Personhood: a Game for Two or More Players _ Melting Asphalt

9/22/2014 Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players | Melting Asphalt

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Personhood: A Gamefor Two or More

PlayersBeing a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its manymasks. — John Gray

Pardon me while I scratch a little itch here in public.

I'd like to describe for you a concept that I can see very clearly in my mind. Ican't entirely justify its existence or its utility, but it's given me thatconsummate intellectual satisfaction: the feeling of ideas clicking into place.

When I think about human social interactions, I often think about specificrelationships and the roles that they entail: husband and wife, citizen andrepresentative, superhero and sidekick, BFFs. But today I want to talk aboutthe most generic relationship — the one that exists between any two membersof a society. What is the nature of that relationship? As an implicit socialcontract, what are its expectations and obligations?

I think it makes sense to call this generic social contract "personhood," andthose who abide by it "persons."

Bear with me now. I realize these terms are hotly contested, not least

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because they're the focus of a number of longstanding legal and moraldebates. Many would claim, for example, that a fetus is already a "person,"and that therefore abortion is murder. But this is emphatically not thenotion of personhood I want to discuss. So please: don't get hung up (yet)on whether my notion of "personhood" accords with yours. We may or maynot be talking about the same thing.

The idea of a "person" that I'm going to use today is most similar to the ideaof a "lady" or "gentleman" — without the gender connotations, obviously,but in the same sense of being a label or status earned through properbehavior (which then creates an obligation for others to treat us nicely inreturn).

So it's often said, "If you want to be treated like a lady, you have to act like alady." And similarly, "If you want to be treated like a person, you have to actlike a person." That's the idea I'm trying to get at.

Or like I wrote a couple months ago:

A person (as such) is a social fiction: an abstraction specifying thecontract for an idealized interaction partner. Most of ourinstitutions, even whole civilizations, are built to this interface — butfundamentally we are human beings, i.e., mere creatures. Some of usimplement the person interface, but many of us (such as infants orthe profoundly psychotic) don't. Even the most ironclad person amongus will find herself the occasional subject of an outburst orbreakdown that reveals what a leaky abstraction her personhoodreally is.

In other words, the concept of personhood that I'm articulating is bothmore and less than being human.

Here's the gist of the idea, illustrated as a comic strip. Pardon the lowproduction values; I'm new at this:

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/ux-and-the-civilizing-process/





The point is, when we act as persons, wearing our person masks out inpublic, we're acting within the framework of an implicit social contract —one that's designed to help us get along smoothly with our fellow persons.

Of course, this type of "contract" isn't a binary, all-or-nothing proposition.Instead, like all social phenomena, it admits of degrees. The way it works isthat the more you behave like a person, the more you'll be treated like one. Soit isn't a question of "whether" someone is a person, but rather "how muchpersonhood" she has, based on how well she carries herself.

A screaming, pooping infant is less of a person than even the wildest 10-year-old, who in turn is less of a person than a fully-composed adult. Sociopathshave less personhood than honest folk, and drug addicts less personhood thantheir sober counterparts. Just as someone can be more or less of a lady, shecan likewise be more or less of a person.

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Of course personhood, being an abstract behavioral specification, isn'treserved merely for humans. Any creature (or artifact) capable of presentingitself as a person will thereby earn the benefits. That's the beauty of aninterface: as long as the system behaves properly, we don't have to care howit's implemented.

So today I'm going to explore the idea that personhood is a two-sided socialcontract, and specifically, one that is both contagious and sticky in humanpopulations.

We'll start by elaborating on both the benefits and responsibilities ofpersonhood.

THE BENEFITS OF PERSONHOOD

The rights or benefits of personhood are actually very simple. Being aperson entitles you to conduct yourself among persons. Or to beprecise: The more personhood you display, the more you'll be welcome in thesociety of persons.

(Note the recursive nature of this definition — persons being defined interms of other persons. This is no accident. It will come up again and again,and we'll address it explicitly in a minute.)

We can be even more precise, if we like. Being a person earns you:

The right to conduct yourself among persons — to show your face in thesociety of persons and to conduct business among them. Not justcommercial business, of course, but also personal, social, professional,or political business.

