Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?: A Dialogue

by Justin Leiber

Book Overview

"This is a dialogue about the notion of a person, of an entity that thinks and feels and acts, that counts and is accountable. Equivalently, it's about the intentional idiom --the well-knit fabric of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872200027
• ISBN13: 9780872200029
• Release Date: March 1985
• Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Interesting Issue

This book deals with issues that we do not think in our daily life and this is what it is to be a person. It is amazing how the arguments of the book are construed and seems absurd to take the consideration of animals and machines being persons. Yet, regardless of its absurdity it is something that should be considered; an issue that should be debated on. The first thing that came to my mind while reading this book is that a person is similar to a computer in that persons are also 'programmed' by society and education (this issue is not about the computer we use in our daily lives but a more complicated machine). When reading this book keep in mind that a human being means "any individual of the genus Homo, esp. a member of the species Homo sapiens." So, obviously Justin Leiber is not saying that computers are humans because they are not from the same species. Now, what it is to be a person is something different. I never thought of the way we use the word person being equal to human being. In fact, I thought person=human being, but now I have realized this is not so. A human being is a person (there is no doubt about this) but not necessarily a person is a human being. For example, in law a corporation, a partnership, an estate, or other legal entity is recognized to a person, but not a human being. Think about it if a corporation that does not function with the same autonomy as the computer in the book is a person why the computer can not be a person too. All these things I have thought of came from reading this book. I strongly recommend it because it gives the possibility of opening our mind and seeing reality from a different perspective.