3.6 Human Being and Person — the Same?
3.6.1 An Ambiguous Word
Before the question of the relationship between human being and person can be answered, one must notice an ambiguity lurking in the very word “human being.” For “human being” can mean two things:
First: the human being in the full sense of the word — as the “essential concept of the human being.” That is the living being that can think, love, act freely, and know; the bodily-spiritual being that can become conscious of itself. In this sense we speak of the essence of the human being.
Second: the human being in the purely biological sense — as a member of the biological species Homo sapiens. In this sense the human being is classified by certain bodily characteristics and assigned to a biological genus.
Both meanings are constantly mixed up in everyday life. Max Scheler pointed out this “treacherous ambiguity” early on: on the one hand, the word “human being” is meant to designate the special biological characteristics that identify the human being as a subgroup of the vertebrates and mammals. It is obvious that this way of forming the concept not only leaves the living being so designated subordinate to the concept of the animal, but also makes of it a comparatively very small corner of the animal kingdom. On the other hand, Scheler writes, the word “human being” is also meant to designate — and that in the same language and across all cultures — something entirely different: namely an epitome of things opposed in the sharpest possible way to the concept of the animal as such.1
This book is concerned with the essential concept of the human being, that is, with the first meaning. Whenever this book speaks of the “human being,” it always means what distinguishes the human being as a human person — not merely his membership in a biological genus. Within the various possible concepts of person, it is important to keep these two basic meanings of the term “human being” apart.
Confusing these two meanings has far-reaching consequences. Whoever understands “human being” only in the biological sense will treat the question “Are all human beings persons?” as an empirical one: do all specimens of the species Homo sapiens have the properties that constitute a person? Whoever, by contrast, understands “human being” in the full sense of the essential concept recognizes: being human is always already personhood. The question is then not whether a particular specimen of a biological genus exhibits certain properties, but whether a being with human nature exists — and if so, then it is a person. The ambiguity of the word “human being” thus lurks, often unnoticed, behind many disputes over the concept of person.
3.6.2 Five Possible Relations
Are all human beings persons? And are all persons human beings? These are questions that anyone who engages philosophically with the being of the human being will ask. Between the concept “human being” and the concept “person” there are, in purely logical terms, exactly five possible basic relations — five basal relations that are mutually exclusive. This means that exactly one of them must be true (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 79—89).
To understand these five relations, picture two circles: one for the set of all persons and one for the set of all human beings. Depending on how these two circles stand to each other — whether they overlap, whether one contains the other, or whether they are separate — different possible relations result.
-
All persons are human beings, but not all human beings are persons (bR1). — That would mean: the set of persons is a subset of the set of human beings. There are human beings who are not persons. This position is taken, for example, by proponents of the empirical-functionalist approach. For them, embryos, the severely demented, or human beings in an irreversible coma are not persons, because they cannot (or can no longer) exercise certain capacities. Peter Singer holds this position: for him, not all human beings are persons, because personhood is tied to self-consciousness and rationality.
-
All human beings are persons, but not all persons are human beings (bR2). — That would mean: the set of human beings is a subset of the set of persons. Every human being is a person, but there could also be non-human persons — pure spiritual beings, say, or God. This is the position defended in this book. It is thus taken to be true that all human beings are persons (being human, or human personhood, begins as a rule with fertilization), but not all persons need be human beings. Robert Spaemann and Josef Seifert hold this position. That is, there is no human being whose human nature is not ontologically possessed by an underlying subject.
-
All persons are human beings and all human beings are persons (bR3) — “person” and “human being” would be coextensive. The two circles would be identical. This position is conceivable, but it excludes the possibility that there could be non-human persons — something that should not be ruled out, at least as a conceivable possibility.
-
No person is a human being and no human being is a person (bR4). — The two circles would be completely separate, without any overlap. This position would claim that the set of human beings and the set of persons have no overlap whatsoever. It is obviously untenable, for there are at least some human beings who are indisputably persons — the normal adult, thinking human being, for instance.
-
Some persons are human beings and some human beings are persons — but not all persons are human beings and not all human beings are persons (bR5). The two circles partially overlap. There would thus be both human beings who are not persons and persons who are not human beings. This position is held by those who tie personhood to certain capacities and at the same time regard some non-human beings as persons. Peter Singer holds a position that falls under this relation: he considers certain great apes to be persons (because they possess self-consciousness and a sense of the future), while he does not regard certain human beings (newborns, say, or the severely mentally disabled) as persons in the full sense.
