Personhood is the status of having outstanding moral worth. Yet the specific criteria that qualify someone as a person are controversial. In the West, personhood tends to be defined in terms of "sophisticated cognitive capacities;" yet, in other societies, such as sub-Saharan Africa, personhood is more often understood as a relational process. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a legal person (either a natural or a juridical person) has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.
Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood, and the beginning of human personhood. In the 21st century, corporate personhood is an existing Western concept; granting non-human entities personhood, which has also been referred to a "personhood movement", can bridge Western and Indigenous legal systems.
Processes through which personhood is recognized socially and legally vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood might not be universal. Philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire have argued for a cross-border view of persons as emergent from social relational processes involving human beings. They write that a person "emerges out of a complex configuration of relationships involving human beings; we might say they become a ‘being-in-relationship.’ The emergent ‘being-in-relationship’ is a person, showing aspects, including superlative moral worth, not present before the relationships came together." Anthropologist Beth Conklin has shown how personhood is tied to social relations among the Wari' people of Rondônia, Brazil. Bruce Knauft's studies of the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea depict a context in which individuals become persons incrementally, again through social relations. Likewise, Jane C. Goodale has also examined the construction of personhood in Papua New Guinea.
Philosophical definitions
In philosophy, the word "person" may refer to various concepts. The concept of personhood is difficult to define in a way that is universally accepted, due to its historical and cultural variability and the controversies surrounding its use in some contexts. Capacities or attributes common to definitions of personhood can include human nature, agency, self-awareness, a notion of the past and future, and the possession of rights and duties, among others.
Boethius, a philosopher of the early 6th century CE, gives the definition of "person" as "an individual substance of a rational nature" ("Naturæ rationalis individua substantia").
According to the naturalist epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the term may designate any human or non-human agent who possesses continuous consciousness over time; and is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.
According to Charles Taylor, the problem with the naturalist view is that it depends solely on a "performance criterion" to determine what is an agent. Thus, other things (e.g. machines or animals) that exhibit "similarly complex adaptive behaviour" could not be distinguished from persons. Instead, Taylor proposes a significance-based view of personhood:
Relatedly, Martin Heidegger developed his understanding of the distinctive kind of being which a person is as Dasein. The term's literal means an existence as a "being-there" or "there-being." Heidegger writes that, "Dasein itself has a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities; [...] it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it." For Heidegger, the way in which Being is an issue for a person as Dasein is their future oriented caring. This distinguishes Dasein from function or performance criteria of personhood.
Others also dispute functional criteria of personhood, such as philosopher Francis J. Beckwith, who argues that it is rather the underlying personal unity of the individual:
This belief in the underlying unity of an individual is a metaphysical and moral belief referred to as the substance view of personhood.
Philosopher J. P. Moreland clarifies this point:
Harry Frankfurt writes that, in reference to a definition by P. F. Strawson, "What philosophers have lately come to accept as analysis of the concept of a person is not actually analysis of that concept at all." He suggests that the concept of a person is intimately connected to free will, and describes the structure of human volition according to first- and second-order desires:
According to Nikolas Kompridis, there might also be an intersubjective, or interpersonal, basis to personhood:
Mary Midgley defines a "person" as being a conscious, thinking being, which knows that it is a person (self-awareness). She also wrote that the law can create persons.
Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are: is alive, is aware, feels positive and negative sensations, has emotions, has a sense of self, (controls its own behaviour, recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities. While many of White's criteria are somewhat anthropocentric, some animals such as dolphins would still be considered persons. Some animal rights groups have also championed recognition for animals as "persons".
