🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Empirisch-funktionalistischer Personbegriff
The empirical-functionalist concept of person determines the person not by its being, but by its actual capacities. Whoever actually possesses self-consciousness, reason and certain cognitive achievements is a person. Whoever does not, is not (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 100 ff., 109 ff., 200 ff.).
John Locke defines: a person is one who is conscious of himself as identical over time. Derek Parfit regards the person as an epiphenomenon of psychological continuity. Peter Singer demands: a person is one who actually exhibits rationality, self-consciousness and autonomy. David Wiggins holds a modified Lockean approach.
The consequences are far-reaching. Embryos are accordingly not persons. Human beings with severe dementia can lose their status as persons. Newborns are (for Singer) not yet persons.
The dissertation criticizes this concept of person fundamentally. It confuses personhood and person-behavior — it inverts the principle agere sequitur esse. It knows no constitutive nature; the person has no abiding essence. It cannot ground the dignity of the person, because dignity is tied to contingent capacities. It leads to oblivion of the person — the forgetting of who the human being truly is.
Three systematic objections form the framework of this critique. The exclusion objection shows that the empirical-functionalist concept of person necessarily excludes certain groups of human beings — embryos, the sleeping, the comatose, the severely demented or severely disabled — from the circle of persons, and thereby contradicts lived experience and the moral consensus. The objection from diachronic identity shows that psychological continuity cannot constitute personal identity over time, but already presupposes it: the one who remembers is the one who experienced it, not the one who first comes into being through it. Both objections are systematically unfolded in the dissertation (Bexten 2017). Finally, the performative contradiction shows that anyone who argues for this position enacts, in his own speech act, the very personhood that he wishes theoretically to restrict to a narrow subset of human beings — it is a development of Bexten’s own (2026), following Apel’s transcendental pragmatics, and closes a systematic gap in Spaemann.
The basal relations show: this concept of person leads to bR3 or bR4. Not all human beings are accordingly persons. The dissertation further shows that it is not worldview-neutral, but rests on certain metaphysical pre-decisions. Descartes’ division of mind and body forms a historical root. The alternative is the substance-ontological-relational concept of person, which grounds personhood in being, not in doing.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Concept of Person
Chapter assignment: Chapter 3: What Is a Person?, Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Locke, John (1690): An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II, ch. 27 (Of Identity and Diversity / Personal Identity).
- Parfit, Derek (1984): Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press (the person as an epiphenomenon of psychological continuity).
- Singer, Peter (1994): Rethinking Life and Death. Melbourne: Text Publishing (actualist criteria of personhood).
- Wiggins, David (1980): Sameness and Substance. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Descartes, René (1641): Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy) (the division of res cogitans and res extensa).
See also
Exclusion Objection, Objection from Diachronic Identity, Performative Contradiction, Substance-Ontological Concept of Person, Relational Concept of Person, Basal Relations, Personhood, Person-Behavior, Agere sequitur esse, Dignity, Embryo, Dementia, Fertilization, Human Person, Oblivion of the Person, Person, Substance, Nature, Act and Potency, Someone, First Dimension, Body-Soul Unity, Archphenomenon, Essential Law, Personalist Norm, Cognition, Insight, Freedom, Love, Soul, Body, Form and Matter, Truth, Interiority, John Locke, Peter Singer, Derek Parfit, Robert Spaemann, Thomas Aquinas, David Wiggins, René Descartes, Boethius, Chapter 3: Concept of Person, Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person, Artificial Intelligence, AI Ethics, Turing Test, Alan Turing, Triage