Exploring the Semantics of a 'Person'

The term 'person' is used to denote an entity with the power to engage in contracts with other persons as well as possessing rights and being subject to law. We have discovered already in this course that the conflation of having rights and having the capacity to enter into a contract are not incompatible. All this talk of persons, which brings these two separate things together, seems to me to confuse the discussion. Person is often used synonymously with 'people,' and that term has the same issues. 

If I were the divine lexographer, that demigod who defines words, I would stipulate 'person' as meaning those two things (rights and contracts) and 'people' to mean those who have rights and less than human faculties. In any case, as the term stands now (before reading the chapter) I would say that even the highest functioning primates and whales are not strictly speaking 'persons.'

Maybe there capacity to form contracts with other members of their own species would change my opinion. In that case it would be our fault we couldn't communicate with them.