The right to be taken seriously. Other persons must accept you, and yourwords, promises, and reasons, more or less at face value.

The right to be treated politely and accorded various personal dignities,

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like being called by your name (rather than "boy" or "hey you"), notbeing touched or gawked at, etc.

The right to autonomy. Persons must refrain from coercing or usingforce against you.

The right to be reasoned with. Other persons must give reasons fordoing things that affect you.

The flip side of this, of course, is that when you don't uphold your end of thebargain (the responsibilities of personhood, which we will articulate below),you're no longer entitled to the benefits. Specifically you forfeit the mostimportant benefit — the right to conduct yourself among persons — andconsequently you'll be pushed to the margins of society, if not forciblyremoved from it. This is how we treat children, criminals, the profoundlysenile, and the profoundly psychotic.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF PERSONHOOD

As you read the following — the responsibilities of personhood —remember that these are not arbitrary rules. Everything rests, veryconcretely, on the logic of whether a particular behavior makes it easier orharder for others to interact with you. If I say, "X is important forpersonhood," it's not because I have a prejudice that persons should do X.It's because, objectively, not doing X makes it harder for other persons to bearound you.

Here, then, are the responsibilities or criteria of personhood. The more ofthese you're able to meet, the more of a person you'll be:

Identifiability

This one's a good place to start. You can't be a person unless you have aname and a face — a way for others to identify and recognize you. This is apretty basic requirement for e.g. reciprocal altruism.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism



Note the implication: You become less of a person when you're wearing amask or are otherwise anonymous. Shedding the responsibilities ofpersonhood in this way can be quite thrilling, like during Halloween or at amasquerade ball (or while robbing a convenience store!). But it alsocontributes to the degradation of personhood on the internet — with theensuing loss of civility we're all familiar with.

Integrity

This is now closer to what we might call the heart or substance ofpersonhood: the consistency and integrity of one's statements andbehaviors.

What does it mean to have integrity? Well it's a number of related things. Itmeans being whole-faced, not two-faced. It means being honest and true toyour word, fulfilling your promises and upholding your obligations. Itmeans having consistent preferences, especially across time— even though(as an animal) your mood will surely change.

In a nutshell, having integrity means maintaining the facade of good-faith,singular agency.

Of course we all grant each other plenty of leeway to change our minds —it's not like one flip-flop will get you kicked out of the club. But if youchange your mind often enough, or continue to state preferences that youlater deny, sooner or later you'll end up frustrating your fellow persons.

Small children fail spectacularly in the integrity department. They'll make'promises' that they have no intention or even the ability to keep. They'll lie,just to get their way in a particular moment. They'll change their mindswilly-nilly, blowing hither and thither along with internal and externalwinds. A large part of growing up, then, consists of internalizing the socialconsequences of failing to maintain integrity. The world slowly ratchets upits expectations of integrity (and of personhood more broadly), and thechild must slowly rise to the challenge. In this way, growing up can be seen



as an exercise in sharpening one's personhood. This process is also knownas socialization.

Reasonable-ness or use of reasons

The society of persons runs on the "currency" of reasons. This isn't a realcurrency, of course, just a metaphorical one — but the metaphor is fairlystrong. We give each other reasons, accept or reject the reasons of others.Reasons, like money, can be good/bad/sound/etc., and we are always (like ashopkeeper being handed a suspicious-looking bill) evaluating the reasonsof others, testing them for soundness. Sometimes we're called upon to givean account of our behavior, i.e., to show our reasons as we might open ourbooks to an auditor. In fact we're auditing each other so frequently thatwe've created a strong incentive to produce counterfeit reasons: pretexts,confabulations, rationalizations, justifications, etc. We even dabble in credit,as in giving credit to a friend when he behaves strangely, but when we don'tknow the full story, or in giving someone the "benefit of the doubt," thoughhis reasons may seem a bit fishy.

But(!) however tricky it is to peddle in reasons — however prone such acurrency is to inflation, debasement, and Gresham's Law — it beats theknickers off the alternative: violence. Threats, counter-threats, shoving orshouting matches. If you want one of your fellow humans to undertake aspecific action, it's far more civilized to ply him with reasons than coercehim with fists.

