ON BEING A PERSON
December 15th 1999
Some time ago an eminent Scottish-based academic was discussing the rights and wrongs of procuring human abortion. He said that people would view the question very differently if the pregnant woman's body-wall were transparent so that the foetus would be seen increasingly, as the months pass by, to be recognisably a baby. It can be argued that an eight-months foetus (normally being viable) is every bit as much a person as is the new-born infant that will be delivered a few weeks later and that, consequently, to procure abortion - especially late-term abortion - is to commit murder.
Our academic went on to make the rather puzzling remark that "the abortion issue is bedevilled by disputation about personhood ".
A very odd remark .... because it is precisely the view of those opposed absolutely to abortion that the foetus is truly a person while those people who countenance abortion are precisely those who deny that the foetus is a person but that it is merely a potential person.
Both parties agree that being, or not being, truly a person is the crux of the matter. Hence personhood is at the very centre of the debate (as the respective protagonists all see it).
The purpose of this essay is to try to identify a tenable notion of what we actually mean when we say that a living being is a person. What do you think?
One thing is clear, if only hypothetically so, and that is that the notion of person does not entail being human. We have not actually met aliens from outer space but we may yet do so and it is perfectly possible that they may be quite definitely not of our species but, nonetheless, they may be seen to behave in a manifestly personal way towards one another.
Moreover, some terrestrial species act in ways that suggest that the word person could, perhaps not unduly fancifully, be applied to them.
These extra-terrestrial and terrestrial considerations make it all but impossible to complete satisfactorily a would-be definitive sentence - A person is .....
Traditionally, a circular argument has been used and passed unnoticed for what it is - circular. People say that a person is a living being with a soul and that a soul is that which confers personhood upon its possessor. If you expand that circularity to fill three large volumes of convoluted theologising ... the circularity remains but is less easily detected.
Another attempt is to say that a person is one created in God's image - without in any way knowing, as demonstrable fact, that there is indeed a Creator/God and, if such exists, what He (and thus His image) might be like.
A more fruitful, less fanciful, approach may be to define, formally, a person as a being that can form and sustain personal relationships. We then have to see what features of a relationship between beings make it a personal relationship. A full list of such features is not required - even supposing we have the wit to construct it; a list of personhood criteria can be opened and if a being satisfies, at least, many of these criteria then the status person can be awarded to that being.
How about this for a start? Persons are living beings that are -
1) capable of more or less dependable mutual recognition,
2) capable of reciprocal meaningful communication of perceived fact and experienced feeling,
3) capable of shared recollection of shared past experiences,
4) capable of telling each other meaningfully of past experiences not actually shared,
5) capable of sharing meaningfully thoughts about possible shared future experiences,
6) capable, to some degree, of marking out the limits of what they wish, or ought, to share in particular areas of possible experience open to them,
7) capable of feelings - of love, hate, milder affection or aversion, respect, contempt, fascination or boredom ... etc etc more or less symmetrically or unsymmetrically .... towards each other,
8) capable of respectful mutual agreement, or disagreement on matters of belief and opinion.
Other items might be added to this list but, in any case, a relationship ....... neighbourly, business association, collaboration in various areas of voluntary work or sport, affection (sexual or otherwise) ...... between human beings can be said to be a personal relationship IF it complies with criterion number 1 and, at least, with most of the others.
Moreover, if it is held that personal relationships as so identified, are paramount in human life (without personal relationships, human life is pretty pointless) then it can be held that such relationships ought to be conducted subject to ethical considerations perhaps more exacting than those that apply to relationships that are not personal ones in the sense sketched above.
If something along the lines of the above is accepted then several things follow:
a) that, by reason of failure to comply with criterion number 1, the human foetus and the human PVS patient cannot reasonably be termed persons.
b) therefore decisions to procure human abortion and to switch off life support in PVS cases do not constitute offences against the person and, in particular, do not, properly speaking, constitute murder.
c) Not being murder ...... such decisions are not thereby rendered ethically neutral but they are rendered unsusceptible to the ethical considerations governing killing persons is general.
d) That birth is not merely an event contingent upon such things as natural causes, medication or surgery; it is quite fundamental ; it is the beginning of the process of learning to be a person.
e) to be against, in ALL circumstances, either procuring abortion or assisting suicide or switching off PVS life-support ..... are therefore essentially pacifist attitudes. Now, pacifism is an honourable position but one has to notice that the pro-life enthusiasts are not usually pacifists in relation to war and capital punishment.
Incoherence raises its ugly head all over the place, does it not? We ought to be beheading it.
Perhaps we need some new, preferably infallible, doctrines from those who claim expertise in that area - how about Just Abortion and Just Mercy-Killing ... to parallel the classic teachings on Just War? Perhaps we need, in addition to person, the notions of pre-person and post-person.
E.S.
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