Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Concept of Person

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Personbegriff

The concept of person is the central concept of the dissertation. The question “What is a person?” can be answered only once it has been clarified what the word “person” is meant to signify at all. Bexten identifies eighteen distinct meanings and distinguishes adequate from inadequate concepts of person (Bexten 2017, pp. 59 ff.).

From the book

“The dispute over the concept of person is, as the bioethicist Dieter Birnbacher aptly observed, ‘no mere dispute about conceptual contents, but a dispute between thoroughly antithetical normative-ethical doctrines.‘”

— Three fundamental perspectives on the person, Chapter 3

Eighteen Meanings

The word “person” is used in at least eighteen distinct meanings — from the legal person, through the grammatical person, to the ontological person. This ambiguity is a principal source of confusion in ethical and philosophical debates.

Three Basal Concepts of Person

The dissertation distinguishes three fundamental types of concepts of person (Bexten 2017, pp. 117 ff.):

  1. Substance-Ontological Concept of Person: person as spiritual substance (Boethius, Thomas Aquinas)
  2. Empirical-Functionalist Concept of Person: person constituted by actual capacities (Locke, Singer)
  3. Relational Concept of Person: person essentially determined by relation

Adequate Concept of Person

An adequate concept of person must capture what is essentially and necessarily proper to the person in virtue of an essential law. As its result, the dissertation defends the substance-ontological-relational concept of person: the person is a spiritual substance in the body in relation (Bexten 2017, p. 129).

Basal Relations

The basal relations (bR1–bR5) clarify how the concept of person stands to the concept of the human being. The five possible relations show what consequences the various concepts of person carry.

Person as a Concept of Dignity

Alexander of Hales coins the insight that “person” is a concept of dignity: to be a person means to possess dignity. This holds independently of whether the person actually unfolds its person-behavior (agere sequitur esse).

Moral Relevance

An entity has moral relevance when its being demands a value-response — even when it is not a person. Moral relevance is an objective value: it obtains independently of whether anyone acknowledges it.

Personal ontology distinguishes between the ontological dignity of the person (the highest value) and the moral relevance of other entities (e.g. animals, ecosystems). Moral relevance is weaker than the dignity of the person, but real: non-personal entities too can possess an intrinsic value that demands an appropriate response. The moral ought presupposes moral relevance (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 215–220).

Ontological classification:

  • Superordinate concept: Objective Value

Ontological relations:

Chapter assignment: Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person

See also: Value-Response, Moral Ought, Dignity, Person, Values, Reverence, Personalist Norm

Non-Human Person

The non-human person is a person that does not constitute a body-soul unity but is a purely spiritual substance. In the Thomistic tradition this includes the angels and God (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 95 ff.).

The concept of person is wider than the concept of the human being. Not every person is human. Personhood is not constituted by corporeality but by spiritual nature as such. The human person is essentially corporeal — her soul is forma corporis. Non-human persons, by contrast, exist as purely spiritual substances.

This distinction is philosophically significant because it shows that the concept of person is used analogically. God is a person in an eminent sense, the angels in a sense distinct from that of the human person. Spaemann stresses that precisely this analogy preserves the concept of person from a reductionist narrowing onto the biological.

Ontological relations:

Substance-Ontological-Relational Concept of Person

The concept of person defended as adequate in the work: a synthesis of substance ontology and relationality. The person as spiritual substance.

Ontological relations:

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Birnbacher, Dieter (1997): “Das Dilemma des Personenbegriffs.” In: Streit um den Personbegriff, ed. Jan P. Beckmann. Münster. (German)
  • Boethius: Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, cap. 3 (persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia).
  • Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, aa. 1–4 (person as subsistens distinctum in natura intellectuali).
  • Alexander of Hales: Summa Theologica I, no. 405 (person as nomen dignitatis).
  • Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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