So the criterion of 'reasonable-ness' actually devolves into two relatedcriteria:

Giving reasons i.e. legibility. When called upon, you must be able toprovide reasons for all of your (non-trivial) social actions. You don'tneed a good 'reason' for automatic/habitual bodily movements likeleaning back in your chair, but if you get up and walk out of a meeting,you'll need something better than "I just felt like it." In other words,you need to know yourself and be able to explain yourself to others, in

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law



order to provide the illusion of being scrutable.

Accepting reasons i.e. amenability. You don't always have to acceptreasons from other persons — lord knows how many of them arecounterfeit — but you must accept them often enough to showothers that you're reasoning in good faith. When we ply each otherwith reasons, we're often testing the waters to see how amenable ourassociates are (vs. irrationally committed to their prejudices).Similarly, if someone gives you overwhelmingly good reasons for aparticular course of action, you'll forfeit personhood by not goingalong with it.

Standing

This one's a little weird, but extremely important. In order for others to dobusiness with you — accept your reasons and promises on credit — youneed to have something to lose; you need some table stakes or collateral.Let's call this standing.

Standing can mean simply "good standing in the community," wherethrough a history of past behavior you demonstrate to the community thatit's something you respect and value (and thus would be hurt by losingaccess to it). Or it can mean stature or status — some kind of reputation.

The concept of "legal standing" focuses on the right to sue. But the right tobe sued is equally if not more important(!).

Here's Thomas Schelling from The Strategy of Conflict:

Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned intextbooks are the right to sue and the "right" to be sued. Who wantsto be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise:to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someonewho might be damaged. If suit does arise, the "right" seems a liabilityin retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.

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Think about that for a minute. The right to be sued is a privilege.

You need some 'skin in the game' before anyone will be willing to trust you.If you have nothing to lose — if you just drifted into town, for example, andhave no reputational capital here — what incentive do you have not to lieand make false promises, or otherwise violate the contract of personhood?Society can't trust you unless it has you by the short hairs.

Children, for example, lack "standing" in this way. We've all agreed to "goeasy on them" if they mess up — to send them to juvenile hall instead ofjail, in the extreme case. But this very leniency also undermines theirpersonhood. Imagine a 12-year-old — a particularly precocious one —trying to comport himself among full adult persons. Everyone would eyehim with suspicion, knowing (at least in the back of their minds) that hehas less at stake in his interactions. Now imagine instead that this 12-year-old signed some kind of (hypothetical) contract, committing him to adultstandards of punishment. Does he not instantly become that much moretrustworthy, more of a person?

When conservatives emphasize the importance of personal responsibility, Ithink this is what they're talking about. The less we hold ourselvesresponsible for our actions (ex ante), the less we can be trusted to actproperly. And an important corollary of this: The more lenient society iswith its members, the weaker the social contract, and the harder it is foreveryone to interact with each other — a sobering thought.

Autonomy

Persons must be, broadly, the authors of their own actions.

If you outsource your agency to someone else (e.g. by becoming a slave or alackey), you undermine your own personhood. Insofar as slaves are not thetrue authors of their own actions, it's much harder to reason with them("because my boss said so," isn't a very satisfying response), harder toaccept their promises, etc. When you aren't your own master, the rest of the



personhood contract breaks down.

This is true, but to a lesser extent, among e.g. husbands who are "whipped"by their wives. A group of men who want to stay out late playing poker can'treason with their whipped buddy; all of their reasons fall on deaf ears. Andthus he loses a bit of personhood within that community.

One of the common ways people outsource their agency is acting "in thename of" someone or something else. This is how workers in uniform —police, soldiers, etc. — become non-persons to the populations they interactwith. You can't use the full spectrum of reasons, or enter into a freecontract, with a policewoman who's "just doing her job."

Proper comportment

The way you "carry yourself" goes a long way to how you'll be treated.

