Kinds of Persons, Kinds of Rights, Kinds of Bodies

Perhaps because, as Descartes famously remarked, commonsense is the best distributed thing in this world, there seems to be some very wide agreement as to the meaning of words such as "person," "rights" and "body." "Person" appears to be just another synonym for "human being," and "rights" and "body" appear to denote intrinsic properties of all persons, that is, things all persons have in common. This essay argues that there are contexts in which neither assumption is true, even in the restricted area of legal doctrines and debates. The first section discusses circumstances in which non-human beings can nevertheless be defined, and have indeed been defined, as persons. The second section describes discussions about the acquisition of rights by certain objects (if rights were intrinsic properties of certain objects, such discussions would have been as idle as debating whether one should add "gold" to the list of the intrinsic properties of granite). These two preliminary sections lead into the third section, the longest, in which several apparently opposed uses of the word "body" in legal discussions are examined at some length. I am therefore not inclined to talk about the "person," "rights" or "the body," and to talk instead, if only to make the trivial point that many things are left undreamt by our philosophies, legal and otherwise, about kinds of persons (indeed about kinds of "person"), kinds of rights, and kinds of bodies. I am also inclined to describe statements or phrases like "She is a person," "The Rights of Man" or "All persons have bodies" as honorary terms of praise, or implicit descriptions of certain kinds of future behavior, that is, as promises, rather than as retrospective descriptions of facts or states of things. All this is prelude to a larger project, which has to do with the attribution of properties to bits and pieces of the world and not primarily with juridical matters.' (Given my lack of formal legal training, that is of course a most fortunate circumstance.) In the expanded project, but not here, I offer a few metaphysical hypotheses on the function of such attri-