1The Nature of People

What is a person? The question can mean two different things. One is what it is to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson--a someone and not merely a something. You and I are people (or persons); stones are not. Whether a chimpanzee is a person is disputed. What is this property--personhood--that we’ve got and stones haven’t got, and which there is dispute about whether chimpanzees have? An answer would be a completion of the formula Necessarily, x is a person if and only if...x.... Or maybe the formula should be ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if...x...t...’, so as not to prejudge the issue of whether something could be a person at one time and a nonperson at another.1 Call this the personhood question. The most common answer is that to be a person (at a time) is to have certain special mental properties (at that time). Locke, for instance, said that a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places ” (1975: 335). To be a person is roughly to be intelligent and self-conscious. Others say that a thin