Personhood: An emergent view from Africa and the West

Abstract

African understandings of personhood are complex, with different accounts emphasizing distinct aspects of what it means to be a person. Some accounts stress excellence of character and performing well in social roles and relationships, while others focus on innate moral qualities of individuals independent of their conduct and character. This paper sheds new light on these twin aspects of personhood. It proposes a way to navigate these dual features by bringing African and Western personhood into conversation, building on the strengths of each approach, and developing a new view of personhood that we call, Emergent Personhood. Section 1 introduces diverse approaches to personhood within African thought. Section 2 compares African and Western approaches. Section 3 evaluates advantages and disadvantages of each and identifies conditions that any account of personhood must meet to leverage the advantages and avoid the disadvantages identified. Section 4 introduces Emergent Personhood, which meets these conditions. Section 5 concludes that expanding the conversation about personhood across cultures enriches an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a person.

1. INTRODUCTION

African understandings of personhood are complex and multifaceted. This paper addresses an important distinction between those African views that stress individuals’ moral character and those that stress individuals’ innate moral qualities. Approaches emphasizing moral character embrace the idea that to be a person is to habitually behave well toward others and a community and to consistently engage in prosocial ways. Individuals who qualify as persons in this sense have regularly acted in ways that show generosity, friendliness, compassion and other qualities that benefit others and society. Menkiti stresses this aspect of African personhood, elaborating that, “persons become persons only after a process of incorporation…For personhood is something which has to be achieved, and is not given simply because one is born of human seed.”¹ Stressing moral character, Gyekye states that a person is “humble,” “has respect for others,” and “it might be said of someone who exhibited highly elevated moral standards that they are “truly a person.”² Nkula‐N'Senga focuses on Bumuntu, which “means the quintessence of personhood,” and characterizes it as, “manifested in four basic ways: good thought and good heart (mucima muya), good speech (ludimi luya), good actions (bilongwa biya), and good way of looking at people and at the whole world.”³ It includes cultivating compassion, kindness, generosity, truthfulness, honesty, hospitality. While personhood is not an inevitable feature of growing older, some African scholars hold that maturing is essential.⁴ For example, Menkiti writes that “the older an individual gets, the more of a person he becomes.”⁵

When African scholars stress innate moral properties of persons, their attention turns to qualities of individuals that are held independent of people's relations to others or to social achievements within a group. Emphasizing the second sense of personhood implies that being a person does not depend on how one comports oneself in the world and would be present even if one behaved poorly. Gyekye, for example, emphasize the second aspect of personhood when they say, “even if at the end of the day [an individual] failed to attain the expected [social] status, his personhood would not for that reason diminish, even though he may lose social respect in the eye of the community. So that it is social status not personhood at which individuals could fail.”⁶ Gyekye adds, “one is a person because of what he is, not because of what he has acquired. ⁷ Likewise, Wiredu proclaims, “a person is social not only because he or she lives in a community…but also because, by internal constitution, a human being is part of a social whole.”⁸

The emphasis on innate properties within African thought frequently points outward to capacities for communing with others. For example, Metz refers to the innate capacity to share a way of life and care about others,⁹ while Molefe¹⁰ points to sympathy for others. Human beings who lack these qualities are fully human; however, they are not considered persons with full moral standing. Thus, Metz writes that while “typical humans” have an equal moral status, humans who are “utterly incapable of other‐regard” are not persons: “extremely autistic, psychopathic, and mentally incapacitated human beings lack a dignity comparable to ours, supposing they are indeed by nature utterly incapable of being subjects of a friendly relationship.”^{11 , 12}

Whether emphasis is placed on character or properties, the general idea is the same: someone (human or nonhuman) who qualifies as a person has moral standing to demand that others treat them with respect and see them in a certain way.¹³ Irrespective of whether prosocial conduct or innate properties are stressed, someone who counts as a person is thought to have superlative moral worth, variously expressed as having an entitlement to life, an outstanding value or dignity, or value for one's own sake. On the first, character‐based, view, the emphasis is on grounding moral personhood on social standing earned by habitually engaging in prosocial acts. On the second, property‐based view, what is stressed as a ground for moral personhood is innate qualities that a being has independent of their conduct or performance. Notably, in the African tradition, both character‐ and property‐based features tend to point outward, to behaving well with others, or having the innate capacity to do so.

