The problem of anthropocentrism and the human kind of personhood

Abstract

Neither of the seemingly straightforward approaches of retaining the human at the top of the hierarchy of beings and of flattening human personhood solves the question of non-human personhood. But the concept of personhood does have the resources to address this issue, if we take it as a kind of moral agency. The way that humans develop moral agency through their temporality, historicity and community must be mapped onto the personhood of animals, but this is extremely difficult and must await more scientific knowledge and wiser and more empathetic human understanding. It is in our hands, rather than the commandment of a non-human reality.