In the recently published Menkiti’s Moral Man, Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe defends the late Ifeanyi Menkiti’s communitarian theory of personhood. According to this theory, “A person is a person because of other persons” (1) or, as Menkiti is quoted as saying, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am” (2).
I come to Oyowe’s work not as a specialist in African philosophy but as a moral philosopher trained mostly in the analytic tradition. The idea that Oyowe presents is a provocative one that I am attracted to. In my dissertation, I defended a seemingly similar view, contending that human beings are inherently social creatures, taking inspiration from Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, among others. So, what follows should be understood as an effort to work through the issues raised by Oyowe from the perspective of a meeting of traditions. I have no doubt that, for many specialists in African philosophy, assessment of Oyowe’s text might rest on other matters than those that preoccupy me.
It should be noted, further, that Oyowe in this text regards himself as providing a defense and exposition of Menkiti’s theory of personhood. I am by no means a Menkiti scholar, so in what follows I will refrain from exploring the extent to which Oyowe accurately conveys Menkiti’s views. Hence, I will take the positions evinced in Menkiti’s Moral Man to be Oyowe’s, since it is perhaps possible to interpret Menkiti differently and since, in any event, Oyowe both endorses the views he attributes to Menkiti and at some points explicitly goes beyond the confines of Menkiti’s writing.
Oyowe’s book is wide-ranging and covers many different topics: autonomy and practical reasoning, moral status, social oppression, the nature of social facts, the metaphysics of ancestors, and, of course, the nature of personhood. Given space constraints, I will focus only on what Oyowe has to say about moral status, personhood, and oppression.
Overview of the Theory of Personhood
For Oyowe, personhood has three necessary elements. First, persons are biological entities— namely, humans. Second, persons must possess “moral function,” a tripartite capacity that consists in moral personality, deliberative rationality, and freedom (39–43). Finally, personhood requires that this human with a moral function undergo “social incorporation.” It is only through this social incorporation that personhood is achieved.
Oyowe is surprisingly light in explicating what the process of social incorporation demands, given the central role it plays in the theory. What Oyowe does suggest is that social incorporation involves something on the part of the agent and something on the part of the community. The agent being incorporated must live up to certain social obligations. The community, in turn, has certain customs, norms, and rites that grant personhood to individuals. For this reader, Oyowe’s text would have been strengthened by a discussion of the types of customs and norms that would be necessary or sufficient for social incorporation, and whether there are any types of norms or customs that don’t fulfill this function.
Borrowing terminology from John Searle, Oyowe contends that personhood is “a soft fact.” It is a social function created through collective action according to constitutive rules. Oyowe’s discussion of constitutive rules, though, raises more questions than it resolves. According to Oyowe, the constitutive rule by which a human being becomes a person is the following: “some human being [with moral function], x, counts as a person, y, if seen and treated in certain ways in the social world, C” (148). As Searle writes in The Construction of Social Reality, “the ‘counts as’ locution names a feature of the imposition of a status to which a function is attached by way of collective intentionality” (44). The classic example which both Searle and Oyowe appeal to is that of money. The paper and ink that constitute the physical properties of money intrinsically lack the function of currency. It is only when we, collectively, grant certain bits of paper the status of money, that said bits of paper actually become money. What the text does not resolve, on my reading, is the question of what function is being attached to humans by way of collective intentionality when they are incorporated into a community. This is a function which they must intrinsically lack absent incorporation.
The Problem of Conventionalism
An important problem in Oyowe’s account of personhood as a social fact is that he never clarifies what exactly the social function of personhood is. What is it that persons do which non-persons can’t do? We can’t answer this by pointing to moral agency or the capacity to reciprocate, since these are intrinsic properties for which a soft fact is not required. Presumably the social function has to do with being able to participate in particular community practices. Let’s call such practices “person-practices.” These are practices which one can perform only if one is a person, that is, if one has been bestowed personhood via social incorporation. But why must one have a moral function to perform these person-practices? Why must one be human? I assume that person-practices will be culturally relative, varying as the social norms of societies vary. As such, we might think that different societies will have different inclusion conditions on incorporation. Some societies might incorporate the oxen who till the soil, the dogs who aid the hunt, and the cats who catch the rodents. Just as we cannot know a priori what the social norms of any society will be, we cannot know a priori what the person-practices or incorporation conditions of any society will be.
We might also wonder whether there could be communities without persons, just as there have been communities in human history with no money. Yet Oyowe seems to suggest that communities must have persons; a community is necessarily a community of persons. To complete this thought would require an argument that links the existence of a community to the fulfillment of the social function that only personhood supplies; absent this social function, there can’t be a community. But because Oyowe doesn’t identify a concrete social function that personhood satisfies, we are left wondering why personhood, so understood, is necessary for community. If personhood really is a soft fact, then, we should expect that there could be personless communities, just as there are communities that don’t use money.