Within African thought, different ways of reckoning these dual dimensions of personhood are apparent. Behrens proposes that character‐based elements of personhood are characteristically African, while property‐based approaches are characteristically Western: “In Western thought, personhood is concerned with the status of moral patients, whereas the African approach focuses on the character of a person as a moral agent.”¹⁴ A second response equates African personhood with having certain innate qualities, and relegates concerns about moral character to other moral domains. For instance, Oyowe maintains that virtues and vices are local and relative, while personhood and human rights concern core properties humans share.¹⁵ A third view seeks to integrate dual features into a single coherent account, arguing that either aspect alone “does not tell us the whole story.”¹⁶ For example, Molefe and Muade defend an integrated approach by noting deficiencies of singling out just one dimension of personhood: if personhood is exclusively about innate capacities, how do we account for duties towards humans without these capacities; if personhood is just about excellence of character, how do we explain moral equality.¹⁷ Ikuenobe also seeks to integrate personhood's dual aspects, arguing that character and status are conceptually linked: personhood derives from “naturally endowed capacities” that include “sociality or the capacity for communal relations,” rather than being “solipsistic, individualist, isolationist, and reclusive.”¹⁸ For this reason, Ikuenobe finds it problematic to conceive of innate properties “as intrinsically moral with a duty of respect without including how humans use their capacities or conduct themselves in communal relations.”¹⁹ Others stress that many objections to African accounts of personhood are “fixated on the moral perfectionist facet of personhood, tending to overlook its dignity facet.”²⁰ Including both dimensions furnishes a strong defense against these objections.

This paper sheds new light on the character‐property distinction by engaging African and Western philosophies in a conversation about personhood. Section 2 tracks salient differences between African views that emphasize character and Western views that emphasize innate properties. These differences relate to whether the source of moral worth is extrinsic or intrinsic, earned or unearned, scalar or binary, changing or stable, and derivative or non‐derivative. Section 3 critically evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of African and Western approaches considering these features. It proposes requirements for a theory of personhood that builds‐in advantages of African and Western views while avoiding disadvantages. Section 4 adds a new thread to the conversation about personhood, proposing a new view, Emergent Personhood. Section 5 concludes that engaging African and Western approaches to personhood can enlarge and deepen understandings of what it means to be a person.

Throughout the paper, we use African and Western to indicate views widely held among people in those regions. We do not claim to represent all views from Africa, or the West, nor do we claim that African or Western ideas are ‘pure’ or untouched by outside influences. We recognize that people outside those regions may share the views in question.

2. A NOVEL APPROACH TO A PERENNIAL PROBLEM

The distinction between accounts of personhood that accentuate moral character and those that stress innate properties of individuals can generate confusion, since it is often unclear which aspect is being considered, which takes precedence, and even whether the two features can be brought together in a coherent way. As further distinctions are added to the mix, complexities multiply. For starters, ‘person’ is ambiguous in some African languages. Gyekye points to the dual meanings of both the Akan word for person, onipa, and the Yoruba word, eniyan –each can refer either to the ontological feature of being a human being or to the normative sense of being a human being who has attained a high moral standing.²¹ This ambiguity becomes confusing when it is unclear which sense of person is being referred to. Second, beyond linguistic ambiguity, each approach underscores different ideas about how to portray personhood in its best light. Here, the disagreement does not turn on the meaning of the word ‘person,’ but rather, the best way to present personhood philosophically.

Navigating these two senses of personhood, we gain inspiration from a way of philosophizing Chimakonam characterizes as, “engaging in a conversational encounter.”²² This approach commences by discerning distinct conversational threads and bringing them together—multiplying, rather than eliminating threads, and enlarging, rather than narrowing, philosophical debate. Following this method, we introduce new threads into the conversation about property and character views of personhood by comparing salient features of African and Western viewpoints, pointing to key differences, and playing these distinct traditions off one another.

2.1. African personhood: character‐based views

While African character‐based views are varied, they often include certain hallmark features. First, they frequently emphasize relational aspects and ties between individuals as key components of personhood. According to Gbadegesin, “the ‘I’ is just a ‘We’ seen from another perspective.”²³ Shutte puts the point this way: “In European philosophy of whatever kind, the self is always envisaged as something ‘inside’ a person, or at least as a kind of container of mental properties and powers. In African thought it is seen as ‘outside’ subsisting in relationship to what is other, the natural and social environment.²⁴” Menkiti likewise asserts, “in the African view it is the community which defines the person as person, not some isolated static quality of rationality, will, or memory.”²⁵ Metz associates the African tradition with the position that “the essence of any concrete, natural object is, at least in part, necessarily constituted by its relationships with elements of the world beyond the thing's intrinsic properties.”²⁶

Second, many African scholars regard the character‐based aspect of personhood as an achievement realized through ongoing effort. They hold that the high moral status associated with being a person in this sense implies certain performative acts, such as actually being in community with others and displaying moral excellence in relating. As noted, this approach aligns with character‐based views. For example, Molefe writes, “the call for the individual to aspire to attain personhood is an invitation to develop those morally relevant facets of her nature, or more specifically, to develop a morally virtuous character.”²⁷

