Persons: Key Notes Introduction

What are the characteristics of Personhood? 1:

• One to whom we ascribe mental and physical charateristics, which we developed as the idea of having a perspective.
• Possessing a network of beliefs.
• Rationality, of which we identified three varities - inference, means-end reasoning and evaluation.
• A sense of self creation through relationships with others, which we distinguished from merely having a perspective and from a purely biological sense of self.
• Self-awareness, which involves not just a conception of one's experiences, but of oneself as the subject of experiences.
• A language user, which greatly changes the kind of self one is.
• Being reflective, which requires self-awareness and probably language.
• Autonomy, the ability to give oneself 'rules' and shape oneself through choices, values and goals.
• One who is responsible, accountable and possesses rights

What is a person? 1:

• To…