But the flip side presents an even more pressing point: if personhood is a soft fact dependent on a community’s social norms, humans with moral function can be arbitrarily excluded from personhood. The history of antiblack racism yields countless examples of how society can arbitrarily exclude humans from spheres of social life.
We might worry, then, that personhood itself is an arbitrary notion. Consider, for example, private clubs, like country clubs, that often have arbitrary membership rules. Not only are the rules of such clubs arbitrary, but the very existence of these clubs is arbitrary: they need not have ever existed, and in any event, they exist in order to exclude. If Oyowe’s view of personhood is correct, could we conclude that being a person is akin to being a country club member, something we might individually prefer over being excluded, but something the world might very well be better off with without? We are not better off without money, because money serves an important social function. Here again, we are compelled to ask what social function personhood serves.
Oyowe does address the concern of arbitrariness, offering three reasons why personhood is not arbitrary, but on my reading none of these are satisfactory. The first is that who can count as a person in a community is constrained by possession of certain intrinsic properties: only humans with a moral sense can count as a person. However, as we have seen, if personhood is a soft fact, we should expect different communities to arrive at different social norms concerning who—and what—can count as a person.
Oyowe’s second reason for suggesting that personhood is not arbitrary is that “the basic conventions linked to the conferral of person-status on each other in community cannot be modified arbitrarily. This is because underlying them are more stable human interests connected to responsibility, just deserts, and even survival. These interests could not be wished away or modified by human decision” (153). But if the conventions that confer person-status can vary from community to community, how can we know, a priori, that any given community cannot modify its conventions arbitrarily? The answer that Oyowe seems to want to give is that personhood is linked universally to responsibility and desert, which suggests that the social function of personhood we are in search of may have something to do with the ability to participate in responsibility practices. However, as we have seen, using Oyowe’s terminology, this is just an individual’s moral function, which is determined by the individual’s intrinsic properties. Having personhood bestowed on one does not make one able to participate, since that ability is already present independent of social incorporation.
Perhaps what is at issue is not ability to participate in responsibility practices as such but power or permission to participate. Most human adults have the ability to participate in judicial proceedings, whether as a lawyer, judge, juror, stenographer, bailiff or so on; many likewise have the ability to participate in a baseball game, whether as a pitcher, catcher, right fielder, umpire, etc. But the power to be recognized as a participant in these affairs depends on rules that determine who counts as playing any of these roles: I cannot waltz into a courtroom and participate as a lawyer in a proceeding. It is only after passing my state’s bar exam, for instance, that I am granted the power to participate as a lawyer in a legal proceeding. Perhaps Oyowe’s point, then, is just that only after my community has granted me with personhood do I attain power or permission to participate in my community’s responsibility practices. It is only if I am incorporated in a community that the community will recognize my property claim, my demand to treat me with respect, or my exhortation that injustices against others be made right. But it is hard to see how this beats back the charge of arbitrariness. Since Oyowe holds that there can be morally functioning human beings who are socially unincorporated, it would seem to follow that humans who are capable of participating in responsibility practices can be excluded from these practices. And this exclusion would be as arbitrary as being excluded from a country club because of the color of one’s skin. Why should my plea for justice not be recognized simply because I have not been incorporated into your community? Is not the fact that I possess “moral function” sufficient for you to treat my claims as you would your fellow community member?
Perhaps when Oyowe says that conventions for bestowing personhood cannot be arbitrary he doesn’t mean that these conventions have a firm moral or rational foundation but rather that they cannot be rescinded or changed on a whim; this would mean personhood conventions are non-arbitrary by virtue of their persistence but not necessarily their normativity. Because conventions are constituted by collective intentionality, they cannot be changed by any individual person: it is only if we, as a community, deny your social incorporation that you won’t count as a person. But this is a red herring. A concern with the arbitrariness of a putative social norm is fundamentally a concern with rational or moral foundations, not a concern with who is enforcing the rules. When we are concerned with the fact that an individual will be given the power to change certain rules—such as when we express concern that a certain person is being elevated to the Supreme Court—what we are primarily concerned with is not the descriptive fact that an individual will have the power to change the rules, but rather the normative fact that the person may make changes that lack a proper justification. (Of course, these two things might be connected if, for example, normative justification for rule making requires passing the through democratic procedures.)
Oppression and Moral Status
In chapter 4, Oyowe argues that oppression “depersonalizes.” The examples of oppression he focuses on are gender and racial oppression, the latter in the form of chattel slavery as practiced in the Antebellum South. Oyowe writes that “those like slaves and women who are deprived of [social incorporation, participation, and recognition] are either nonpersons or persons to a lesser degree than those who are not” (119–120).