Third, African ways of thinking lend themselves to the idea that personhood is a matter of degree, reflecting the fact that individuals can display person‐conferring qualities to varying extents. Thus, it might be said that someone is ‘more’ or ‘less’ of a person depending on the degree of moral excellence they exhibit. Many African accounts regard personhood to be aspirational and unfinished over the whole course of a person's life. Lauer maintains, “personhood is not a birthright, but a chosen mission,” and adds, “an individual's achievement is recognized as the success of a whole community's capacity to nourish its robust, capable, responsible and differently resourced members.”²⁸ According to Menkiti, personhood is “the sort of thing which has to be attained and is attained in direct proportion as one participates in communal life through the discharge of the various obligations defined by one's stations.”²⁹

Fourth, African personhood, with its aspirational emphasis, inclines to the view that the character dimension of personhood changes, and ideally increases, over a person's life. Illustrative is Menkiti, who portrays personhood as an arc, marked by ontological ascent and descent.³⁰ Thus, an infant is not yet a person, but a ‘mere dangler,’ while a newly deceased individual persists as a person, while they are remembered, later joining “the nameless dead” and slipping into “personal non‐existence…becoming once again…unincorporated non‐persons.”³¹ The general idea is that as individuals move through their lives, they can forge relationships that grow more meaningful and ethically significant over time, maturing their moral character and the possibility for moral excellence.³²

A final feature of African personhood concerns whether ‘person’ in the character‐based sense is foundational or derivative. Two distinct positions are apparent. The first (sometimes called, ‘strong’ or ‘radical’) holds that being a person is derivate of participating in a community. Menkiti, for example, endorses the view that “the ‘we’ associated with community is a thoroughly fused, collective ‘we,’”³³ rendering community a prior, necessary condition for the existence of persons. Likewise, Mbiti says, “The community must… make, create, or produce the individual; for the individual depends on the corporate group.”³⁴ A second position (sometimes called, ‘moderate’ or ‘restricted’) regards person and community as co‐constitutive. Eze espouses a moderate stance, describing a contemporaneous formation of persons and communities; one cannot exist without the other.³⁵ Although both approaches underscore a tight connection between persons and communities, it would be wrong to characterize these views as expecting people to follow social rules blindly.³⁶ The Yoruba proverb conveys this point well: “each individual must use their own hands to improve their own character (Owo ara eni, La afi I tunwa ara enii se).”³⁷ When moral dissenters stand up for what they think is right, they are persons in the fullest sense, enacting moral excellence.³⁸

2.2. Western personhood: Property Based Approaches

Contemporary Western personhood brings distinctly different aspects to light. First, Western personhood generally pinpoints intrinsic qualities of individuals, especially higher cognitive capacities, such as consciousness, self‐awareness, rationality, or the capacity to feel pleasure and pain as requirements for personhood. For example, discussing abortion and the moral status of the fetus, Warren begins with the question, what qualities would a hypothetical alien require to qualify as a person, and argues that aliens are not persons if they lack certain innate properties, such as sentience, consciousness, self‐consciousness, reason, self‐motivated activity, and the capacity for language.³⁹

In keeping with this approach, Kantian ethics identifies the inner capacity of the will to act based on moral laws it gives itself to be the hallmark of having high moral worth and dignity.⁴⁰ For Kant, ‘autonomy of the will’ indicates the capacity of a rational will, uninfluenced by outside sources, to choose the moral laws to which it will be subject. Korsgaard surmises that for Kant, “Any attempt to control the actions and reactions of another by any means except an appeal to reason treats her as a mere means, because it attempts to reduce her to a mediate cause.”⁴¹ Similarly, Schneewind interprets Kant as saying, “Because we are autonomous, each of us must be allowed a social space within which we may freely determine our own action.”⁴² According to Kantian ethics, pro‐social virtues like generosity and charity are problematic as a basis for moral worth, because they hinge on a do‐gooder's involuntary temperament and render beneficiaries dependent.⁴³

Another leading Western account, utilitarianism, holds that being ‘morally considerable’ depends on the internal psychological ability to suffer or have enjoyments.⁴⁴ Any being with this ability deserves to have their interests factored into the calculus that determines which action brings about the greatest good.⁴⁵ Bentham, for example, held that the relevant question for determining moral considerability was “not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”⁴⁶ Singer contrasts beings with the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyments with those that lack this capacity, claiming, “It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer.”⁴⁷

Second, within Western approaches, the qualities that standout as a basis for personhood are generally unearned. For example, regardless of whether what confers dignity is a rational will (as Kant suggests) or the ability to suffer and have enjoyments (as Bentham indicates), individuals do not deserve these qualities but simply have them or don't. Darwall underscores this point, distinguishing two kinds of respect: appraisal and recognition.⁴⁸ Recognition respect is “the disposition to give appropriate weight or consideration in one's practical deliberations to some fact about the object and to regulate one's conduct by constraints derived from that fact.”⁴⁹ By contrast, appraisal respect is based on our own favorable estimation of a someone's merits and character in a particular pursuit. Western accounts of personhood typically hold that what makes someone a person are qualities they have antecedent to and independent of others’ appraisal.