This starts (but does not end) with how you carry yourself physically. It'sobvious, but you have to wear clothes in order to be taken seriously.("Clothes make the person" might be more accurate than "Clothes make theman.") You have to maintain basic hygiene or no one will want to stand nextto you. You have to dispose of your bodily fluids (urine, feces, spit, mucus,ear wax; coughing, sneezing) in ways that don't offend your fellow persons.

But proper comportment extends beyond your physical person to encompassall the behaviors of your social person (or persona). It requires you to takeproper ritual care for your own 'face' (having self-respect) and the 'faces' ofothers (being considerate). We can phrase this recursively: "You must treatother persons as persons." This starts with a strict prohibition on violenceand coercion, and extends to any act that even hints at such.

Here's Erving Goffman from his sublime book Interaction Ritual:

In our society, the "well" or "properly" demeaned individual displayssuch attributes as: discretion and sincerity; modesty in claimsregarding self; sportsmanship; command of speech and physical



movements; self-control over his emotions, his appetites, and hisdesires; poise under pressure; and so forth.

Proper use of social emotions

This is really a subset of proper comportment, but it's so important that Ithought it deserved its own section.

The reason it's important is because emotions are evolved and universal. Inother words, we get most of these things for 'free,' simply by virtue of beingborn a human animal. Thus the social emotions provide a strong platformon which to develop all the other components of personhood.

The key social emotions are:

Shame. Persons should feel ashamed (and act accordingly, e.g., hidetheir faces) whenever their personhood breaks down in public. Thisincludes everything from being caught naked or in a lie, to being late,to having one's reasons shown to be contradictory. Sometimes you canlose more personhood by failing to show the requisite shame, than bythe shameful act itself.

Anger. When you are violated in some way, it's natural and right toget angry. But you must not get angry unless violated, and you mustdirect your anger only at the offending party. To be a "loose cannon" isclearly dangerous to those who would associate with you.Additionally, your anger needs to be soothe-able, within reason, withthe proper appeasements, i.e., shame and remorse.

Remorse. You must show (and feel) genuine remorse/contritionwhen your actions cause harm to another person.

Of course there are all sorts of edge cases to debate here (e.g. about howmuch shame, anger, or remorse it's appropriate to demonstrate in differentscenarios), and it's understandable that we spend so much time in thesedebates. But the point here is not to debate the edge cases, but rather toacknowledge that they exist with regard to a common framework we all

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participate in.

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So that's the contract of personhood.

If you want to be treated like a person, you have to act like a person. If youwant to be welcome among persons, you have to be a good interactionpartner.

Now let's explore some of the more interesting corollaries.

THE RECURSIVE/CIRCULAR NATURE OFPERSONHOOD

This is the most important part of the essay.

I've already pointed out a few of the ways in which personhood is definedsomewhat recursively. Personhood only makes sense with respect to (pre-existing?) persons. For example:

A person is a human being accepted by other persons for generic socialinteractions.

Persons are the result of a civilizing process, and can only be civilized byother persons.

Persons must treat other persons as persons.

You might find the circularity of these definitions a bit disconcerting, but Iwill argue that it's absolutely essential to the idea of personhood. What thecircular/recursive nature of personhood means is that it will be a stableattractor in social-contract space. It also means that personhood is bothcontagious and sticky in human populations.

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Once the idea of personhood gets started within a community (more on thisin just a minute), most humans will eventually get sucked in. That's becausepersonhood exhibits network effects — the more the merrier. Person-Personrelationships are more productive and mutually beneficial than Person-Nonperson or Nonperson-Nonperson relationships. Thus the economicsdictate that personhood will come to dominate the population, so thatalmost everyone who is able to meet the requirements of personhood iseventually inducted into its sacred order. Anyone who doesn't 'play along'will be left out in the cold.

Here's another, related way to put it: Spend enough time around otherpersons and they will probably infect you with personhood. How? Byrewarding you for person-like behaviors and punishing you for non-person-like behaviors.

