What Is a Person? : Untapped Insights from Africa

This book introduces a provocative new view of personhood that philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire call Emergent Personhood. It builds on philosophies from Africa and the West to argue that individuals'' moral worth emerges through social relational processes with other human beings. The authors show the implications of Emergent Personhood for human beings across the lifespan, animals, nature, and non-living lands, soil, and rocks on earth and in space. The book considers the possibility of ascribing moral standing to machines, including large language models and social robots. Jecker and Atuire''s collaboration represents the first-time philosophers from Africa and the West have joined forces to consider personhood. Their new philosophy of persons combines strengths of African and Western thought.

What makes us ''persons'' in the moral sense, beings with a certain dignity and worth? Philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire explore this question by bringing African and Western philosophies into conversation. They start by characterizing the differences in the contemporary scene in Africa and the West, proposing that these differences were not always present, are hardly inevitable, and can and should be bridged. They then introduce the concept of Emergent Personhood, a new philosophy of personhood that combines insights from Africa and the West. It holds that beings with superlative worth emerge through social relational processes involving human beings, yet they are more than the sum of these relationships. Persons have an identity of their own and exhibit superlative moral worth, a remarkable feature not present at the base. Emergent Personhood justifies personhood for all human beings from birth to death. It also gives strong support to personhood for a wide range of animals, soils, rocks, and ecosystems. Focusing on human personhood, Jecker and Atuire argue that high moral status is stable across the lifespan and reaches a terminus with death''s declaration, which ends the human-human associations that enable personhood to arise. They conclude with a turn to nonhuman personhood, considering personhood for artificial intelligence, animals, non-living nature, and extra-terrestrial life and lands.