Third, leading voices in Western philosophy generally regard personhood as a binary, all‐or‐none designation. The general idea is that being a person requires crossing a ‘finish‐line,’ and all beings that meet certain requirements for personhood cross this line and have the status, and that status is full.⁵⁰ In keeping with this assessment, Kant is generally interpreted as holding that “basic moral status does not come in degrees. It is always equal to that of other people regardless of the level, if any, at which our moral capacities and dispositions are developed, realized or exercised.”⁵¹ Likewise, utilitarians are generally understood as affirming that any being who crosses the line of having a capacity for suffering and enjoyments is morally considerable. While sentience and the capacity to suffer may vary in quality and degree, once a threshold capacity to suffer and enjoy is met, the conferral of moral considerability applies. In the Western framework, this same all‐or‐nothing approach applies to beings with the potential to develop morally salient qualities in the future, such as fetuses and infants. For example, Thomson says ‘an acorn is not an oak tree;’ analogously, a prenatal human being has the potential to become a person but does not meet the bar for personhood.⁵²

Fourth, Western thinking lends itself to regarding personhood as mostly stable throughout life. Once the finish line is crossed, a person has a generally secure moral status. Still, it is possible on Western accounts for an individual to lose full moral status and become a non‐person. For example, serious illness, such as advanced Alzheimer's disease, or serious injury, such as anoxic brain injury resulting from cardiac arrest, can rob someone of personhood if it leads to the loss of qualities like sentience and moral reasoning deemed necessary for personhood. Barring such events, personhood, once attained, remains constant until death, which is defined by the cessation of personhood‐conferring properties, such as consciousness or other cognitive functions.

Finally, Western approaches standardly regard personhood as foundational and community as derivate. Typically, the community is seen as deriving from the choices that persons make from a standpoint outside society. For example, the social contract tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regards civil society as based on the consent of individuals in a state of nature, outside civil society. Before entering society, individuals are pictured as persons possessing natural and inalienable rights and the capacity for free and rational choice.

Table 1 recaps the discussion of Section Two, noting five contrasting features of character‐based African personhood and property‐based Western personhood.

Table 1.

Comparing Character‐Based African Views & Property‐Based Western Views of Persons.

	African	Western
1. Intrinsic or extrinsic? 2. Is the source of value inside the object or outside in an individual's relations to others?	Mostly extrinsic	Intrinsic
3. Earned or unearned? 4. Is personhood an achievement an individual deserves credit for?	Earned	Unearned
5. Scalar or binary? 6. Is personhood a matter of degree or all‐or‐nothing?	Scalar	Binary
7. Stable or changing? 8. Does personhood usually change or remain stable over a person's life?	Changing	Mostly stable (absent severe disease/injury)
9. Derivative or non‐derivative? 1. Is personhood a basic concept or derived from other concepts?	Derivative/partially derivative	Non‐derivative

KEY: Western = Kantian and utilitarian ethics; African = character‐based African views.

To summarize, African views of personhood that emphasize moral character tend to regard personhood as extrinsic, earned, scalar, changing, and mostly or partly derivative of community. In these five respects, African character‐based views differ from Western property‐based views of personhood. African views of personhood that stress individuals' innate properties also differ substantially from Western approaches, due to their emphasis, noted previously (Section 1), on outward‐facing prosocial capacities. Thus, while Kantian and utilitarian property‐based approaches tend to stress internal states such as consciousness, the capacity to suffer, or the ability to reason about morality, African property‐based approaches tend to accentuate the ability to commune with and sympathize with others.

3. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF AFRICAN AND WESTERN PERSONHOOD

In this section, we critically examine the African and Western approaches to personhood discussed in Section 2, identifying advantages and disadvantages of each across the five parameters considered: intrinsic or extrinsic, earned or unearned, scalar or binary, stable or changing, derivative or non‐derivative.

3.1. African Personhood

Consider first, the advantages of African personhood. It is an advantage of both character‐focused and property‐focused versions of African personhood that they provide a secular standard for personhood, namely relating to others in prosocial ways or having the innatee capacity to relate. This aspect of African personhood was not a serious contender in the West until quite recently, when certain strands within Western thought, such as feminist,^{53 , 54 , 55 , 56} and communitarian philosophies,^{57 , 58} reacted to what they considered excessively rationalist and individualistic elements in Western thought.⁵⁹

Second, African personhood brings the advantage of providing a secure basis for social duties to others and the community, since being a person hinges on fulfilling these duties or at least having the capacity to do so. By emphasizing duties before rights, African philosophy encourages seeing oneself as part of a group with associated responsibilities. African societies tend to attach honor and social esteem to consistently helping others.

