Guide to the Arcane Realm

Personhood

Personhood is the status of being considered a person, which is tied to host of civil responsibilities, liberties and equality. According to most law, only a person or has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.

The concept of personhood was conceived in various feudal lands to differentiate the beings that should be part of a moral community, to be deserving of our moral consideration, as opposed to monsters which were not considered persons and thus nobody really cared what happened to them.

Monsters

To the everyday person, a monster is a creature that can scare or harm people. The word usually connotes something wrong or evil; a monster is generally morally objectionable, physically or psychologically hideous, or a freak of nature.

Since the beginning of history, monsters were described and likely existed before history as well. Most monsters in antiquity were wild natural or preternatural animals, typically those predatory in nature or had unusual appearances and habits. As more species (feral or sapient) have been "discovered", there have been many accused of being monsters by other species and the consequences that came with that.

Malicious spirits have also been called monsters, particularly the likes of Shaytan and demons that existed during the Ghulat Wars. The term can also be applied figuratively to describe a "non-monster species" individual with similar characteristics, such as a person who does cruel or horrific things.

The assumption that a monster will do terrible things without remorse or lack to capacity to be reasoned with, has allowed for monsters to be slayed without any moral issues. In antiquity, many crusades by the gods were to slay monsters as a moral good and profitable ventures like adventuring had this as their business model. Even with the collapse of most major civilizations, the act of avoiding and slaying monsters kept the people safe and eventually allowed them to establish settlements again.

However this worldwide traditional mindset has been challenged from time to time. The most well-known example was when reports of certain faye, henge, and spirit species labelled as monsters were found to have a degree of empathy. This challenged the notion of them being evil creatures and led to tensions during a transition period were the notion of rights were being discussed among people.

United Sapient Species

The USS is an organization composed of nearly every national government in the world. It was founded to prevent interspecies war and genocide as well as the influence of multinational corporations on political figures and systems.

Most nations are members of the USS and send diplomats to the headquarters to hold meetings and make decisions about global issues. Its objectives include maintaining international peace and security, promoting people's rights, fostering social and economic development, protecting the environment, and providing humanitarian aid in cases of famine, natural disaster, and armed conflict. Their main claim to fame is drafting up the rules to how personhood is determined in the modern world.

United Sapient Species Consideration

One of the major philosophical, legal and politically important debates made by the United Sapient Species was what are the requirements to be considered a person. A legal scholar proposed one of the earliest called the Genetic Criterion. This view says that you are a person if you have a sapient species DNA, and you are not a person if you don't. The virtue of this view is its simplicity, but its implications are so problematic that most philosophers and the USS dismiss it. If all you need to be a person is a hominin's DNA, then hominin mouth cells are persons, and so are corpses. And most obviously, one sapient race could consider itself persons while ignoring another sapient species rights. Also no inorganic forms of life like Anthroids or various spirits could meet the genetic criterion, even though they seem more like persons than individual cells. So, the Genetic Criterion seemed to allow some obvious non-persons into its definition, like, the cells in a city.

Another major consideration was from a philosopher who offers five more specific criteria that she believed together constitute personhood. Consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity to communicate, and self-awareness, i.e. the same that constitute sapience. These five factors are known as the Cognitive Criterion for personhood and argues that some sapient beings just aren't persons, either not yet, or not anymore. In this view, if a being is incapable of communicating, isn't aware of itself as a self, can't think or move around on its own, or isn't conscious, then it's not a being that we can call a person, even if it happens to have sapient being DNA or information. Controversy came because the cognitive criteria not only definitely ruled out fetuses, but it also kind of ruled out young children as kids don't become self-aware until an early point in their life cycle. So cognitive criteria might have kicked out of the personhood club some beings that, to the populous, are clearly people.

Another idea discussed was the Social Criterion that says that you're a person whenever society recognizes you as a person, or whenever someone cares about you. This one seems pretty intuitive as it says that you matter morally when you matter to someone. It allows for society's understanding of a person to change over time, which seems good when we're thinking about something like expanding rights to protect primates, for example. However, the USS thought carefully about this view, because it also means that if no one happens to care for a particular being, that being simply isn't a person. It would mean that fully rational healthy functioning adults might not have personhood just because no one happens to care about them, and they wanted inclusion in the moral community to be something more than a popularity contest.

Another contemporary philosopher says that the key to personhood is sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain. This criterion ignores the whole idea of species all together and instead looks at a being's capacity to suffer. This view says that it's wrong to cause unnecessary pain to anything that can feel, but if it can't feel, well, we do no harm by excluding it from the group of beings that matter. So fetuses younger than the development of sensation for a species are not persons, nor in persistent vegetative states but any being with a developed central nervous system is a person.

The USS had to carefully consider all their options since some people think that personhood is a right, a sort of ticket to the moral community that you forfeit when you violate the laws of society in a major way. In this view, you can surrender your own personhood through grossly inhumane actions. This line of reasoning is one way people justify capital punishment. Yes, killing people is wrong, they might say, but if a criminal has surrendered their personhood through their actions, then they're no longer a person anymore, so we as members of the state would think ourselves justified in killing them. This was even more crucial as scientific evidence about monsters popping up from psychologists and behavioral scientists. Historically it was thought that it was the nature of creatures called monsters to do inhumane actions and thus people could justify punishing or killing them and not caring about their well being or rights. However more evidence was beginning to show that some beings considered "monsters" could have the capacity to be sapient, understand society morals, and potentially become part of the moral community.

Out of these discussions came a nuanced option called the gradient theory of personhood, which says it's not all or nothing, it's more like a dimmer switch to attempt to solve the problem. So, personhood comes in degrees, and you can have more or less of it. So in this view, a fetus would grow slowly in personhood throughout pregnancy as cognition develops. So a 26 week old fetus would have less personhood than a 34 week old fetus, which would have less personhood than a newborn baby that would have less personhood than a toddler. And likewise, personhood can be lost as gradually as it can be gained.

A lot of people thought this was a reasonable way to look at the issue, especially with elements of the cognitive and social criteria. For instance, a "monster" race individual raised in a domestic setting with values to the point where they do not want to mindless hurt or kill other citizens then they are considered more of a person than sapient monsters who may pray on them. And if much more monster individuals are considered to be part of the moral community than those that aren't, then over time the species as a whole can be considered people.

Thus it has become a major tenet of the United Sapient Species organization, all sapient species are people but some are considered more than others. Of course while mostly excepted, there are still groups and conflicts that call even this interpretation into question.

A/N: I guess this would fall under social issues of the world. I split the world's history into eras then this would be the major topic of an era just before the modern day of the serting. Also, shout out to CrashCourse Philosophy for the inspiration for this part.