Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

David Wiggins

3 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: David Wiggins

David Wiggins is an analytic philosopher who attempts to modify the Lockean concept of person without abandoning it altogether. In the book his position serves as an example of a middle way that recognizes the problems of pure functionalism but does not consistently pursue the substance-ontological alternative.

Key Contribution

Wiggins recognizes the weaknesses of the pure empirical-functionalist concept of person: if the person is defined only by actual functions of consciousness, insoluble problems of personal identity arise. He therefore supplements Locke’s criterion with physical similarity and species membership: a being is the same person if it is physically sufficiently similar and belongs to the same biological species (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 95 ff.).

Central Ideas in the Book

Modification of Locke’s Approach

Wiggins sees: Locke’s purely psychological criterion of self-consciousness is not sufficient to secure the identity of the person. For consciousness can be interrupted, disturbed, or altered — and yet the person remains the same. Wiggins therefore adds bodily continuity and biological species membership as criteria. He thereby moves in the direction of the substance-ontological position without, however, fully adopting it.

Species Membership and Being Human

Wiggins’s recourse to species membership approaches the thesis of the book: whoever belongs to the human species is a person. Yet he remains within the frame of an empirical criterion instead of naming the ontological ground: it is not biological species membership as such that grounds personhood, but substantial being as a human person — the rational nature that every human being has from the beginning, because the soul as form informs the body.

A Half-Hearted Correction

The book acknowledges Wiggins’s correction as a step in the right direction, but shows: the correction remains half-hearted because it does not penetrate to the ontological foundation. As long as person remains a concept of function — even one supplemented by empirical criteria — the dignity of the person cannot be grounded as inalienable. Only the substance-ontological concept of person, which understands personhood as substance and First Dimension, achieves this.

Place in the Book

Wiggins is treated in the chapter Chapter 3: What Is a Person? (German), where the various concepts of person are presented and compared. His position shows exemplarily that the empirical-functionalist approach, even in its modified form, cannot answer the fundamental questions.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 95 ff. (Wiggins’s modified Lockean concept of person with physical similarity and species membership).

Further sources:

  • Sameness and Substance (1980). Oxford: Blackwell (modification of the Lockean concept of person by physical similarity and species membership)
  • Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (thoroughly revised and expanded version; today’s reference text)

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