In addition to these advantages, African approaches that stress prosocial conduct carry distinct advantages when it comes to the moral standing of nonhumans, including not only animals,⁶⁰ but the natural and built environment,^{61 , 62} by viewing them as prospective persons and regarding their moral status and personhood along a continuum, rather than all‐or‐nothing. African views also invite a nuanced assessment of the moral standing of novel entities, such as artificially intelligent agents.^{63 , 64} Generally, African ways of thinking promise more finely grained judgments about the personhood of diverse creatures and things.

Yet, African personhood also brings significant drawbacks. First, some renderings of African personhood exclude many healthy adult human beings from the ranks of personhood, either because they regard those who habitually harm others or perform poorly in social roles as lesser persons or ‘non‐persons’ or because they exclude human beings that utterly lack the capacity to commune with others. It can be tempting in cases where people commit moral atrocities to deny their humanity or personhood, but they are human beings and persons like us. Likewise, it can be tempting to demote the moral standing of human beings with severe intellectual impairments, placing unimpaired humans (or intelligent animals) above them, yet they are persons like us. Notably, some African philosophers explicitly reject discriminating in these ways. Tangwa, for instance, holds that “Moral consideration and desert, in the Nso’ conception, are indiscriminately due to all human beings, regardless of their individuating characteristics, status, or social rank.”⁶⁵

Second, it is a conspicuous feature and potential disadvantage of character‐focused African accounts that gaining or losing personhood depends on others’ appraisal. While Gyekye underscores supererogation as a positive, aspirational element in African thought, its downside is to diminish the personhood of those who fall short or exclude outright those who habitually misbehave.⁶⁶ African feminists critiquing ubuntu have flagged concerns that community determinations of who qualifies as a person embed existing power hierarchies, such as “privileging some persons on the basis of, for example, unequal social status, gender inequalities, and age differences.”⁶⁷ In tandem, queer theorists and those advocating for people with disabilities emphasize the need to apply an intersectional lens to notions of ‘community.’⁶⁸ Generally speaking, a compelling account of personhood should not rest on the appraisal of one's community.

A third related disadvantage of African approaches is that they allow moral inequalities between human beings. Views stressing moral character regard individuals as greater or lesser persons based on perceived social performance. For example, Menkiti states, “personhood is something at which individuals could fail, at which they could be competent or ineffective, better or worse….”.⁶⁹ Gyekye states, “If a human being lives an isolated life, a life detached from the community, he would be described not as a person but as an individual.”⁷⁰ Some views stressing moral properties also suggest that human beings without the requisite properties (or without a threshold level of them) are not persons. For example, people with reduced capacities to commune or be sympathetic might be considered lesser persons, or nonpersons. A satisfactory account of persons must establish all human beings as moral equals from birth to death.

3.2. Western Personhood

Western personhood also offers significant advantages and drawbacks. First, it carries the advantage of establishing that all human beings have worth and dignity, rather than reserving this privilege for a select few. Historically, these ideas were associated with possessing a soul and being made in the image of God (imago Dei). Universal human personhood formed part of the philosophical underpinnings for human rights theory, in which all people have equal and intrinsic rights as free and rational beings. These same ideas eventually found expression in the French and American revolutions, and in social contract theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which held that even outside civilized society, in a hypothetical state of nature, people had ‘natural rights’ meriting respect.

Second, since Western personhood standardly regards personhood as all‐or‐nothing, rather than a matter of degree, all humans have an equal moral standing. This implies that human moral status is mostly stable and generally cannot be lost or diminished, even when an individual's accomplishments fall short, or others judge them harshly. Darwall's conception of ‘recognition respect’ (from Section 2) encapsulates this idea: all human beings merit a certain respect because of the kind of beings they are.

A third and related advantage of contemporary Western personhood is to make being a person a foundational status, rather than derivative of incorporation in a community. This carries the advantage of making it easier for people to question their social roles and relationships and see themselves as freer to carve out new roles and opportunities in life. It also invites questioning social authority and social structures more broadly. With less pressure to fulfill social roles and duties, rebelling against social norms becomes more conceivable.

