Modern accounts of personhood fail because they do not explain deep-seated moral intuitions about the value of human life.
The 2008 film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (based on a novel of the same name) is a fictional story about the friendship between an eight-year-old son of a Nazi concentration camp officer and another eight-year-old who is one of the camp’s prisoners. The boy, named Bruno, thinks the camp is merely a farm and asks his father why the farmers “wear pajamas” (which are actually inmate uniforms). Bruno’s father begins his answer, ominously: