标签：#moralagency

Humans have long assumed they belong to a special category called "persons." But what actually makes someone a person? And why should persons get special moral status? I keep coming back to these questions because they refuse to stay abstract. The moment you build an AI system that reasons about its own goals, they become engineering problems. The Traditional View Personhood is supposed to confer special status: persons have rights, deserve respect, bear responsibility for their actions, and warrant moral consideration. The philosophical tradition offers several criteria for what earns you membership in this club. Rationality. Kant's version: persons are rational agents who can recognize and follow moral laws. Rationality lets you understand moral principles, deliberate about actions, and choose based on reasons rather than instinct. But babies aren't rational, and we call them persons. People with severe cognitive disabilities have reduced rationality, and we don't revoke their personhood. Rationality comes in degrees; personhood is treated as binary. Self-awareness. Persons are conscious beings who recognize themselves as distinct entities persisting through time. This enables understanding yourself as an agent, planning for your future, taking responsibility for your past. But elephants, dolphins, and some primates pass the mirror test. We lose self-awareness during sleep. And we have no reliable way to verify self-awareness in others. Autonomy. Persons govern themselves and make free choices. This is supposed to ground moral responsibility, rights, and dignity. But if the universe is deterministic, nobody is truly autonomous. All choices are shaped by culture and circumstance. Mental illness reduces autonomy without eliminating personhood. Moral reasoning. Persons understand right and wrong. But psychopaths understand morality intellectually while lacking the emotional response. Children develop moral reasoning gradually. When exactly do they become persons? Lan