Moral Significance of Personhood - Essay Example

Moral Significance of Personhood Christianity has solely shaped the moral traditions that are found in most societies today. Particularly, the Christian creationist theology - with its scheme that places the human being above all of Gods creations - is the foundation of the moral argument in the discourse of personhood. Humans are created in the likeness of God and has been endowed with rationality and subsequently assigned a unique and superior status in the hierarchy of beings. The existence of the soul is fundamental in this creationist argument. The soul is, ideally, what makes a human a person as it both breathes life to the human body and gives it the faculty of reason. Without a soul a human is either dead or not human at all, such as in cases where the devil claims and takes charge of the body of an individual. The idea is that a person owes its identity and personhood to the soul, reinforcing the principle that human life is sacred, requiring respect and recognition of its dignity. Here, it is underscored that life is a gift signifying an ontological status for human beings wherein each of us inherited a moral capacity as well as right to live as beings that are created in God’s image and individual moral perfection. It was John Locke who cut loose the conceptual strands that held together the personal and biological dimensions of humanity in his essay, Of Identity and Diversity. It was this along with his assumption that not all human beings may be persons that launched the debate in regard to the human ascendancy over other beings. The teleological argument has been largely done away with as advances in reproductive technology, medical genetics, and treatments continually assail the rationality of God and his hand on the affairs of the humans. As biological science discover the marvels of human body, scientists and modern philosophers are emboldened to deny the Creator-variable and the soul, citing the brain as fundamental in the existence of the human reason. Michael Tooley (2001) presented the functional definition of personhood with his dissection of the brain. Here, he outlined that the brain is scientifically divided into two regions, and that the upper part is mainly responsible for the personhood of a person: The upper brain… contains the neuron-psychological basis not only of higher mental functions such as self-consciousness, deliberation, thought and memory, but also of consciousness of even the most rudimentary sort. (p. 117) The destruction of this region, say in an accident or as a result of a disease, is tantamount not just to the destruction of certain general capacities but of states that underlie personal identity as well. This basis of personhood follows a utilitarian or functional approach. As with the case of the brain damage, for instance, the resulting incapacity makes a human less a person. This functional approach to personhood classifies humans into persons and potential persons (i.e. an ovum or an embryo). Some thinkers also took pains in emphasizing “adult human beings” as persons perhaps implying that infants do not qualify in the standards. This is a cold and detached argument not unlike a mechanical principle that values a thing not for its being and existence not even for its purpose but for its use. As mentioned previously, this concept of personhood is rule-utilitarian wherein a person’s worth is factored into whatever cost-benefit ratios play a part in a consequentialist assessment. This is a flaw because personhood should not entirely be characterized by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. This basically goes against the substantive definition of religion or the very concept of morality and ethics that is anchored on the idea that the person is unique, one that mirrors the image of God and one that is equated with a respect for the sanctity of life. This argument is still fundamental particularly as a person is not a process or happening because from his conception he inherited a moral claim to personhood. It is interesting to note that if we deduce from something’s being a person that it has certain rights, then we almost always are committed to the argument that seeks to establish that that entity is a person. In addition, never would anyone develop a satisfactory account and argument why it is wrong to kill a person without essentialist metaphysics. Part II. Michael Tooley cited the criteria of personhood in what he referred to as universally accepted requirements of what makes a person: A being that possesses consciousness, has preferences, has conscious desires, has feelings, can experience pleasure and pain, has thoughts, is self-conscious, is capable of rational thought, has sense of time, can remember his own past actions and mental states. (p. 120) In addition, Tooley outlined that a person must be able to envisage a future for itself, display non-momentary interests, involving a unification of desires over time, the capability of rational deliberation, morality and the traits of character that logically evolve through time, can interact socially with others and can communicate with others. (p. 120) In short, for Tooley: X is a person if and only if x has serious right to life. This view entails, on the one hand, that humans who lack the requisite capability (such as fetuses and infants) are not person. Here, at least, one sees in Tooley an inclination towards the substantive perspective in personhood although there is flaw in his argument that there are degrees of personhood, implying