Infants and demented old persons cannot communicate by lan-
guage and are therefore typically excluded from the category of
moral agents. In the past, persons able to communicate by lan-
guage--for example, slaves and women--were also denied the
status of moral agents; today, many children and mental patients--
similarly endowed--are denied that status. The point is that attri-
buting or refusing to attribute moral agency to the Other is a matter
of both fact and tactic--a decision that depends not only on the
Other's abilities, but also on our attitude toward him. To be
recognized as a moral agent, an individual must be able and willing
to function as a responsible member of society, and society must
be willing to ascribe that capacity and status to him.

The dependence of moral agency on mindedness renders the
judgment of mindlessness of paramount legal and social signifi-
cance. Two common tactics--ignored by classic and modern moral
philosophers alike--deserve special mention in this connection.
One is treating a person as incompetent when in fact he is not (thus
harming him under the guise of helping him); the other is treating
a person as a victim when in fact he is an active agent (excusing
him of responsibility for his self-victimization and blaming his
self-injury on innocent third parties).

Although mind is a moral and psychological concept, it is now
regularly addressed by biologists, linguists, mathematicians,
neuroscientists, philosophers, and physicists as well. Most of these
authors ignore the actual uses of the term "mind." Instead, they
treat the mind as if it were the brain, or a function of the brain,
and define their task as offering observations and speculations
about the workings of that organ. ^* To properly evaluate the merits
of these studies we must not lose sight of the fact that the word
"mind" is a part of our everyday vocabulary and that we use it most
often, with the most far-reaching practical consequences, in ordi-
nary discourse, law, and psychiatry.

-x-