of a culture.

Another problem comes in here, because the process of developing into the subject of a life is a gradual one. At birth, the fetus is already the subject of a life, but when did this occur? This may make us wish to tread extremely carefully. We know that at some point the fetus has an internal perspective and that that internal perspective begins to be incorporated in a process of learning and memory that can be called the beginning of "a life." Embryologist Charles Gardner puts the point at which the fetus begins to have sufficient brain structures for these capacities to begin at about six months.8 We might believe that we need to pick a point a month or so earlier in order to be sure. Maybe we would even want to pick a point as early as the discontinued experiences stage on the grounds that this is the first point at which the fetus has any rights at all, and that it then has the potential to develop full rights. This might roll back the area of permissible abortion to as early as 10 weeks, although this again would be subject to further information on development.

Furthermore, the fetus has the body continuous with the body of a person, and as English points out, although a body can have no rights, it might be wise nonetheless for a culture which wishes its citizens to respect the rights of persons to treat bodies (which are generally so closely related with persons) with a certain amount of respect (i.e. as though they had rights).9 We do this in our dealings with the bodies of former persons, or perhaps I should call them the former bodies of persons, by letting persons decide what should be done with their bodies after they no longer inhabit them. For example, obviously there would be more donors and less time wasted in obtaining consent if people agreed that when a body is no longer a person (brain death?) it can be used for transplants to save the lives of other persons, because the person can only have a right to say what happens in and to her body when she is, in fact, the owner of that body, and at death you no longer own your body (even if you can exist outside of it). Regardless of this argument, and despite the fact that actual persons with an actual right to life might need organs which belonged to your body during your life, we allow people to choose while they are alive what will happen to their former bodies.

Finally, we give full moral rights to temporary nonpersons (i.e. those who are temporarily unconscious) because they are obviously in the process of leading a life. That process may be interrupted by a brief period of unconsciousness, but the thread of that life will very likely be taken up again. The person is still there, waiting to be revived and to continue what it has already begun. Moreover, unless a being is permanently unconscious, because the structures of the brain have been destroyed, it is very difficult to tell whether that being is presently conscious and unable to communicate that fact, or unconscious and thus a dormant person. This, however, is very unlike being an early fetus, who does not yet even have the structures to be the subject of a life, and has not begun to lead a life. If the temporary nonperson can be permitted to continue her life, she has the right to do so.

With regard to the fetus, then, it is a person in the last three months (approximately), so far as our current knowledge of brain structures and functions can tell us. Before that point, perhaps at around ten weeks, it may become the subject of disconnected experiences and may have some rights on that basis, but the rights it would have on that basis would be easily overridden by the rights of actual persons, and no one, so far as I know, has an abortion for no reason whatsoever. In addition, however, the fetus is also both a potential person and the body continuous with the body of a person. Thus, it may have value to the culture or to the owners (before it stops being an object). It may also be necessary to treat it in certain ways even when it is not a person, just as we treat the bodies of the dead in certain ways, even though they are no longer persons.

None of this solves, or is intended to solve the question of abortion, because I have not discussed rights in any detail. It may be that under certain circumstances a woman has a right to an

abortion even if the fetus has value, and even if it has a right to life. The proposition I have defended here is merely that our concept of a person is not nearly so complex and unclear as others have tried to make it out to be. The problem is not the concept of a person, but our ability to apply that concept to particular instances. Application is further complicated by the fact that there is a serious metaphysical difference of opinion about whether the subjective perspective is contained in a material brain or an immaterial mind/soul. If we give the former answer, then our criteria for personhood will be increasingly applicable as we unravel more of the mysteries of the structures and functions of the brain and develop new techniques for observing brain function. If we choose the latter alternative, however, then we will have to rely on some religious authority’s word on who has or does not have a soul or a brain, and religious authorities do not agree on this subject. Moreover, they can point to no evidence in either the physical nature or the behavior and capacity of a being which unequivocally demonstrates its ensoulment.