A problem with this view can be elucidated in light of the empirical fact of what might be termed overlapping communities, a point well-illustrated by Michele Moody-Adams’s tour-de-force Fieldwork in Familiar Places. All of us live in overlapping cultures. Each of these cultures has its own social norms, some of which sometimes conflict. In the Antebellum South, Black humans were denied membership to the dominant White supremacist culture. But histories of Antebellum slavery equally demonstrate the rich norms and traditions of slave culture; hence, slave culture and White supremacist culture overlapped in the lives of morally functioning Black human beings.
If we take Oyowe’s view of personhood seriously, it would seem there can be no categorical statements about whether a being is a person. The question must always be, is this a person in this culture? Further we might wonder if it can really be true that any human is not incorporated into any community.
The issue of oppression is connected to that of moral status. Oyowe defends what may be characterized as a gradient or degreed theory of moral status, as opposed to a binary theory. According to gradient theories, an individual can have more or less moral status depending on how much of the moral status-granting property the individual has. An individual who satisfies a certain threshold of the relevant property has “full moral status” while individuals who fall short of that threshold will lack full moral status, but have less-than-full moral status on account of having some of the relevant property. According to binary views, moral status is like a light-switch: you either have it or you don’t. If you have the moral status granting property, then you have moral status full stop; if you lack the property, then you lack moral status, full stop.
Oyowe avers that only persons have full moral status. Individuals who are not persons lack full moral status. In the context of trade-offs, then, the interests of individuals with full moral status are to be given greater weight than individuals who lack full moral status. We have seen that for Oyowe, only community members are persons, and that there can be human non-persons. How do the interests of human non-persons compare to the interests of animal non-persons? For reasons that were not clear to this reader, Oyowe suggests that human non-persons are to count for more than animal non-persons. Oyowe’s chapter on moral status defends against a charge of speciesism made by Kai Horsthemke, but the defense left me convinced that the view is speciesist.
Oyowe seems to think that the speciesism issue rests on the question of species membership as delineating who has full moral status. “If species membership was the basis for moral status,” he writes, “human nonpersons, such as infants, would have the same moral status as persons” (70) From this he concludes that “Menkiti is not a speciesist” because those humans and nonhumans who lack full moral status do so for the same reason—namely, non-personhood (72).
On my view, this response fails unless we grant a particularly idiosyncratic meaning to “speciesism.” On its more conventional meaning, speciesism gives greater weight to the interests of a human than to like interests of a nonhuman animal, simply because the human is a human. The fact that not all human interests count equally is irrelevant to the question of speciesism. The relevant question is how human interests are weighted when compared to nonhuman interests. Oyowe argues that “relative to animals, human nonpersons have a higher, though not full, moral status” (71). I take this to mean that the interests of human nonpersons are to be given greater weight than the interests of nonhuman animals. But what justifies this differential weighting of interests if not species membership? Oyowe does not provide us with an explanation. He points to possible explanations, such as “modal personhood” or “modal relationalism,” but he doesn’t say what these views amount to or why they are not speciesist.
Things get worse for Oyowe when he tries to turn the table on the sentientist. Oyowe writes, “If Menkiti’s speciesism is mere prejudice, comparable to racism and sexism because it draws a line between human and animal interests, so too Horsthemke’s sentientism. …[A]t issue is the exclusion of some interests at all, not the inclusion of more” (72). This misunderstands the sentientist’s view. Here is how Peter Singer famously articulates it:
Bentham . . . is saying that we must consider the interests of all beings with the capacity for suffering or enjoyment. He is not excluding any interests from consideration, because the capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests, a condition that must be satisfied before we can properly speak of interests at all. (6)
Sentientists are not excluding interests by drawing a line between sentient and non-sentient beings. There are, rather, identifying sentience as the capacity for having interests. Now, one might disagree about whether this is the correct dividing line between beings that have interests and those that do not—biocentrists such as Paul W. Taylor and Kenneth Goodpaster argue that all living things have interests, and thus have full moral status—but this is a substantive philosophical question about the nature of interests. Whatever the case, sentientists are not arbitrarily drawing the moral status line at sentience. To be sentient is to have a stake in how one is treated. A plant can live or die, grow or shrivel. But insofar as plants lack sentience, they have no stake in what state they end up in. It doesn’t matter to the plant whether it lives or dies, grows or shrivel. At least, this is what the sentientist holds. Perhaps the sentientist is wrong and all living things have interests, but what matters is that the sentientist is not drawing a morally arbitrary line in the sand in the way that the speciestist does.
