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Philip Cole, "Problems with "Persons"", Res Publica III/2 (1997), 165-183: This paper critically examines the concept of a person that has come to play a central role in medical ethics. That concept claims that the most morally valuable lives are possessed by persons, and persons are beings that possess rationality and self-consciousness. This view also holds that only persons are morally wronged when they are killed, because only persons have an interest in continued life, by virtue of their rationality and self-consciousness. The paper looks in detail at this view as expressed by John Harris in The Value of Life, and argues that, to the extent that Harris is interpreted as offering an account of the moral value of personhood in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions - those conditions being rationality and self-consciousness - this must be a misinterpretation. No such account of personhood is available: rather, personhood is a "cluster" concept, and a set of necessary and sufficient conditions cannot be supplied. The paper further argues that, although the concept of a person is a moral concept, the distinction between persons and non-persons is not a moral distinction: that is, from an account of the moral value of persons, nothing follows concerning the moral value of non-persons. From, this, the paper rejects the view that the persons/non-persons distinction coincides with the immorality/acceptability of killing boundary, by critically examining the arguments of Dan W. Brock in Life and Death. e-mail: p.cole@mdx.ac.uk

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