ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that taxonomy alone provides insufficient grounds for determining personhood, but we do contend that biology is relevant to figuring out who is a person. The fundamental problem with the Species Membership approach is that it is trying to make a biological category do normative work. The concept of 'personhood,' with all its moral and legal weight, is not a biological one, and it cannot be meaningfully derived from the taxonomic category, Homo sapiens. Contemporary philosophers of biology often associate essentialism with natural kinds. The chapter traces a thread through the history of biological taxonomy, focusing on entanglements between essentialist definitions of species and some of the ideologically driven, socio-political applications for which these have been co-opted. There have been many efforts to identify characteristics that are uniquely human and separate us definitively from the rest of the animal kingdom.