This is how we socialize our children. 'We' (the society of persons)systematically reward children for behaving like persons and punish themwhen they don't. This happens at home, via the parents, and at school, viathe teachers — but also via the other children who, though they are onlyproto-persons themselves, can nevertheless help refine each other. And notethat there hardly needs to be any explicit teaching involved — let alone anyunderstanding of what 'personhood' is or how it works. The onlymechanism necessary to achieve personhood is this: a child who acts morelike a person will experience smoother, more productive interactions withall the persons in her life, versus experiencing friction every time she actslike a non-person. Take this differential treatment, point a general-purposereinforcement learning algorithm at it, and out pops a person.

So how does personhood get off the ground in the first place? Where did weget the first persons, who then helped drag everyone else into the game?

This turns out to be much less of a challenge than it might appear. The trickto getting all complex things off the ground — with the exception ofairplanes and rockets (and that's pretty much it) — is not to do it in onestroke but rather in very small increments. So you don't need to start with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personality-the-body-in-society/



fully-formed personhood to get some of the advantages. Instead you can startwith proto-proto-proto-personhood — a weak, primitive, simplified versionof the personhood contract — which then becomes stabilized throughout apopulation (because it provides benefit), until slowly everyone realizes thatthey can tighten the contract into proto-proto-personhood... — and theneventually into full personhood.

These steps can be arbitrarily fine-grained. In fact, in the history ofhumankind, there were probably dozens of incremental steps towardpersonhood, no doubt along with a few backward steps at various times andplaces. The period after the fall of the Roman Empire could, for example, beanalyzed as an attempt to find solid ground for a new social contract oncethe old one, Roman citizenship, had given way.

The simplest contract — if the story of the Fall in Genesis has anypsychological truth to it — might be the one that says "humans must wearclothes, or else feel ashamed (i.e., hide and withdraw from society)." Itseems important that shame is the very first thing Adam and Eve experienceafter they eat the forbidden fruit:

When [Eve] saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food andpleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she tooksome and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was withher, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and theyrealized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and madecoverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as hewas walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from theLord God among the trees of the garden.

Shame is indeed the civilizing emotion.

WHERE PERSONHOOD BREAKS DOWN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process



With a lot of complex things (e.g. governments, the brain, computers), it'soften hard to see how they work when they're functioning properly. It's onlywhen they start to break down or come apart that we see the true nature ofwhat's going on. The seams show us how it was made.

Same thing with personhood. So let's look at some cases where it breaksdown.

Personhood breaks down most dramatically in children, as we've alreadyseen. Children uphold fewer of the responsibilities of personhood, and sothey are accorded fewer of the benefits.

Personhood breaks down (very mildly) in those who can't maintain properhygiene. Most of us have had the experience of a classmate or coworker whosmells bad or doesn't wash his hair, and such people aren't invited to spendas much time among those of us who keep ourselves clean. It's not that theysuddenly become non-persons; they're just slightly less welcome as a resultof their small violation of the contract. This is one reason that even the verypoorest people often obsess over their appearance.

Personhood breaks down in severe drug addicts. Because the addict lacksself-control, he can't be reasoned with or trusted to keep promises. At firstthe addict is simply marginalized, pushed away from polite society. But ifhis condition deteriorates, and if he has friends and loved ones who careenough (notably, those bound to him by relationships other thanpersonhood), they may stage an intervention. This is tantamount tostripping the addict of his personhood (rendering him persona non grata), andit's telling that an intervention is a communal affair involving mutualrecognition (common knowledge) of the consensus. This will beembarrassing and uncomfortable for everyone — both the addict and hisloved ones — because of how much we rely on the contract of personhoodin our normal, everyday interactions.

Personhood, it should be noted, is always a fiction: the fiction of being aconsistent, singular agent. But as long as the fiction is convincing enough, it



will pass muster and be accepted by other persons. An addict's problem,then, is just that he can't maintain the fiction as convincingly as the rest ofus.

Personhood breaks down (very mildly) in fanatics and ideologues. We've allhad the displeasure of arguing with a raving fanboy or someone in the gripsof an ideology. When good reasons fall on deaf ears, we're seeing evidenceof a small breakdown in personhood.

