An accidental determination of the person within a community. Changeable.
Ontological relations:
- has subclass: Lawyer
- has subclass: Parental Role
- has subclass: Specialist Role
- has subclass: Leadership Role
- has subclass: Child’s Role
- has subclass: Employee Role
- is subclass of: Accident
- has subclass: Intended Parents
- (inverse) range: plays role
The Person as Bearer of Roles
Ontological relation: a person plays a social role within a community. The role is accidental — it can change without personhood being altered. The person is never reducible to her role; whoever identifies the person with her role commits instrumentalization. The ontological foundation of this relation lies in the distinction between substance and accident. The person is a substance (ens per se), whereas the role is an accidental relation. Concrete roles such as leadership role, employee role, parental role, or child’s role determine the person more closely without constituting her essence. The personalist norm demands that every ascription of a role respect the personhood of the role’s bearer.
- Domain: Person
- Range: Social Role
Lawyer
The lawyer is a person in the social role of legal counsel. This role stands in the service of justice as a archphenomenon and protects the rights of persons in legal proceedings (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 309 ff.).
From the standpoint of personal ontology, the role of the lawyer is significant because it brings the dignity of the person to bear even within institutional contexts. The lawyer represents the legitimate claims of a person who does not herself possess the professional or factual means to assert her rights.
As with every social role, the personalist norm binds the lawyer never to treat the client merely as a means. The role remains accidental. It does not constitute the personhood of its holder, yet it represents a way of concretely assuming responsibility for other persons.
Parental Role
The parental role is a social role that a person assumes as mother or father within a family. Considered ontologically, it is accidental: it does not belong to the essence of the person but is a contingent determination that accrues to the substance (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 250 ff.).
Nevertheless, the parental role is of particular personal significance. It brings with it a profound responsibility: parents are the first to encounter the child in a personal manner and to accompany the child in its unfolding. Care, upbringing, and love are the activities proper to parenthood. The decisive insight of personal ontology remains: even one who never becomes a parent is a person in the full sense. The parental role does not constitute personhood but is a way of realizing it within the interpersonal community.
Specialist Role
The specialist role is a social role in which a person is active in a particular domain on the basis of specific professional competence (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 314 f.).
From the perspective of personal ontology, the specialist role is an accidental determination. It describes what someone does and can do, not who someone is. The person is never exhausted by her professional function. At the same time, the exercise of professional competence is a way in which the person places her rationality and abilities in the service of others. It can be an expression of genuine work and of personal self-realization.
The specialist role becomes problematic wherever the person is defined exclusively through her expertise and reduced to it. Such a reduction would be a form of oblivion of the person, one that fails to recognize the essential core of the person — her dignity beyond every function.
Leadership Role
The leadership role is a social role in which a person assumes directive responsibility for other persons and structures (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 313 ff.).
From the standpoint of personal ontology, what is decisive is that all leadership remains bound to the personalist norm. The persons who are led may never be treated merely as means to the attainment of organizational ends. Legitimate authority differs from mere power in that it serves the good of persons and respects their dignity.
Leadership competence therefore comprises not only professional and organizational abilities but, essentially, the capacity to perceive the other as a person. Where leadership reduces the person to her function, it becomes oblivion of the person. The leadership role itself remains accidental — it does not belong to the essence of the person.
Child’s Role
The child’s role is the social role that a person assumes as a child within a family. Like all social roles, it is accidental — it does not determine the essence of the person but describes a relational position within a community (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 251 ff.).
The child’s role nonetheless has a particular significance for personal development: within the family the child experiences the first and most fundamental form of interpersonal relation. In the relationship to its parents the child is recognized, loved, and supported in its unfolding as a person. Upbringing and childhood as a phase of life are the space in which fundamental personal capacities — trust, language, moral consciousness — are awakened. Ontologically, the child remains, from the beginning of its existence, a full person with inalienable dignity.
Employee Role
The employee role is the social role that a person assumes as an employee within an enterprise or organization. It is changeable and accidental — the person is not her role (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 314 ff.).
This principle has far-reaching consequences: dignified work requires that the employee be perceived as a person — not as an interchangeable functionary. The personalist norm demands that working relationships be arranged so as to respect the dignity of the person: through a just wage, appropriate working conditions, and recognition of the personal contribution. Where an enterprise defines the employee exclusively through his usefulness to the organization, instrumentalization is present. The person possesses her dignity prior to and independently of any professional role she assumes.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a. 1–2 (the person as substance; the distinction between substance and accident).