Written by Victoria Teng

How To Be A Person

Interview: What Does It Mean to Be A Person?

A Reflection and Analysis
For this assignment, I decided to interview my grandma. To begin, we both agreed that being
a person is more than just a matter of biology; we have an emotional, social, and (debatably)
spiritual component to our core. Being a person also involves reconciliation between different
facets of ourselves. Though they can overlap, there is often a disconnect between what we
present to others (our public self) and what we feel and think (our private self). My grandma was
adamant that when there is a huge disconnect, it becomes problematic, because we can
miscommunicate our wants and needs, and in trying to be or appear to be good people, we may
neglect the undesirable aspects of our personality instead of confronting them. However, she said
that maintaining a set image of yourself in all situations can create problems as well an extreme
case of this being Donald Trump, who prevents himself from perceiving anything negative about
himself by closely adhering to the image of who he wants to be. This, to me, is a form of
pretention, and so all his supporters claims that he is of genuine nature unlike other phony
politicians are moot. This makes clear that unanswered questions of authenticity especially of
ourselves to ourselves are universal.

Being self-aware enough to ask these questions about our existence is another important part
of being a person. To me, this is an important distinction between people and animals. My view
on what it means to be a person focused on individual traits and behaviors: having desires
(primal ones like food and sex, and complex ones like intellectual stimulation and finding
purpose in our work), being self-aware and having different sides to ourselves. However, my
grandma focused more on how our interactions with the world around us inform our personhood.
To her, being a person meant being sentient, being able to give and receive love, having a moral
compass, and having a core spirit, soul and inner being that constantly undergoes change as a
result of external forces. By her definition, animals are people too. With reference to her dog,
Bertie, she claimed that animals have their own personalities, quirks and traits that are partly
innate, partly influenced by their environment, are able to feel and love, and even have a moral
compass. In response to my confusion at her last point, she raised the example of dogs helping
 Written by Victoria Teng
How To Be A Person

people when they are hurt and exhibiting apologetic behavior when they do something wrong.
She said that this shows that dogs have a clear sense of what is right and wrong.

However, I disagree with her. Animals are not self-aware. They do not have complex desires
like embarking on a search for being or finding meaning in their work. They are not self-
conscious the way people are in presenting themselves to others. They are not pretentious. Yet,
by my explanation for this, am I not proving that someone whose motor skills are impaired and
ability to think is destroyed, by way of an accident, is not a person? Thats an awfully
contentious thing to say, and not something I feel equipped to answer.

According to my grandma, having a moral compass is one of the traits that makes you a
person. But I found this claim more difficult to justify. Is it a right of personhood to make moral
decisions? If someone is terminally ill and in perpetual pain, is it within our right as a person to
perform euthanasia on them? There was an instance reported in the news where a bunch of
teenagers saw a man drowning, and instead of helping him, they videoed his demise. Is it a right
of personhood to be able to make immoral decisions like this? By law, they were not required
to help him, so they were not wrong in that sense. My grandma tried to clear my confusion by
saying that different societies have different value systems because of their existence within
different environments and circumstances. So though we all have moral compasses what makes
us people, according to her , they are all different, so it is not a right of personhood to weight
our own beliefs over those of others. Therefore, in her opinion, it is not a right of personhood to
make moral decisions if their outcomes affect anyone but ourselves.

In the end, we decided that, like most questions surrounding morality, the question of what it
means to be a person has no conclusive or right answer. We can only make suggestions.