Personhood breaks down in Storm Troopers, soldiers, and facelessbureaucrats. The individual units within these bureaucracies have no names(or their names are meaningless across the divide that separates them fromthe populations they interact with), sometimes no faces, no individualidentity, and very little autonomy. They can't be shamed or reasoned with.The same is true, but to a lesser extent, of anyone who wears a uniform.Uniforms are everywhere a signal that the wearer is enacting a role in whichhis agency is outsourced and his individuality is suppressed. This can be asource of power, but it can also be degrading, e.g., having to wear a uniformto work.

Perhaps most importantly, personhood breaks down in the presence ofother relationships. Remember, personhood is the most generic social role —so other, more specific roles usually supersede it. Husbands and wives, forexample, don't have to wear clothes around each other. A commandingofficer in the military doesn't owe his subordinates any reasons. Goodfriends can let down their guards and be a little more familiar with eachother. (Etymology note: familiar derives from the Latin famulus, meaninghouse-servant.) But in most cases, personhood still lurks in thebackground, and in this way provides a foundation on which to build outother, more specific relationships. Friends still interact with each otherlargely as persons, even as they relax a few of the constraints.

One of the most dramatic breakdowns of personhood occurs merely bylabeling someone as "mentally ill." This starts a downward spiral in whichpeople stop treating the patient as a full person, and as a result she becomes less



incentivized to act as one. They may or may not subject her to variousindignities (like restricting her freedom), but what's equally corrosive iswhen they stop holding her to the same standards as everyone else. As aresult, she becomes less incentivized to hold up her end of the personhoodbargain, further justifying the treatment others are subjecting her to. In thisway, the virtuous feedback loop that normally upholds and reinforcespersonhood — the feedback that coaxes behavior toward ever moreintegrity, consistency, and good manners — breaks down, and avicious feedback loop takes its place. When back-ward psychiatric patientsstart smearing their feces on the walls, it's because they're at the bottom ofthis vicious cycle, and resort to forms of attention-grabbing andmanipulation that lie outside the personhood contract.

Not all labels of mental illness degrade one's personhood, of course. Itdepends on how severe the illness is. It also depends, crucially, on howfrequently other persons (and the patient herself) explain her actions asarising from the illness, instead of arising from everyday reasons andmotives. If she breaks a promise and her friends chalk it up to depression,then she's in more trouble than if they simply shrugged and said, "Pffft,what a flake." This accounts for some of our reluctance to share mental-health diagnoses with our broader network of acquaintances and coworkers.

A FINAL THOUGHT: ASPERGERS

People with Asperger Syndrome force us to confront personhood in a ratherpeculiar way: by using a self-consistent variant on the traditional contract.

Relative to 'neurotypicals,' Aspies seem to care much more about, and putmuch greater emphasis on, the criteria of integrity and use of reasons. Theyhave a heightened sensitivity to these dimensions of personhood, andprickle more when others make contradictory statements, for example, orshrug off reasons in favor of "intuition." On the other hand, Aspies seem tocare much less about, and put far less emphasis on, the criteria of politeness,proper comportment, and the proper use of social emotions — owing, perhaps, to a



dulled sensitivity.

What's most intriguing, here, is that Aspie personhood is reflexive: itreinforces itself and produces its own network effects. Put ten Aspies in aroom together and they'll have a glorious time, exchanging all sorts ofinformation — mutually and blissfully ignorant of each other's(quote/unquote) faux pas. In other words: Aspie personhood harmonizes withitself. This is in stark contrast to the way e.g. schizophrenic patients interactwith each other.

But Aspie personhood clashes with neurotypical personhood and vice versa.Any mixture of the two populations will be discordant; someone is boundto take offense. Either an Aspie will bristle at some (seemingly)contradictory statement made blithely by a neurotypical, by taking it tooliterally, or a neurotypical will bristle at some rude social gesture madeinadvertently by an Aspie, by taking the 'affront' too seriously.

In this way, Aspies are like the squareface in the comic strip I included uptop. Squares get along great with squares, and triangles with triangles, butalthough the two populations can get along with each other, they often rubeach other the wrong way.

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Thanks to Lee Corbin for some excellent discussions that helped tease outmuch of this subject matter.

Originally published July 7, 2014.

I post new essays about twice a month. Get updates by RSS, Twitter, or

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Personhood: a Game for Two or More Players _ Melting Asphalt