Which of these five possibilities is the right one cannot be decided by logic alone. It depends on what the person really is in its essence — and that can only be established materialiter, that is, by examining the thing itself. Yet the distinction shows: the question is not trivial. And it has immediate ethical consequences, for the answer determines which beings are accorded dignity and rights.
The bioethicist Dieter Birnbacher has spelled out the connection between these logical relations and their ethical consequences.2 He distinguishes between an “equivalence doctrine” (all human beings are persons and all persons are human beings — that is, bR3) and a “non-equivalence doctrine” (human being and person do not coincide). Whoever holds the non-equivalence doctrine must ask himself: are there human beings who are not persons? Are there persons who are not human beings? Or both?
It is important to note that the position defended in this book (bR2: all human beings are persons, but not all persons are human beings) also represents a form of the non-equivalence doctrine — yet one that draws the circle of persons wider than that of human beings, not narrower. It excludes no human being from personhood, but opens the concept of person to possible non-human persons.
Some readers may see a dilemma here: “Either one says that all human beings are persons and all persons are human beings — then one excludes God and angels. Or one separates human being and person — then one opens the door to the claim that some human beings are not persons.” But this apparent dilemma dissolves as soon as the five relations are carefully distinguished. Position bR2 shows: one can draw the set of persons wider than the set of human beings without excluding a single human being from the circle of persons. The alleged dilemma rests on the tacit assumption that one must choose between bR3 (coextension) and bR1 or bR5 (some human beings are not persons). Position bR2 shows that there is a third possibility (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 86—89).
3.6.3 “Person” Is a Dignity Concept
One thing connects the most diverse conceptions of the person, however different they may otherwise be: the concept of person always carries an ethical significance within it. Whoever says “person” always also says something about the worth of this being. The word “person,” as used today, always predicates of the entity it names an incomparable ethical significance — an incomparable worth, significant in itself, an inalienable dignity.
This was already clearly formulated in the early Middle Ages. Alexander of Hales (1185—1245) defined the person as follows: “The person is an independent being that is distinguished by its peculiarity belonging to dignity.” Elsewhere Alexander of Hales wrote: “The person is a matter of morality, because it expresses a peculiarity of dignity.”3 Even at this point, then, it can be noted that what the various fundamental conceptions of the person have in common — what connects them — is the incomparable dignity of the person.
To be a person, then, never means merely having certain properties. It always also means being the bearer of a dignity that is not something added on, something external, but belongs to the essence of personhood itself. This dignity is not something conferred on the person — by the state, say, by society, or by other persons. It belongs to personhood itself. It is, as the dissertation puts it, an “inalienable, objective worth of the person” — the ontologically sufficient ground for affirming and loving the person for her own sake.
A physician who treats an unconscious patient does not treat him with dignity because the patient asks him to — the patient cannot ask for anything. He does so because he recognizes in the patient a person who possesses dignity independently of her current condition. This dignity is the reason we treat even the dying, the unconscious, the unborn as if they were — what they in fact are — fully valid persons.
This has consequences for the whole discussion. For if the concept of person is a dignity concept, then the question of who is a person is not a purely theoretical question. It directly concerns the life and rights of real human beings.
What distinguishes and separates the various conceptions of the person from one another is above all one thing: the question of the ground of dignity. Is personhood, and with it personality, attributed to an entity on the basis of certain actual and actualizable capacities — that is, ultimately on the basis of rationality? Or do we speak of the human being who, through his being human, possesses personality as proper to his essence and is therefore from the outset elevated by his very being above all other biological living beings — regardless of whether the properties, capacities, and faculties are actualized or can be actualized, or cannot be actualized, owing, say, to a blockage or to ontogenetic development that has yet to occur?
One’s philosophical-metaphysical conception of reality — one’s worldview — thus essentially determines which concept of person one holds. And vice versa. There is a close connection between what someone thinks about reality as a whole and what he says about the person.
Next section → · Back to chapter overview
Fußnoten
-
Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (The Human Place in the Cosmos), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Bonn: Bouvier, 1995, pp. 11–12. ↩
-
Birnbacher, Analytische Einführung in die Ethik (Analytical Introduction to Ethics), Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2003, pp. 31f. ↩
-
Cf. Alexander of Hales, Summa Theologica, cited after Bexten 2017, p. 93. ↩