Personhood Across the Lifespan

Abstract Chapter 3 explores human personhood across the lifespan. It argues that Emergent Personhood has important advantages over leading African and Western views, because it alone gives a foothold to equality. Emergent Personhood holds that human beings of all ages have equal moral standing. It regards human beings with variable intellectual capacities as equals, reasoning that the human-human relationships that give rise to exceptional moral worth remain stable throughout life. By contrast, some African views understand personhood as an arc that can increase as individuals move through their lives and become increasingly incorporated and able to show pro-social virtues. Emergent Personhood also contrasts with Kantian and utilitarian views, which generally accord higher moral standing to mature, cognitively intact adults than infants, children, or older people with dementia. Chapter 3 closes with a forced choice involving selecting research subjects from a pool of people representing diverse ages and mental capacities.