Person Ascriptions, Profound Disabilities and Our Self-Imposed Duties: A Reply to Loretta Kopelman

Abstract

Although various authors, especially philosophers, have written extensively on the concept of person — expanding and expounding on the necessary and sufficient conditions which warrant the non-trivial version of the claim that ‘Persons ought to be respected’ — Professor Kopelman has focused her attention on a more specific problem and on our relation to (what I shall call) ‘atypical individuals’, though this fine tuning has not made matters any less complex. On the contrary, as R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer acknowledge, just prior to the close of the first chapter in their Respect for Persons, and after turning from their consideration of persons to atypical persons, “we are still left with some cases which are difficult to explain in terms of respect for persons.” Indeed, Professor Kopelman apparently would agree with their claim that although these cases “present difficulties to any theory of morality, [this] is not really an excuse for failing to make an attempt to account for them” ([2], p. 34). Whereas Downie and Telfer cite the cases of “children, the senile, lunatics and animals” and observe that these cases present difficulties, Kopelman directs her thought over a range of individuals who are differentiated as mildly, moderately, severely and profoundly retarded. She is, of course, fully aware of the value-laden baggage which such language is compelled to bear; she herself has carefully illustrated that a variety of everyday ascriptions of atypical individuals have built-in limitations. But just so long as general usage and ordinary language engender more social good than ill, on Kopelman’s view, such problematic usage may be permitted.¹ With this I find no cause to quarrel.