3.5 Examples of the Different Views
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 3.5 Beispiele für die verschiedenen Sichtweisen
3.5.1 Concrete Consequences: Who Counts as a Person?
The different views lead to quite different answers to the question: who is a person? This is not an academic parlor game; it affects the lives of real human beings.
According to the first view (person only through capacities):
- Not all human beings are persons. An embryo, a human being in a coma, a severely demented human being — on this view they could all be non-persons, because they do not, or no longer, exercise certain capacities.
- Some non-human beings could be persons if they possess the required capacities.
- There are “potential persons” — beings that are not yet persons but could become persons.
- There can be “gradual personhood” — one can be more or less of a person, depending on how many capacities one possesses.
According to the second and third views (the person as an independent being, the person as an independent being in relation):
- All human beings are persons — from the first to the last moment of their lives. Human personhood begins, as a rule, with the fusion of the germ cells, fertilization.1
- There are no “potential persons”. Persons are always actual. It makes no sense to speak of “potential persons”. Persons are never potential.
- Personhood is not a matter of degree but absolute: one is a person or one is not. Personal being does not develop; what develops is character, personality, person-behavior.
- Non-human persons are also conceivable in principle (e.g. God, pure spiritual beings), but all human beings are always and completely persons.
Clearly, then, much depends on which view is the more accurate one. These are not just philosophical fine points, but questions of life and death.
The concrete effects reach far beyond the lecture hall. In law, the concept of person determines from what point a human being counts as a bearer of fundamental rights. In medicine, the question arises whether a human being after so-called “brain death” is still a person or not — and whether organ removal can therefore be permissible. In nursing care, the question is whether a severely demented human being still deserves the same protection and the same respect as a healthy adult — or whether his claim to protection diminishes along with his capacities.
None of these questions are thought experiments. They are decided daily — in parliaments, in hospitals, in nursing homes. And behind every decision stands, consciously or unconsciously, a particular concept of person.
3.5.2 Concept of Person and Worldview
The various conceptions of the human person bring something revealing to light: a particular concept of person cannot be adequately described in purely formal relations. A sufficiently determinate concept of person always includes substantive determinations as well — and with them assumptions about reality as a whole. Here one’s worldview seems to play an essential role (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 98—107).
The empirical-functionalist concept of person can also be called the naturalistic concept of person, since it is fully compatible with naturalism. By naturalism is meant here a strong metaphysical and at the same time methodological naturalism, which holds, among other things, that there can be no such thing as a human mind or intellect as an archphenomenal entity — everything, rather, is “nature”: open to physical, biological, and chemical investigation, and ultimately to explanation as well, once knowledge — natural science — has advanced far enough.
Here the deep connection between concept of person and worldview becomes especially tangible. The theory that one must distinguish between a purely descriptive and a purely prescriptive concept of person seems to rest on quite specific, problematic “metaphysical” presuppositions that need to be questioned. Ultimately, what is at issue is the right concept of being, along with questions closely bound up with it: is the gulf between being and ought asserted by David Hume (1711—1776) justified in principle?2 Is the so-called naturalistic fallacy alleged by George Edward Moore (1873—1958) valid in principle?
These questions are not merely academic. Whoever claims, with Hume, that one cannot infer ought from being must explain why the fact that someone is a person should have any bearing on how we treat him. And whoever accepts the naturalistic fallacy as valid must explain how moral obligations can be derived at all from the nature of a being.
At its core, the question is: does the being of the human being have normative force? Does what the human being is also tell us something about how he is to be treated? The substance-ontological-relational concept of person says yes: the dignity of the human being is grounded in his being, not in his performance. The personalist norm — “the human person is to be affirmed and loved for her own sake” — is not a duty imposed from outside, but the only adequate response to the being of the person. The empirical-functionalist concept of person must answer no to this question, or evade it — and then struggles to ground the inalienability of human dignity.
There is thus a close connection between someone’s overall philosophical outlook and the concept of person he holds. Whoever regards reality as purely material will incline toward a functionalist concept of person. Whoever holds reality to be richer than the merely material — whoever, that is, takes the possibility of the spiritual seriously — will be more open to a substance-ontological or substance-ontological-relational concept of person.
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Fußnoten
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Schwarz, Die verratene Menschenwürde: Abtreibung als philosophisches Problem (Human Dignity Betrayed: Abortion as a Philosophical Problem), Cologne: Communio, 1992. ↩
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Spaemann, Personen, op. cit., pp. 30–34. On the “break with the classical understanding of the person” and the “atomization of motion”. ↩