Added to this is Oyowe’s lack of clarity on the relation between personhood and “full moral status.” He states that “persons alone exemplify full moral status” (76). But only a page earlier, Oyowe recounts Menikit’s view as stating that “one might have full moral status but fail to be a person. Although being a person is sufficient, it is not necessary” (75). It has been suggested to me that perhaps what is at issue are multiple senses of “moral status,” some referring to what social-incorporated personhood bestows but others referring simply to one’s independent degree of “moral function.” But this would be unhelpful, for it would collapse the distinction between moral patienthood and moral agency.
We saw above that for Oyowe, personhood is a soft fact that is determined by collective intentionality. We also saw that Oyowe holds that slaves in slave societies and women in misogynistic societies lack personhood. If personhood is necessary for full moral status, this would seem to entail that slaves in slave societies and women in misogynistic societies lack full moral status. It should be pointed out that Oyowe does not hold that the fact that individuals lack full moral status entails that persons have no obligations toward them. What it does entail on his view, however, is that such individuals don’t have claimable rights (84), and that the comparable interests of beings with full moral status trump the interests of beings with less-than-full moral status. So, if slaves lack full moral status, then (a) they don’t have a claimable right to be freed, and (b) their interest in being freed from suffering is trumped by the comparable interests of the slave holder, who is a person on Oyowe’s view. While this may be a reasonable enough framework for describing an oppressive society’s social norms, I find it hard to accept a conception of personhood that has the normative implication that a slave lacks full moral status and a claimable right to be freed.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Personhood
When I ask my students what a “person” is, they typically respond by saying “a human.” According to the first definition of “person” in Webster’s Dictionary, my students are right. Many Western philosophers, however, use the term to refer to the capacity for moral agency, which on such accounts typically coincides with reason, such that not all humans are persons and not all persons are humans. According to Oyowe, personhood refers to being a socially-incorporated member of a community, for which moral agency is insufficient.
I have long held that a person is an individual with the capacity to reason. Oyowe’s book has prompted me to revise this view. On this new view, there is no such thing as personhood. Rather, “personhood” is a philosophical term of art. Its meaning is fixed by how a particular philosopher defines it. We cannot distinguish correct referents of the term “person” from incorrect referents; there are simply different referents. By contrast, I maintain that there are correct accounts of what makes one a “human being,” a “moral agent,” or a “member of a community.” These are certainly things we can disagree about. But when we disagree about what “personhood” refers to, we are not really having a disagreement. Suppose we characterize the three categories just referenced as denoting “humanhood,” “moralhood,” and “memberhood.” If I argue that memberhood requires social incorporation and you argue that moralhood does not require social incorporation, we are obviously not having a disagreement. And if we each state our view of what “personhood” is—say, I argue that social incorporation is necessary and sufficient for personhood while you argue that moral agency is necessary and sufficient for it—we are similarly not having a disagreement. Rather, we are just stipulating our two quite different ways of using the term “personhood.”
This speaks to what is perhaps most frustrating about Menkiti’s Moral Man. Oyowe presents his view as one that is in competition with what he calls Western views of personhood. According to Western views, personhood is a metaphysical fact determined by the intrinsic properties of an individual, such as possessing reason or moral agency. Oyowe opens his book with the criticism that Western views of personhood are individualistic: in focusing on reason they focus too narrowly on the intrinsic properties of an individual. While I think that these are rich grounds for criticism of many Western views, Oyowe’s account doesn’t satisfy in that regard. Indeed, Oyowe does not actually deny that individuals have the intrinsic properties identified by Western philosophers, or even that reason is an intrinsic property. Rather, he simply denies that this is sufficient for personhood. But in doing so, he is just providing a different stipulation as to what “personhood” refers to; he is not disagreeing with Western philosophers about the nature of reason or moral agency.
That being said, there is room for a communitarian disagreement with what is here called the “Western” conception of person. Reason, we might think, requires interactions with other minds. Perhaps we cannot formulate reasons for belief or action without interacting with others. It is only by living with others in a community that we acquire the capacity to reason. In this way, we might think, personhood does require community membership. Or, to put it another way, moralhood requires memberhood. In other words, we might locate a critique of predominant Western conceptions of personhood not in the additive requirement that a human with moral function also be socially incorporated, but through exploring whether moral function already presupposes something like social function.
This is of course but a mere sketch of a possible idea, though one I happen to find compelling. I was disappointed that Oyowe did not entertain an idea along these lines. Given the aim of the work, a comparison of Menkitian communitarianism with a “transcendental communitarianism” like that I just sketched would have gone a long way. That said, while this book did not live up to my loftier expectations for it, I am glad to have thought through the issues it raises. As is often the case with philosophy, I learned a lot by wrestling with arguments and claims I found much to disagree with.
Zachary Bachman
Zachary Bachman is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in ethical theory, applied ethics, and action theory.
