Are we essentially persons? Olson, Baker, and a reply

Philosophical Forum 33 (1):81-99 (2002)
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Abstract

In the literature on persons and their identity, it is customary to distinguish the issue of the nature of personhood—“What is a person?”—from the issue of per- sonal identity—“What are the persistence conditions of a person over time?” In recent years, Eric Olson and Lynne Rudder Baker have brought to the forefront of discussion the related, but often neglected, issue of our essence: “What are we, most fundamentally (essentially)—human animals, persons, or something else?” Attacking what he calls the Standard View of personal identity, according to which personal identity consists in some type of psychological continuity, Olson contends that this thesis has highly implausible implications. Attributing the claim that we are essentially persons to the Standard View, Olson defends the alterna- tive thesis that we are essentially (living) human animals, members of the species Homo sapiens, and that our persistence conditions are biological, having nothing to do with psychology. At the heart of his critique is the contention that the Standard View lacks a plausible account of the relationship between a person and the human animal associated with her. Defending “person essentialism” and defining persons as beings with first-person perspectives, Lynne Rudder Baker responds to Olson’s challenge with the Constitution View: We (human) persons are constituted by, but not identical to, human animals. After reconstructing Olson’s critique of the Standard View, I argue that Baker goes a long way toward meeting his challenge to account plausibly for the relationship between persons and human animals. Then I contend that her person-based Constitution View nevertheless has major difficulties: a “newborn problem”; a dubious ontology; and a problematic account of personal identity. I conclude with general reflections about this dialectic.

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David DeGrazia
George Washington University

Citations of this work

The Moral Insignificance of Self‐consciousness.Joshua Shepherd - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2):398-415.
The Moral Insignificance of Self‐consciousness.Joshua Shepherd - 2016 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (4).
Identity, Killing, and the Boundaries of Our Existence.David Degrazia - 2003 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (4):413-442.
Persistence Without Personhood: A New Model.Joseph Gottlieb - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):346-364.

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