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9 Persons: Natural, Functional, or Ethical Kind?
Author(s) -
Lizza John P.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
american journal of economics and sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.199
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1536-7150
pISSN - 0002-9246
DOI - 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2007.00504.x
Subject(s) - personhood , epistemology , bioethics , natural (archaeology) , consciousness , sociology , identity (music) , subject (documents) , personal identity , context (archaeology) , environmental ethics , psychology , social psychology , self , law , philosophy , political science , aesthetics , archaeology , library science , computer science , history , paleontology , biology
A bstract . In this paper, I examine alternative views of personhood and how they affect our understanding of life and death. Building on David Wiggins's insight that our concept of person tries to hold in a single focus our nature as a biological being, a subject of consciousness, and a locus of moral values, I argue against views that try to reduce persons to one of these aspects at the expense of the others. Thought experiments that have been prominent in the literature on personal identity are criticized on grounds that they sunder persons from the moral and cultural context in which they appear and ignore an essential relational aspect of persons. I argue for a substantive view of persons that understands persons as “constituted by” but not identical to human organisms, and that treats persons as having essential relational properties. Persons are thus beings whose nature is not determined entirely by their biology or psychology but is, in part, a matter of individual, moral, and cultural construction. I argue that such a view provides the best theoretical grounding to answer the more practical, bioethical questions concerning the beginning and end of life.