A tradable good — an entity that has a price and can be exchanged for something else. The decisive point of personal ontology is this: the person is NEVER a commodity. This fundamental axiom runs through the entire dissertation and forms one of the sharpest boundary lines of the ontology of personhood. Wherever a person is treated as a commodity — be it in human trafficking, in surrogacy, in prostitution, or in the economic reduction of human labor to a mere cost factor — there occurs a fundamental violation of dignity.
The difference between commodity and person is not one of degree but an ontological one. The commodity belongs to the order of the something, the person to the order of the someone. A commodity has a price. A person has dignity. A price can be replaced by an equivalent value. Dignity admits of no equivalent.
For this reason the class of commodity is, in the ontology, essentially different from the class of person. There is no entity that could be both commodity and person at once. Every attempt to treat a person as a commodity is a form of instrumentalization and contradicts the personalist norm. The person may never be a mere means but is always to be affirmed for her own sake.
The connection between commodity and money deserves particular attention: money is the universal medium of exchange that renders all commodities commensurable. But wherever money becomes the sole standard, the danger arises that persons too will be reduced to their economic usefulness. This reduction is one of the basic forms of the oblivion of the person.
Ontological Classification
Ontological relations:
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Kant, Immanuel (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Academy Edition vol. IV, p. 434 (distinction between price and dignity).