What Is a Person?

This book introduces a provocative new view of personhood that philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire call Emergent Personhood. It builds on philosophies from Africa and the West to argue that individuals' moral worth emerges through social relational processes with other human beings. The authors show the implications of Emergent Personhood for human beings across the lifespan, animals, nature, and non-living lands, soil, and rocks on earth and in space. The book considers the possibility of ascribing moral standing to machines, including large language models and social robots. Jecker and Atuire's collaboration represents the first-time philosophers from Africa and the West have joined forces to consider personhood. Their new philosophy of persons combines strengths of African and Western thought.