I don’t think this eliminates much real inconvenience, although it might soothe ruffled feathers in very superficial discussions. If you can have fractional people, that creates the following problems:
The temptation to do math with them.
The same sort of icky skeeviness you get when you read history books and note that at one time, for population count purposes, blacks counted as 3⁄5 of a person each.
Disagreement about whether someone is 1⁄2 or 5⁄8 of a person could easily get as heated as disagreement about whether they are a person or not.
Depending on what factors increase or decrease personhood, widespread acceptance of a belief in fractional people could lead to attempts to game the system and be “personier”.
The idea of fractional people is less common that the idea that personhood is a cluster of properties in thingspace, and various beings partake of those properties to a greater or lesser extent.
This seems to carve reality at its joints more than the idea of fractional people, but is certainly still problematic.
It may seem difficult, but we already, in practice, have many classes of fractional persons and it doesn’t seem too problematic.
Juveniles, for example, or the handicapped (who have rights in varying degrees—a permanent vegetable doesn’t have the right to not be killed by another person, but a low-functioning autistic most certainly does); and past examples of attempts to make someone personier haven’t been too bad. (I think here of Terri Schiavo, and the attempts by right-wingers to make her seem less brain-dead than she was—remember Frist’s diagnosis-via-videotape?)
I don’t think this eliminates much real inconvenience, although it might soothe ruffled feathers in very superficial discussions. If you can have fractional people, that creates the following problems:
The temptation to do math with them.
The same sort of icky skeeviness you get when you read history books and note that at one time, for population count purposes, blacks counted as 3⁄5 of a person each.
Disagreement about whether someone is 1⁄2 or 5⁄8 of a person could easily get as heated as disagreement about whether they are a person or not.
Depending on what factors increase or decrease personhood, widespread acceptance of a belief in fractional people could lead to attempts to game the system and be “personier”.
The idea of fractional people is less common that the idea that personhood is a cluster of properties in thingspace, and various beings partake of those properties to a greater or lesser extent.
This seems to carve reality at its joints more than the idea of fractional people, but is certainly still problematic.
It may seem difficult, but we already, in practice, have many classes of fractional persons and it doesn’t seem too problematic.
Juveniles, for example, or the handicapped (who have rights in varying degrees—a permanent vegetable doesn’t have the right to not be killed by another person, but a low-functioning autistic most certainly does); and past examples of attempts to make someone personier haven’t been too bad. (I think here of Terri Schiavo, and the attempts by right-wingers to make her seem less brain-dead than she was—remember Frist’s diagnosis-via-videotape?)