The psychological concept of “person”

Reluctance to overextend personhood seems to drive many of the skeptical responses in the first round of commentaries on Rowlands\u27s target article. Despite Rowlands’s straightforward Response that we already accept some nonhumans as persons, there is still hesitation to accept that other nonhuman animals are persons. Rowlands\u27s argument is sound but the skeptics don’t accept the Lockean notion of person. The metaphysical sense of person is a psychological one, however, and psychological properties grant one moral status according to many ethical theories