Baier, A. (1996). " A Naturalist View of Persons, opens in a new window". From Ch. 15 of Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, pp. 313-315 and 320-326. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Both Locke-on-personal-identity and Reid-on-personal-identity give the basis for personal with the individual. In both accounts, there is an internal metaphysical principle for personhood, with little mention of interpersonal contexts and social relations. Baier-on-personal-identity grounds it in relation to other people.
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Baier calls her theory a naturalist view of persons to emphasize the interdependence of persons. She was inspired by the idea of Mary Calkins personalist view of nature that emphasized the interdependence of different natural things.
“Our natural habitat, as persons, is among other persons. Our personhood shows in the way we are responsive to one another, responsive to earlier and later generations, responsive to the presence of other groups of persons…” (p. 326)
Characteristics that define a person based on this relational view
- that you were born of specific parents
- Locke also acknowledges the importance of origin, but only for the identity of human beings, not for the identity of a person. This is on the basis of Locke origin criterion
- the acquisition of certain skills
- the use of language that distinguishes between ourselves and other persons (“me”, “we”, “she”, “they” )
- the use of abilities needed for communal interactions = the games we play, like the games of truth, of making deals, of participating in religious practices, of conducting aggressive confrontations (war)
“In virtue of our long and helpless infancy, persons, who all begin as small persons, are necessarily social beings, who first learn from older persons, by play, by imitation, by correction. The naturalist knows that pride and shame are as often directed at parentage, home, and schooling, or at inherited wealth or inheritable diseases” (p. 320)
“Our capacity for play is, as Hume, Nietzsche, and others have recognized, an important member of the skills of personhood.” (p. 321)
Person as a status term
“The term ‘person’ is a status term, and it is our term. It is we who have to decide what that status is, and whether we give it to a human fetus, to other animals, to corporations…. Sometimes one wishes we could just drop the term, so heavily freighted is it with its theological past and with current controversies. But words are hard to kill. The only real strategy is to make do with the old concept, heavily burdened though it is.”
Here, Baier is saying that “person” is a status term that we apply. She points out that we, as a society, decide who or what counts as a person. This makes “personhood” a human-made concept, shaped by our values, laws, and moral views rather than by objective facts.
Baier also acknowledges how messy and emotionally charged the term has become because of its theological history (ideas about souls, divine image, etc.) and modern ethical debates (like abortion, animal rights, etc.).
Baier is embracing a kind of social constructivist account of personhood that is an anti-metaphysical and anti-realist view of persons.
Social constructivism
a theory emphasizing that individuals and societies construct their knowledge, identities, and realities through social interactions and cu
Problems with Baier
- If personhood is entirely a relational status, then what happens to the intimate, first-person relation each of us has with ourselves?
- There’s something uniquely personal about my access to my own consciousness—an immediacy that no one else can have.
- Baier’s relational and social conception of personhood doesn’t seem to account for this inner, self-reflective dimension—the sense in which I am specially related to myself.
- being a status term doesn’t necessarily mean that its application is grounded purely in social collectives; it is compatible and possible for a status term to grounded in some metaphysical fact, like how Locke-on-personal-identity treats “person” as a forensic status term (connected to moral and legal responsibility) but still grounds it in metaphysical facts
Thoughts
Baier’s conception of personhood aligns with the idea that each relationship in our lives draws out a different version of ourselves.
As a quote circulating online puts it: “When A loses B, they are also mourning the part of A that B brought out.” So when A loses B, they aren’t just grieving the other person — they’re grieving the version of themselves that existed only in relation to B. That part of the self can’t exist independently, because it was sustained by the mutual recognition, care, and interaction between A and B.