Educerie · IB Diploma · Philosophy

Core theme — Being human

The core theme asks one question: what is it to be a person? Everything in it is a way of approaching that, and Paper 1 Section A will hand you a stimulus and expect you to find one of these issues in it.

What is a human being? Personhood

Personhood is the status that confers moral consideration — the thing that makes it wrong to treat something merely as a means. The philosophical work is in the criteria, because each proposed criterion includes and excludes different beings.

Candidate criteria: rationality · consciousness · self-awareness · language · moral agency · capacity for suffering · being a member of Homo sapiens.

Test each against the hard cases, which is what examiners reward:

• Rationality excludes infants and people with severe cognitive impairment, whom almost nobody wants to exclude.
• Species membership includes them, but looks arbitrary — why should biology alone confer moral status? This is the charge of speciesism.
• Capacity for suffering extends personhood widely into non-human animals, which some take as a virtue and others as a reduction to absurdity.
• Self-awareness raises the question of the threshold, and of beings that may possess it in degrees.

The contemporary application is artificial intelligence: if a system displays language, apparent reasoning and self-report, which criterion does it fail, and can we tell? An answer that identifies the criterion at issue rather than asserting that machines obviously do or do not think is the stronger one.

Self and identity

Personal identity is the question of what makes someone the same person over time, given that their cells, beliefs and personality all change.

Three classical answers:

• The body criterion — you are the same person because you are the same organism. Intuitive, but it struggles with thought experiments in which psychology transfers, and it makes identity a matter of matter rather than of the person.
• The memory (psychological continuity) criterion — Locke's answer: you are the same person as the one whose experiences you remember. It fits our intuitions about what matters, but faces the transitivity problem: an elderly officer remembers being a young lieutenant, who remembered being a boy, but the officer does not remember being the boy. Identity should be transitive; memory is not.
• The bundle theory — Hume's answer: introspection finds only perceptions, never a self having them, so there is no persisting self, only a bundle of experiences. This dissolves the problem rather than solving it, at the cost of denying something we seem certain of.

Narrative identity offers a fourth route: the self is the story a person tells about themselves, constructed and revised over time. It accounts for change and for the sense of a life having shape, but it invites the objection that a self-narrative can be false — and if identity is a story, who is telling it?

Mind and body

Substance dualism (Descartes) holds that mind and body are distinct kinds of thing: the mind is non-physical and thinking, the body physical and extended. It respects the apparent difference between a thought and a lump of tissue.

Its fatal difficulty is the interaction problem: if the mind is non-physical, how does it cause the body to move, and how does the body cause sensation in it? Causation between a thing with no physical properties and a thing with only physical properties has never been explained, and any answer seems to violate the conservation of energy.

Physicalism holds that mental states are physical states. Identity theory says pain is c-fibre firing. This is parsimonious and fits neuroscience, but faces the multiple realisability objection: an octopus, with entirely different neural architecture, plausibly feels pain, so pain cannot be identical to one specific physical state.

Functionalism answers that objection by defining mental states by their causal role rather than their material: pain is whatever state is caused by damage and causes avoidance. Anything with the right functional organisation has a mind — which is why functionalism is the natural friend of artificial intelligence.

The strongest objection to functionalism is qualia: the subjective, felt quality of experience. Functional description seems to leave out what it is like to see red. Two thought experiments press this — the inverted spectrum, and Mary the colour scientist who knows every physical fact about colour vision but has never seen colour. If Mary learns something new on leaving her black and white room, physicalism is incomplete.

Freedom and determinism

Determinism is the claim that every event, including every human choice, is the necessary consequence of prior causes and the laws of nature. This is not fatalism — fatalism says the outcome happens whatever you do; determinism says your deliberation is itself part of the causal chain that produces it. Confusing the two is the most common error in this section.

Three positions:

• Hard determinism — determinism is true, so free will does not exist, and moral responsibility in the retributive sense is unjustified. Punishment can only be defended by deterrence or protection, not by desert.
• Libertarian free will — genuine free will exists, so determinism is false, at least for human action. The difficulty is explaining what an uncaused choice would be: an action with no cause looks random, and randomness is no better a foundation for responsibility than necessity. This is the luck objection.
• Compatibilism — determinism is true and we are free, because freedom is not the absence of causes but the absence of constraint. An action is free if it flows from your own desires and reasoning without coercion. Frankfurt refines this: what matters is whether you want to want what moves you — the addict who wishes not to crave is unfree in a way the contented smoker is not.

The objection to compatibilism is that it changes the subject: it defines freedom into existence and does not give us what we wanted, which was ultimate authorship of our own choices.

The stakes are moral responsibility. If no one could have done otherwise, praise and blame require rebuilding — which is why this section connects directly to Ethics.

Human nature

Is there a fixed human nature, or are we constituted by culture and circumstance?

• Essentialist views hold there are characteristics all humans share — Aristotle's rational animal, or an evolved psychology.
• Existentialist views deny it: for Sartre, existence precedes essence; there is no human nature because there is no designer, and we are "condemned to be free", defining ourselves through choices for which we bear full responsibility. Bad faith is the flight from that responsibility into pretending our roles and circumstances leave us no choice.
• Social constructionist views hold that much of what looks like nature is the product of historical and cultural arrangement.

The examinable tension: essentialism grounds universal human rights — they are owed to all because all share something — but has historically been used to justify exclusion by defining some groups as less fully human. Constructionism resists that misuse but makes universal claims harder to found. Neither position is cost-free, and saying so is better philosophy than picking one.

What actually loses marks in this theme

1. Describing positions without evaluating them.
2. Confusing determinism with fatalism.
3. Treating compatibilism as "a bit of both" rather than as a redefinition of freedom.
4. Attacking the weakest version of the opposing view.
5. Naming philosophers instead of using their arguments.
6. Using personhood and human being interchangeably — the whole question is whether they coincide.
7. Concluding more confidently than the argument supports.
8. In Paper 1 Section A, describing the stimulus instead of extracting a philosophical issue.

Educerie · written from the published IB syllabus structure for Philosophy, core theme, first assessment 2025. Original text; the positions summarised are standard in the philosophical literature. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.