Skepdick wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2019 4:02 pm
Is my belief in my intrinsic personhood sufficient to bestow intrinsic personhood upon myself if society believes that I am not intrinsically a person?
Nobody's "belief bestows" anything. Yours doesn't, and "your" society's doesn't.
Ontological facts are ontological facts. If an entity is a lump of granite, then it's a rock, no matter what anybody else wants to believe. If an entity is a human being, it's a human being, even if you want to call it an "inferior," or a "slave," or a "subhuman." If you do that, you're just wrong. That's all.
It's very ordinary, really. People are wrong all the time. And they don't always know when they are. But it doesn't change any facts about what is true at all.
"Personhood" isn't like the "Queen of the County" crown...it doesn't get bestowed by other people. An entity is a person, or you are not. End of story. It cannot be bestowed, and cannot possibly be taken away by any means. All that can happen is that people can abuse or brutalize you...but they'll be brutalizing and abusing a person, whether they know it or not.
Whether or not anybody recognizes that is perhaps material to the question of how they're going to treat you...but it has zippo to do with what you actually ARE.
Get it now?