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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5qtgl1 wrote

Reply to comment by XiphosAletheria in On Whether “Personhood” is a Normative or Descriptive Concept by ADefiniteDescription

Only some homo sapiens. And certainly not all the homo sapiens we would want to include under the category of persons. So the definition of a person needs to be a different one.

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MouseBean t1_j5rby5r wrote

Yes, the definition should be expansive enough to include rivers and mountains and individual viruses and whole herds of deer.

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5s3kyx wrote

I don't know that it does, really. We include certain groups of humans that that doesn't apply to - namely very young children and the mentally deficient - largely because they tend to matter very greatly to one or more people to whom it does apply.

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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5tq2jm wrote

You don't think disabled people and children are inherently valuable/have personhood?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5uwxnh wrote

No, of course not. I don't believe the idea of an inherent value is even coherent. Everything is always valuable to someone for some reason. You can't grind something up and extract x grams of value from it - it's not some objective physical property of a thing.

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Ill_Department_2055 t1_j5v4ifu wrote

>You can't grind something up and extract x grams of value from it - it's not some objective physical property of a thing.

This is a strange analogy. There are many objective things in the universe that don't have mass.

>Everything is always valuable to someone for some reason.

I don't see how relational value would work without the anchoring of inherent value. In other words: if the valuer doesn't matter, why would his or her valuing matter?

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XiphosAletheria t1_j5vf827 wrote

>I don't see how relational value would work without the anchoring of inherent value. In other words: if the valuer doesn't matter, why would his or her valuing matter?

To whom? And for what? Your valuing of things might well not matter at all to someone else.

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