Personhood in Bioethics

The concept of personhood has been recently strongly criticized by some bioethicists. The present article aims at refuting these criticisms. In order to show how the notion of personhood operates in bioethics, two understandings of it proposed by an Italian bioethicist Maurizio Mori are sketched: a person as a part of the cosmological order and a person as an autonomous-like entity. It is argued that none of the proposed understandings is adequate. The cosmological concept perceives the person as a derivative of the empirical processes. The autonomous-like, in turn, conceives the person as a freely acting subject. This paper endeavours to prove that both conceptions are one-sided. In order to do that, the thought of German philosopher Robert Spaemann is deployed. He convincingly points out that the person must be considered from a so-called ‘modus existendi’ stance. It means that to be a person is to possess a unique way of being. That being encompasses the material content (body) not as a casual factor but as an indispensable mean of expressing itself. The final thesis is that the person’s being is man’s life. Drawing upon such a conclusion, it is taken up a critical discussion with the views rejecting the usefulness of the concept. I. Back to the Notion of the Person Contemporary discussions and debates taking place within bioethics seem to be utterly dominated by particular issues. It is due to the pressure coming from the rapidly progressing biomedical sciences. In order to keep pace with that, bioethics must deal with the constantly increasing number of problems and new aspects demanding to deliver ‘right-here-and-now’ outcomes. Therefore, one rightly gets an impression that this realm of human activity is so strongly involved in the quest for practical solutions that there FORUM PHILOSOPHICUM 12 (2007), pp. 157-175