Being a person comes with a lot of baggage. To say someone is a person seems to imply that they should be treated in a certain kind of way – namely, with a certain amount of respect or dignity.
In legal language, we would say that being a person makes one the subject of certain legal rights and duties. More colloquially, we might say that to be a person is to not be a ‘thing’. Much of human history – from the abolition of chattel slavery to women’s suffrage – can be understood as precisely a series of battles over that distinction between persons and things.
More often than not, such battles have been waged in the language
