What This Book Says
The central thesis of this book can be summed up in a few sentences:
Every human being is a person. Not because he does or can do something in particular, but because he has a particular essence. Personhood is not something one can earn or lose. It precedes all doing, all feeling, all thinking. First someone is there — and then this someone acts, thinks, and feels.
From this it follows: even someone who can no longer think, who no longer feels, who stands at the beginning of his life and cannot yet do any of this — he too is a person. He too has a dignity that is inviolable. Human life is always the life of a person. There is no “merely” biological human life that is not yet, or no longer, personal. Wherever there is human life, there is a person.
And from this it also follows: when we forget who the human being is — when we reduce him to his functions, his achievements, his usefulness — we do him wrong. Not because we break a rule, but because we misread reality. We no longer see what is there. And that has consequences — for medicine, for law, for our everyday dealings with one another.
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