that not all humans are person and that there are humans that do not have the right to life. The flaw is that such argument goes against the moral dimension that he invokes in his argument. He stressed, for instance that personhood is a purely moral concept, free of all descriptive content. This line of thinking is at least sound and had he used this to cover all his arguments and to smother the idea of the “degrees of personhood” he would have presented a consistent and persuasive case. This reasoning is underscored by two propositions posited by Lawrence Becker (1975), which state: 1. That there is no decisive way to define, in purely biological terms, either the point at which human life begins, or the point at which it ends. 2. In any case, if the end points are going to be used as moral divides, they should be defined in terms of morally relevant characteristics. (p. 335) One of the most important aspects of Michael Tooley’s assumptions on personhood is the idea only persons have a serious life to life. This is best illustrated in two controversial issues: death and abortion. Abortion and Personhood According to Mary Anne Warren, there are two distinct but not often distinguished senses in the term “human” – moral sense and genetic sense. In the moral sense, “a being is human provided that it is a full-pledged member of the moral community, a being possessed of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness… On the other hand, a being is human in… the genetic sense provided he or she is a member of the species of Homo Sapiens… that he or she belongs to that animal species.” ( Cited in Feinberg 1989, p. 108) The conflict of these two opposing views is highlighted in the debate about abortion. For the functional school of thought human development is not unlike the metamorphosis of a butterfly, wherein a caterpillar is naturally not considered a butterfly. The analogy is that the butterfly’s life cycle is comparable to the stages of human development, wherein the fetus or an infant is not human as much as the caterpillar is not a butterfly, but instead, the fetus is what Becker called as “human becoming” true to the stages that characterize the development of a human (p. 337) This is fundamentally wrong because it assumes a purely biological standpoint treating humans as nothing different from animals. Consider: a baby is partly human because its body is still incapable of producing spermatozoa. This is despicable for most if not for all people. And what makes it so, considering the fact that a baby indeed pales in comparison to an adult human in terms of personal worth? The answer is the moral personhood that is attached to all humans before being born. Tooley went further than the metamorphosis analogy by suggesting that the potentiality of a fetus or a baby to become a person does not give it a right to life. A personhood or the actual-possession criterion approach to moral status carries some striking implications, in particular the moral permissibility of the infanticide of unwanted children. In this regard, it may not be surprising that philosophers committed to variations of the argument find themselves compelled to oppose abortion on the basis of utilitarian reasons which address the public interest. The point of most interest here is the way in which an exponent of the personhood argument must look beyond the rights language of that argument in order to explain a feature which appears morally embarrassing when viewed from a wider moral perspective. Importantly, by their very nature, such arguments suffer the pitfall of excluding any other terms of moral reference. In regard to this, there are personhood arguments particularly those anchored on concepts such as rights and the duties they ground that consider a fetus as not a person and therefore lacks right. The implication of such line of thinking in the treatment context would seem to be that the fetus has no legitimate claim to consideration. Hence, the utilitarian standpoint will have no qualms at stopping the beating heart of an embryo because the fetus is “technically” not yet a person. But the moral standpoint invokes a metaphysical argument showing that moral personhood emerges in a fetus prior to birth. This addresses the “ambiguity” variable in the personhood debate because the fetus as a human is a person, pure and simple, owing to its moral rights inherited in its conception. This does away with the descriptive and normative complexities that preoccupy some thinkers inclined towards the utilitarian school of thought. Death Today, it is still common to use “person” and “human being” interchangeably. And this somehow goes against the function or utilitarian argument to personhood because it imposes certain moral limitations to personhood. This issue is particularly prominent when talking about the controversial debate on death. Say, a patient in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease may no longer qualify or satisfy the requirements that characterize a “person” especially if we are to take into account Tooley’s definition of personhood. However, to this person’s family and loved ones he is still a husband, a father or a friend, whose life has not yet come to its end. The traditional definition of death, invoked Green and Wikler (1980), is “the ceasing to exist; defined… as a total stoppage of the circulation of the blood, and a cessation of the animal and vital functions consequent thereon, such as respiration, pulsation, etc.” p. 82) There are humungous number of arguments talking about the traditional