Another approach to personhood, Paradigm Case Formulation, used in descriptive psychology and developed by Peter Ossorio, involves the four interrelated concepts of 1) The Individual Person, 2) Deliberate Action, 3) Reality and the Real World, and 4) Language or Verbal Behavior. All four concepts require full articulation for any one of them to be fully intelligible. More specifically, a Person is an individual whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical pattern. Deliberate Action is a form of behavior in which a person (a) engages in an Intentional Action, (b) is cognizant of that, and (c) has chosen to do that. A person is not always engaged in a deliberate action but has the eligibility to do so. A human being is an individual who is both a person and a specimen of Homo sapiens. Since persons are deliberate actors, they also employ hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical reasons when selecting, choosing or deciding on a course of action. As part of our "social contract" we expect that the typical person can make use of all four of these motivational perspectives. Individual persons will weigh these motives in a manner that reflects their personal characteristics. That life is lived in a "dramaturgical" pattern is to say that people make sense, that their lives have patterns of significance. The paradigm case allows for nonhuman persons, potential persons, nascent persons, manufactured persons, former persons, "deficit case" persons, and "primitive" persons. By using a paradigm case methodology, different observers can point to where they agree and where they disagree about whether an entity qualifies as a person.
Philosophical critiques of personhood
Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has written a trilogy of books covering the paradigm of the person in modern political thought: Third Person (2012), Two (2015), and Persons and Things (2015). Esposito’s metapolitical analysis of personhood draws together three unique bodies of literature: critiques of the proprietary prejudice in liberal political philosophy (Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt), Martin Heidegger’s critique of the humanist model of the proper subject (Eigentlichkeit), and Foucauldian biopolitics. Esposito argues that the "dispositif of the person” that animates modern thought creates a series of divisions in humanity.Esposito, Roberto. “The Dispositif of the Person,” in Law, Culture and the Humanities volume 8, number 1, 2012, pp. 17–30. In juridical-political terms, the person is an exclusive model of private individual who is immunized from the obligations and duties that are required of individuals to be a part of a community. In biopolitical terms, the dispositif of the person creates a division in humanity, which separates proper life (bíos, qualified life) from animal, or improper life (zoê, bare life). This schism works on a collective and individual level. Collectively, only proper lives who are recognized by law as legal persons are treated as rights-bearing subjects. Individually:
Esposito’s solution is to conceptualize a notion of the “impersonal.” Starting from a critique of the Roman legal and Christian theological concept of the person, he develops a notion of the “impersonal” understood as the form of a possible reunification between biological life and intellectual life, body and person. The impersonal represents a break from the private, rights-bearing, and immunized individual in modern liberalism. It creates an opening for developing an affirmative notion of biopolitical life and for being in community (or communitas).Esposito, Roberto. 2009. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell. Stanford University Press.
Research
As an application of social psychology and other disciplines, phenomena such as the perception and attribution of personhood have been scientifically studied. Typical questions addressed in social psychology are the accuracy of attribution, processes of perception and the formation of bias. Various other scientific and medical disciplines address the myriad of issues in the development of personality.
Consciousness in humans
Human consciousness is not located in a single “center” but emerges from interacting brain systems. One useful starting point is the reticular formation, a network in the brainstem that regulates arousal and wakefulness. It connects to the thalamus and projects broadly to the cerebrum, forming part of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). This system does not generate the content of consciousness, but it enables it—without sufficient arousal, cortical activity cannot support awareness. In this sense, consciousness depends on both brainstem activation and cortical processing, not one alone.
Building on this, mainstream neuroscience distinguishes between arousal (brainstem–thalamic systems) and awareness (distributed cortical networks). The thalamus acts as a relay and integrator, coordinating sensory and cognitive signals across the cortex. Personhood, therefore, arises from large-scale integration rather than a single structure.
The sense of agency—the feeling that “I am the one causing my actions”—is linked to specific cortical regions. The prefrontal cortex (including Brodmann areas 9 and 10) supports planning and decision-making; the supplementary motor area (BA6) contributes to initiating voluntary movement; and the inferior parietal lobule (BA39/40) helps distinguish self-generated actions from external events. The anterior cingulate cortex (BA24/32) is involved in monitoring actions and detecting conflicts, reinforcing the sense of control. Agency emerges when these systems align predictions, intentions, and sensory feedback.
Thus, personhood is not a fixed essence or a solitary voice. It is a dynamic construction: a coordination between bodily states, brainstem activation, cortical integration, and social context. Consciousness provides the field of experience, while personhood reflects how that experience is organized into a coherent, acting self.
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