What is personhood? What do we want it to be? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) offers an answer to the first question: personhood is an unhelpful, harmful, and pernicious concept in the bioethical setting....

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that bioethicists should stop using the concept of "personhood" in both well-established bioethics debates (e.g., regarding cognitive disability) and emerging ones (e...

In “The End of Personhood” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby raises an important question about the concept of personhood—whether it is useful in bioethics—while encouraging the employment of more specific...

The term “personhood” has a long history and is deeply rooted in the bioethical debate. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby argues that bioethicists should abandon the concept of personhood, because “‘person...

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby argues the concept of personhood is “unhelpful” and “at worst it is harmful and pernicious” (2024, 3). While I share her concerns about how modern bioethics uses personhoo...

Ethics is frequently concerned with how to resolve clashes between competing claims from claimants of different kinds. The idea of moral status is crucial to understanding how (1) competing claims...

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) has called for bioethics to end talk about personhood, asserting that such talk has the tendency to confuse and offend. It will be argued that this has only limited application for (largely) private settings. However, in other settings, theorizing about personhood leaves a gap in which there is the risk that the offending concept will get uptake elsewhere, and so the problem Blumenthal-Barby nominates may not be completely avoided. In response to this risk, an argument is presented (...) in support of the idea that the role of philosophers and bioethicists, far from ending talk of personhood, ought to be to clarify the concept, and to do so in nuanced ways, given its application for specific kinds of impairments. The case of dementia is used to illustrate this in the context of person-centered care. Ironically, given the stigma attached to dementia, far from the need to end talk of personhood, bioethicists are needed to rescue the concept and clarify its role. (shrink)

In her excellent essay, Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that it is “time for bioethics to end talk of personhood.” She is concerned, more specifically, with “the philosophical concept of personhood,...

In her paper titled “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) takes a swipe at the functionalist account of personhood. The problem with the functionalist view of personhood is that...

Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely resolve) (...) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research. (shrink)

In the last two decades, stem cell-based brain organoids have been developed to study disease mechanisms in various neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders. Simultaneously, there hav...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) presents strong arguments that bioethicists should stop using the concept “personhood.” She points out that “person,” meaning an entity with full moral rights, is defined in...

In this commentary, we take up Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) important argument to depart from claims about personhood in bioethics. First, we want to extend Blumenthal-Barby’s critique of the...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that the concept of personhood should not be used in bioethics, and part of her justification is that personhood is not consistent with the public’s values. In this c...

In her target article, “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby argues that bioethics as a field should abandon the concept of “person.” She states that for many (inside and outside of bi...

In her new article in the American Journal of Bioethics, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) provides at least three reasons that support her argument that the concept of personhood must be abandoned...

The realm of bioethics has long been underpinned by the foundational concept of "personhood," which delineates entities meriting moral and legal consideration on the basis of attributes such as con...

Referred to as “a foundational concept” of bioethics, personhood has long figured prominently in discussions of entities’ moral status and attendant rights and duties (Farah and Heberlein 2007, 39)...

Is it time to ditch the concept of “person” from practical fields, like bioethics? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) answers in the affirmative. They urge leaving personhood out of practical debates at the f...

With its provocative title, Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) Target Article is an important addition to the critical work on using ‘personhood’ in bioethics. I suggest it bears on any philosophical discus...

As the author of a book entitled The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics (Eberl 2020), one might reasonably expect me to lament Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) call to end the use...

Human brain organoids (HBOs), three-dimensional neural tissues derived from human pluripotent stem cells, are at the forefront of biomedical research, provoking intricate ethical quandaries (Sawai...

In her highly thought-provoking article, “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) presents a number of reasons why bioethics should “… end talk about personhood.” Some of these rea...

“I am a person” has more emotive appeal than “I am an entity with moral status.” While scientists and philosophers prefer precise terminology, the public and media favor general terminologies with...

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that “[i]t is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood” (11). The author calls on the field to ask different kinds of normative questions about the mo...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues for the discarding of the longstanding standard personhood criteria of bioethicists in assessing the ethical status of new and innovative human-like systems in favor...

The concept of personhood has outlived its usefulness for bioethics, says Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024). The concept of personhood has been important to the bioethics literature from fairly earl...

Two of the lead articles in this issue examine the emerging practice of organ procurement by normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) in terms of whether or not these patients are “dead” at the time t...