Abstract

It is no news that you and I are agents as well as persons. Agency and personhood are surely connected, but it is not obvious just how they are connected. I believe that being a person and being an agent are intimately linked by what I call a ‘first-person perspective’: All persons and all agents have first-person perspectives. Even so, the connection between personhood and agency is not altogether straightforward. There are different kinds of agents, and there are different kinds of first-person perspectives. On the one hand, all persons are agents, but not all agents are persons; on the other hand, all moral agents are persons, but not all persons are moral agents.