Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
Am J Bioeth. 2024 Jan;24(1):3-12. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2022.2160515. Epub 2023 Jan 12.
The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of "personhood" is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood.
人格概念一直是关于堕胎、植物人或最小意识状态患者以及患有晚期痴呆症患者的生物伦理学辩论的核心。最近，该概念被用于思考与人类脑类器官、人工智能、上传思维、人与动物嵌合体和人类胚胎等相关的新问题。一种常见的做法是询问这些实体与（规范意义上的）人有什么共同之处，然后根据这些共同点得出我们对他们（或不对他们）负有什么义务的结论。本文认为，“人格”的概念充其量对当今的大部分生物伦理学没有帮助，最坏的情况是它具有危害性和有害性。我建议我们（生物伦理学家）停止使用人格概念，而是更直接地提出规范性问题（例如，我们应该如何对待这个存在，以及为什么要这样做？），并使用其他哲学概念（例如，利益、感知、承认尊重）来帮助我们回答这些问题。现在是生物伦理学停止谈论人格的时候了。
