engleski

Personhood Ontology and the "Normativist Fallacy"

One of the longest-lasting debates in the ontology of ethics, with allegedly grave consequences for the booming field of bioethics, is the debate over the criteria of personhood. Although typically seen as central and foundational for bioethics (Tooley, Engelhardt), the concept of a person has proven hopelessly vague and intangible, resisting a clear-cut definition in terms of necessary and/or sufficient conditions. For some authors, this is an unmistakable sign of its non-empirical, metaphysical foundation. For others, it is a consequence of the concept's intuitive, folk-psychological origin, explainable by conditions of our evolutionary past – conditions selectively favoring representational systems that – imperfectly but efficiently – classify objects into "persons" and "non-persons". The first point I want to make is that the two interpretations needn't be mutually exclusive. Indeed, they should be treated as complementary: the philosophical concept of personhood can be interpreted as a theoretical proxy of our genetically preprogrammed, automatically executable classificatory practice. This view is backed up by recent findings in the fields of evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience – findings that have led to a postulation of a specialized mechanism in our brain called 'person representation network' or 'the social brain'. It is this mechanism that is held responsible for the cases of stubborn persistence of personlike representations in spite of our conscious knowledge to the contrary (Farah & Heberlein). As my second point, I will claim that these findings are compatible with another, introspectively justifiable assumption: that the output of the person recognition process is not an exclusively cognitive affair. For, by intuitively classifying stimuli as persons we simultaneously make an implicit "value judgment", i.e., experience a kind of emotional attachment to the object of our attention. This insight could have interesting consequences for the ontological foundations of bioethics: it is perhaps no surprise that past attempts did not yield a theoretically satisfying concept of a person since the criteria specifying such an entity cannot be objectively founded, i.e., independently of the normative judgments implicit in our personhood representation mechanism. As my final point, I will argue that this apparently dire conclusion, disclosing a kind of "normativist fallacy", should not be seen as such.

pojam osobe ; reprezentacija osobnosti ; normativistička pogreška ; ontologija ; bioetika

nije evidentirano