Discussion: Persons, higher animals and fatal semantic fractures

Hacker and I are concerned to explore the nature of the relation between the presentation of our knowledge of biological aspects of being a human being and features of the cultural-discursive practices with which people manage their lives and which are the topic of one important branch of scientific psychology, the cultural-instrumental-historical psychology initiated by Lev Vygtosky. 2The above distinction in ways of apprehending human beings seems to be clearly foreshadowed in the writings of Immanuel Kant, particularly in his Metaphysics of Morals.3 ... he [a human being] can and should value himself by a low as well as by a high standard, depending on whether he sees himself as a sensible being (in terms of his animal nature) or as an intelligible being (in terms of his moral predispositions). The trouble with 'human being' is that it might be located in an empirical discourse such as genetics or synaptic chemistry or the procedures of mapping the brain regions active in human beings who are carrying out various tasks, or it might be located in a normative discourse such as that of a war crimes tribunal, or the safety instructions in an engineering apprentice training scheme, or the distribution of household tasks among reluctant adolescents, or hoping for a Gold medal in an athletic context, or remembering what seems to be an undoubted fact, or how to maintain a cognitive skill such as playing a musical instrument, and so on, for all of the affairs of humanity. A person is embedded in a world of moral relations to other persons, is held responsible for his or her actions and in the default condition is morally protected. [...]person' is, inter alia, a 'forensic' concepts as Hacker reminds us, but a great deal more. Genetics tells us of the origins of the neuro-machinery while cultural-discursive psychology tells us how people of this or that tribe 'use' it. 23Robin Dunbar is fond of the correlation between the genetic determination of the optimum tribal population size and the number of people involved in the practice of sending Christmas cards!