Vilius Dranseika from BIOUNCERTAINTY project and Ivars Neiders with Brian Earp published a new article: "Time for Bioethics to End Talk of Personhood (But Only in the Philosophers’ Sense)" in American Journal of Bioethics

Abstract

In her excellent essay, Blumenthal-Barby (Citation2024) argues that it is “time for bioethics to end talk of personhood.” She is concerned, more specifically, with “the philosophical concept of personhood,” which licenses talk about persons “in a normative sense.” Rather than engaging in bioethical analysis first by determining questions about personhood (for example: Is a fetus a person?) and then drawing certain moral conclusions from this determination (for example: Is abortion permissible?), she suggests that we should instead ask our moral questions more directly (for example, about how we ought to treat certain entities and why) and use other philosophical concepts, such as interests, sentience, or recognition respect to answer those questions head on. Regarding debates about such entities as “human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, [or] human-animal chimeras,” for instance, she urges that we should focus our attention directly on the normative questions that are raised by their existence and treatment; whereas focusing on whether such beings are persons, in the philosophers’ sense, can only serve to muddy the waters.

Link to the article

Dranseika, Vilius, Ivars Neiders, and Brian D. Earp. 2024. ‘Time for Bioethics to End Talk of Personhood (But Only in the Philosophers’ Sense)’. The American Journal of Bioethics 24(1):32–35. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2023.2278567.