Beyond relationalism: distinguishing moral and legal personhood after Jecker and Atuire

In their recent <i>Authors Meet Critics</i> contribution to the <i>Journal of Medical Ethics</i>, Nancy S Jecker and Caesar Alimsinya Atuire invite a re-examination of personhood that extends beyond Western individualism and incorporates relational, cross-cultural insights. Their account effectively recentres moral discourse on community, continuity and mutual recognition. This response agrees with Jecker and Atuire that personhood cannot be reduced to autonomy or cognitive capacity alone, but it argues that a further conceptual distinction is needed to preserve clarity between moral and institutional recognition.I propose a dual-layered framework of personhood. The metaphysical person is the enduring subject of moral concern whose identity persists through time, relation and narrative; the legal person is the socially constructed bearer of rights and duties recognised within juridical and political systems. While the two frequently overlap, conflating them risks conceptual ambiguity and ethical inconsistency, particularly in cases such as dementia, embryonic life and artificial intelligence.Jecker and Atuire's relational model richly captures the metaphysical dimension of personhood but leaves open the question of how legal and moral status diverge and interact. The proposed two-layer approach clarifies this interface: moral personhood provides grounding for respect and care, while legal personhood institutionalises those obligations within normative systems. Recognising these distinct yet complementary layers retains Jecker and Atuire's relational insights while safeguarding conceptual precision across diverse bioethical contexts.