Personhood in the context of "Beginning of human personhood"

A person (pl.: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts.

In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes.

Prosopon is a theological term used in Christian theology as designation for the concept of a divine person. The term has a particular significance in Christian triadology (study of the Trinity), and also in Christology.

In English language, the form prosopon is used mainly in scholarly works, related to theology, philosophy or history of religion, while it is also commonly translated as person, both in scholarly or non-scholarly writings. The term prosopon should not be confused with the term hypostasis, which is related to similar theological concepts, but differs in meaning.

In philosophy, a subject is a being that exercises agency, undergoes conscious experiences, and is situated in relation to other things that exist outside itself; thus, a subject is any individual, person, or observer. An object is any of the things observed or experienced by a subject, which may even include other beings (thus, from their own points of view: other subjects).

A simple common differentiation for subject and object is: an observer versus a thing that is observed. In certain cases involving personhood, subjects and objects can be considered interchangeable where each label is applied only from one or the other point of view. Subjects and objects are related to the philosophical distinction between subjectivity and objectivity: the existence of knowledge, ideas, or information either dependent upon a subject (subjectivity) or independent from any subject (objectivity).

Personal life is the course or state of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity.

Apart from hunter-gatherers, most pre-modern peoples' time was limited by the need to meet necessities such as food and shelter through subsistence farming; leisure time was scarce.People identified with their social role in their community and engaged in activities based on necessity rather than on personal choice. Privacy in such communities was rare.

Personism is an ethical philosophy of personhood as typified by the thought of the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. It amounts to a branch of secular humanism with an emphasis on certain rights-criteria. Personists believe that rights are conferred to the extent that a creature is a person. Michael Tooley provides the relevant definition of a person, saying it is a creature that is "capable of desiring to continue as a subject of experience and other mental states".

A worldview like secular humanism is personism when the empathy and values are extended to the extent that the creature is a person, so for example apes get very similar rights while insects get vastly fewer rights. Consequently, a member of the human species may not necessarily fit the definition of "person" and thereby not receive all the rights bestowed to a person. Hence, such philosophers have engaged in arguing that certain disabled individuals (such as those with a mental capacity that is similar to or is perceived as being similar to an infant) are not persons. This philosophy is also supposedly open to the idea that such non-human persons as machines, animals, and extraterrestrial intelligences may be entitled to certain rights currently granted only to humans. The basic criteria for the entitlement of rights, are the intellect (thinking ability, problem solving in real life circumstances, and not mere calculation), and sometimes empathy, although not necessarily, as not all humans are empathetic; however, indifference in the pain of others and crime are certainly criteria for the deprivation of rights. Genuine empathy is not required to achieve acceptable behavior, but a digital limbic system and a dopaminergic pathways alternative, would deliver a more acceptable result for future MPs judging on rights expansion. Personism may have views in common with transhumanism.

Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.