2a: Necessary Ingredients of Personhood

Pro-choicers have proposed a number of properties to add to “human” and “organism” in order to formulate a revised definition of person that is friendlier to their position on abortion. The main contenders are:

Pretty much every property on which a reasonable person might predicate personhood is covered by this list. And it is a simple matter¹ to show that every one of them is inadequate in some respect.

The first two candidates (mental activity and dependence) are continuous properties—they vary by degrees. The others are binary—an entity either possesses them or not. We will start by considering the implications of predicating personhood on a continuous property.