Yet, despite its advantages, contemporary Western personhood has significant disadvantages. First, it is difficult to find a secular criterion that can provide the basis for a universal moral equality of human beings. For secular philosophy, each proposed alternative brings limitations, often making outliers of those that we ordinarily count as persons. A prominent example is given by Kittay, who objects to positing higher cognitive capacities as the basis for personhood, because this requirement makes an outlier of Kittay's daughter, Sesha, who is profoundly mentally and multiply disabled.⁷¹ In line with Kittay's views, Steinbock observes that people are not willing to treat human beings with intellectual impairment like nonhuman animals with comparable intellectual capacities, but instead insist on regarding them as fellow human beings.⁷²

Other proposed secular grounds for moral considerability, such as the capacity to suffer, also go against the grain of many people's considered views. For example, we do not ordinarily regard a human toddler's interests as on a par with those of a pig or dolphin, yet all three arguably have similar capacities to suffer. In a forced choice situation where we could save only one, most think we ought to save the human toddler, not a pig or dolphin. Some argue that generally, people do not think of human beings, such as anencephalic infants, who lack the capacity to suffer and will never acquire it, as lacking moral standing altogether. Instead, we suppose that it matters morally that an anencephalic infant belongs to a human family and has ties to human beings.^{73 , 74} An adequate theory of personhood should avoid making outliers of humans who become impaired or are disabled.

A second disadvantage of many Western accounts of personhood is that the moral imperative to perform in social roles and fulfill social duties seems largely undercut. Gone is the idea that to be a person one must first perform excellently in social life and meet duties to others and the community. Instead, just as people are free to enter or leave civil society, they are free to accept or reject their social roles and the duties attached to them. The implications of this are far reaching. For example, filial duty no longer has a clear ethical justification. As Daniels observes,⁷⁵ there are no obvious grounds in Western moral philosophy today for asserting that there are such things as filial duties owed by adult offspring toward aging parents. Schoeman insists, “talk about rights of others, respect for others, and even welfare of others is to a certain extent irrelevant” when it comes to family members and others we are close to.⁷⁶ This response is unsettling, not only because the owing idiom is often used to talk about filial responsibility (and other family roles), but because many people believe that adult offspring have positive duties to their parents, assuming parents meet ordinary parental duties in ways that satisfy certain constraints.⁷⁷ A satisfactory approach to personhood ought to furnish a basis for fulfilling duties toward those with whom we are related or share a common destiny or vulnerability, without making being a person contingent on doing so.

The analysis of this section suggests that a compelling account of personhood must meet the following diverse, apparently discordant, desiderata: (1) all human beings qualify; (2) qualifying is independent of others’ appraisal yet furnishes a basis for duties toward others; (3) personhood is held equally by all human beings, but to lesser degrees by nonhumans; (4) human personhood cannot be lost or diminished; and (5) personhood is independent of performance in social roles, yet incorporates relational attributes. Harnessing insights from both African and Western philosophies, we turn next to propose a new view of personhood, one that satisfies each of these conditions.

4. EMERGENT PERSONHOOD

From the foregoing analysis, we can begin to tease out some of the central strands of African and Western personhood that we have reason to keep, weaving them together into a coherent new view that we call, Emergent Personhood. We begin by explaining what it means for personhood to be ‘emergent,’ before turning to introduce our proposal.

When philosophers today characterize phenomena as ‘emergent,’ they typically mean that they display some or all of a family of features: being irreducible, unpredictable or unexplainable, holistic, and requiring novel concepts.⁷⁸ Emergent Personhood exhibits many of these hallmark features. First, it depicts the superlative value associated with persons as novel. It holds that human relationships are generative, giving rise to an exceptional moral worth that did not exist prior. Second, Emergent Personhood depicts persons as holistic: the outstanding moral worth that emerges through human‐human and some nonhuman‐human relationships is more than the sum of the parts considered on their own. Third, Emergent Personhood regards ‘person’ as irreducible. One way to explain irreducibility is to say that ‘person’ cannot be analyzed fully in terms of other moral notions –we cannot boil it down to autonomy, rights, or respect.

Emergent Personhood borrows from African personhood the idea that personhood gives grounds for social duties and incorporates relational features. It borrows from Western personhood the idea that all human beings qualify as persons independent of others’ appraisal and have an equal moral standing that cannot be diminished or lost. At first pass, an emergent account of personhood can be characterized by comparing persons to pictures. A picture emerges from component parts yet is more than the sum of the parts. The picture displays new features. It may express harmony or balance, feelings or ideas. It may be symbolic, abstract, or represent something. These features were not present before the picture came together —brush strokes and pixels do not convey these qualities on their own. In similar fashion, 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. Yet a person is not merely the sum of these relationships, because the person that emerges has a being of their own, over and above the relationships they emerge from.

To explain further, consider a different analogy. A vocal quartet typically includes a soprano; alto (or mezzo‐soprano); tenor; and bass (or baritone). When they come together to sing a capella, they produce vibrations that people perceive when sound travels through the air to their tympanic membrane (eardrum), which in turn stimulates neurons, which send signals to the brain. At any moment that it exists, a vocal quartet's music depends for its existence on all these vocalists, their interacting behaviors, and processes (which likewise depend one way or another on the properties and interacting behaviors of their fundamental components). Yet what emerges from the quartet differs profoundly from what each vocalist can produce alone, as is reflected in the fact that someone who is a fan of vocal quartets can relish quartet music yet know nothing about the physics and human biology required to make it.

Like the vocal quartet, human persons emerge through a certain combination of elements and processes configured in a certain way. Like them, persons are more than their basal phenomena considered separately ‐‐they exhibit exceptional moral worth, a remarkable feature, not present at the base. When persons arise, the substratum that gives rise to them includes human beings interrelating. The basal human relationships we are referring to are not specific concrete ones, like ties to particular people, but the existential connection each of has with every other human being. Even when someone is socially isolated or lacks neurodevelopmental mechanisms requisite for certain forms of relationships, we can still say of them that they stand in a relationship with us, qua human being. So understood, emergence does not occur through a single relationship between two people, or by means of a particular social network, or even a subset of relationships that are outstanding in some respect (e.g., harmonious, morally excellent, or caring). Instead, persons come about through a constellation of human relationships that coalesce in a certain way, such that each human being has a connection with every other. Abstractly, the origins of persons can be thought of as tracing to every human being who has ever lived and ever will live. Yet, the more immediate sources of personhood are social relational processes that humans have with other humans here and now. While each person can be distinguished as a separate being, they can also be identified in terms of the social relationships that give rise to them –we might say that an individual is a piece of the whole, part of the fabric of humankind. When I value a human being as a person, what I value is all humanity reflected in them. Ascertaining a person thus becomes less a matter of looking inside someone's head to identify brain waves indicative of consciousness or cognitive functioning, and more a matter of looking into a mirror, and seeing all humanity.

Emergent Personhood theorizes that human beings have equal moral status, because each stands equally in a certain relationship with all humankind. Yet our characterization differs from simply saying that someone is genetically or biologically human; it points instead to human‐human relationships as basal phenomena giving rise to something more –a human being with outstanding moral worth. What we might call a family of humanity conveys this connection when understood not merely as biologic or genetic similarity, but a family‐like tie. When human beings are configured in this family like way, persons emerge. In some African languages, this idea is suggested by the very meaning of the word, ‘person.’ For example, in Buli, a person (nurbiik) is literally “a son or daughter” of a person.⁷⁹ According to the Builsa understanding, “A human being is considered as one who matters to someone…Personhood is thus a relationally derived category.”⁸⁰ In Builsa language, the idea of nuro (from which nur is derived) is a generic person; it does not refer to anyone in particular. Reflecting this, the Builsa customarily introduce themselves by first indicating their family name, then their first name, underscoring that each person exists within a network of constitutive relations and a lineage.

Emergent Personhood rejects the idea that personhood consists of a discrete thing, such as an internal mental state. This approach has proved to be not only too narrow, but too broad — it excludes some human beings with serious intellectual impairment and regards intelligent animals like pigs as potentially morally equal to human infants or people with intellectual impairment. Emergent Personhood takes a different tack. It directs our gaze outward, to the ways in which people and things join together and relate, and the ways in which they move apart and disband. It holds that beings of superlative moral worth that are valued for their own sakes are constituted in and through relational goings on. When relationships acquire a certain intensity and amalgamate in a certain way, they are generative, giving rise to the exceptional moral worth we associate with persons. Emergent Personhood is apt to awaken a sense of shared humanity that invites solidarity and perhaps, can produce a more just society by furnishing a reason to fulfill duties to other human beings. While Emergent Personhood does not require fulfilling duties as a condition for personhood, it homes in on the fact that we stand in a relationship with other human beings that is like no other, shifting the focus from self to self‐in‐relationship. In this way Emergent Personhood illuminates a relational orbit in which all humans stand.⁸¹

4.1. Nonhuman beings and nature

Does theorizing persons in this way exclude nonhumans? Only if humans are disconnected from nonhuman animals and nature. Clearly, this is not the case. Although nonhumans do not join in human‐human relationships, they emerge as persons with value for their own sake through a different constellation of social relational process. These involve a certain pattern of relationships with humans and human communities. When nonhuman‐human relationships form in this way, nonhumans with exceptional value emerge. Their value is not merely instrumental to human ends, but part of a valuable whole, which involves a prosocial relationship with human begins.

An advantage of picturing persons in this way is that it leaves the door open to a more inclusive view. Nonhuman animals, such as dogs and cows; nonliving nature, such as lands, soils, and ecosystems; and artificial intelligences, such as social robots, can potentially become persons through being incorporated in social‐relational processes with human beings. For example, Jecker, Atuire, and Ajei have argued that the fictional protagonist in Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, a social robot named Klara, becomes a person by becoming a family member, friend, and part of a human community.⁸² Klara possesses value as a constituent of these valuable relationships. Klara effectively becomes a ‘robot‐in‐relationship,’ acquiring a value she did not have before, when she was just a robot for sale in a store. Other nonliving nonhumans can acquire personhood similarly; for example, a river can become a ‘river‐in‐relationship.’ Nonhumans who emerge as persons do not mirror humanity, yet their relating with humans generates value in itself. The superlative worth of nonhumans is particular, rather than generalizing to all beings of a certain kind; it continues as long as the nonhuman‐human relationships that give rise to it continue. Comparing the moral status of different types of nonhumans, such as animals and non‐living nature, Emergent Personhood tells us that their moral status depends upon their relationship to humans. For example, Emergent Personhood suggests that whether a mountain or dog has greater moral status depends on the particular dog and particular mountain and the relationships in which each stands with human beings.

In both the human and nonhuman case, Emergent Personhood grounds being a person in social relational processes involving human beings. We do not refer, e.g., to relationships that exist between other sentient and intelligent beings (e.g., between dolphins, elephants, crows), or between living and nonliving beings (e.g., within an ecosystem). This reflects our starting point, which we call humble anthropocentrism. As human beings, we do not know what it is like to live the life of a mole burrowing underground, a crow hovering in the sky, or a flounder propelling itself along the ocean floor.

We cannot shed our human standpoint altogether and adopt the standpoint of a nonhuman animal. Nor can we take on a ‘species neutral’ stance or assume a ‘view from nowhere.’ Instead, what we can offer is a humble human standpoint, designed to be compelling to human beings.

Humble anthropocentrism does not exclude the possibility that persons might emerge from relationships that do not involve human beings, yet it holds that what humans can understand about such relationships is partial and limited. Thus, humble anthropocentrism leads us to hold an agnostic view about whether personhood emerges outside relationships involving human beings. It leads specifically to claiming that although being in a human relationship (either human‐human or nonhuman‐human) is sufficient for personhood, we cannot rule out other sufficient conditions for personhood.

As the foregoing analysis demonstrates, Emergent Personhood meets all five seemingly discordant desideratum set forth previously (Section 2): (1) all human beings qualify; (2) qualifying is independent of others’ appraisal yet furnishes a basis for duties toward others; (3) personhood is held equally by all human beings, but to varying degrees by nonhumans; (4) human personhood cannot be lost or diminished; and (5) personhood is independent of performance in social roles yet incorporates relational attributes.

5. CONCLUSION

This paper explored two distinct aspects of personhood within the African tradition: moral character achieved through prosocial conduct and innate properties, often consisting of capacities to relate or commune. We proposed a novel way to navigate these dual stances by bringing African and Western philosophies of personhood into conversation. Drawing insights from each tradition enabled us to develop a new view of personhood, Emergent Personhood, adding a thread to an ongoing conversation about personhood. We argued that Emergent Personhood not only offers a way to navigate tensions within African thought, but offers a compelling vision of personhood in its own right.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION

Each author contributed substantially to the conception and analysis of the work; drafting or revising it critically; final approval of the version to be published; and is accountable for all aspects of the work.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST STATEMENT

None to declare.

ETHICS STATEMENT

Not applicable.

CODE AVAILABILITY

Not applicable.

Biographies

Nancy S. Jecker, PhD, is a Professor of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, with Visiting Professorships at the University of Johannesburg African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Centre for Bioethics. Dr. Jecker was elected President of the International Association of Bioethics (2022‐2024) and serves on its Board of Directors (2019‐present). Dr. Jecker has published over 200 journal articles and four books. Her fifth book (with co‐author Caesar Atuire), What is a Person? Untapped Insights from Africa will be the first in Oxford's new series, Philosophy Across Borders. Dr. Jecker's expertise spans bioethics, global approaches to philosophy and bioethics, justice and healthcare allocation, sub‐Saharan African philosophy, individual and societal aging, medical futility, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Caesar A. Atuire, PhD, is Ethics Lead, University of Oxford Program in International Health and Tropical Medicine, and Associate Professor, University of Ghana Department of Philosophy and Classics. He was elected President of the International Association of Bioethics (2024‐2026) and serves on its Board of Directors (2022‐present). Dr. Atuire is currently leading a Wellcome Discovery Award to unearth different meanings of solidarity and their real applications in global health. He is also a co‐lead on the Antitheses platform for transformative inclusivity in ethics and humanities research through engaging with disagreement, polarization, and uncertainty. His expertise is African philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy, bioethics, global health, with particular interest in global justice, ethics in low resource settings, international research ethics, and mental health ethics.

Jecker, N. S. , & Atuire, C. A. (2025). Personhood: An emergent view from Africa and the West. Developing World Bioethics, 25, 154–163. 10.1111/dewb.12461

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Not applicable.