standards, new standards, emerging standards of death. What appears to be significant in this discourse pertains to the moral right of a person not to be killed. One class of case will be the human being’s failure to have the properties of personhood that must be satisfied in order not to be denied with the right to life. The cases in point include the abortion of an unwanted child or permissible killing and euthanasia. Out of these variables, Jeff McMahan (2002) provided us an invaluable insight that yet argued the significance of the moral dimension to personhood: a human organism dies when its components cease to function altogether in an integrated way. This… leaves certain questions unresolved, such as whether an organism that is brain-dead but continues, with mechanical assistance, to function in an integrated way is still alive. (p. 255) The idea here is that science or its empirical evidence cannot account entirely for the phenomenon of death. As, McMahan rightly stressed, it is possible that one might die or cease to exist while one’s organism would continue to exist and even continue to live. On another note, Lucretius (1957) argues that death is not evil, inevitable and should not be feared (p. 124) Bernard Williams (1973) in his essay, The Makropulos Case, argued that life without death is meaningless. (p. 82) These philosophers prove that from the moral standpoint death is not entirely a negative concept. The idea, hence, of permissible killings and euthanasia might not be a strong problem area in terms of the arguments presented in favor of the moral personhood. Death also underscores the difference of human from other animals or living things. According to Thomas Nagel (1979), death reminds us of what we have with the concept of life and that it is good to be alive because of the human experience that span the human life cycle. (p. 3) Part III. As laid out by this paper, there is a tremendous problem encountered by those explaining personhood in terms of its utilitarian meaning. Not a few cite this dilemma as ambiguity but it is easy to consider them as confusion. This contemporary school of thought on personhood just throws in a lot of evolving variables driven by the advances in technology and biological science. And so, there is a big room for error, as new principles are discovered only to be supplanted by new discoveries. What is interesting here is that the theological approach to personhood becomes the most consistent argument in the whole debate. And that, when one give it a second look, he or she would find that it is too simple and yet it addresses all the problems that science could not. Perhaps it is helpful to remember that the concept of personhood originated in the traditional moral beliefs and that by having the supposed rationality of science dictate a new framework of morality it destroys its most potent argument in the process. The problem with personhood as ambiguous only comes with the entry of the functional dimension. For instance in the issue of an unborn child, there is a genetic composition of a human and yet additional elements come into play – those characteristics that require consciousness, among others. In the substantive argument, there is no such thing as an unborn child, an innocent infant – these are all human and their lack of self concepts and familiar characteristics found in adult human does not make them less human much less lesser persons. According to Joe Feinberg, it bears repeating that the most important question in “formulating the criteria of personhood in the purely moral sense is not a scientific question to be settled by empirical evidence, not simply a question of word usage, not simply a matter to be settled by commonsense thought experiments.” (p. 111) In addition, a fundamental concept remains solid as ever: Human beings protect themselves with a thicket of rights they do not grant to other beings simply by virtue of being human. This reeks of double standard. Furthermore, it underscores the fact that all humans are persons regardless of the fact that they are fetuses, infants or adults. Interestingly, it is John Locke who supported the idea that personhood transcends the functional definition with his discourse on the concept of identity. To quote: In the state of living creatures, their identity depends not on a mass of the same particles, but on something else. For in them the variation of great parcels of matter alters not the identity: an oak growing from a plant to a great tree, and then lopped, is still the same oak. (p. 208) In using the analogy illustrated by Locke, an incapacitated human such as when he or she, for instance, suffered a stroke and lost some motor functions, there is no change in the identity or in his or her personhood. For Locke, “the reason whereof is that in these two cases – a mass of matter and a living body – identity is not applied to the same thing.” (p. 208-209) There are those who scoff at the stake of religion in the definition personhood, saying that the principles it espouses are passé such as the concept of creationism and its values concerning the sanctity of life. Advances in science, technology and medicine provide evidences that cut up an individual into different functional forms. But no one can deny that the Christian values on life and the Christian morality are what keep society civilized to this day. James Rachel and William Ruddick (1989) had a more persuasive argument as they threw in the element of equality into the discussion on personhood. According to them, persons are entitled to equal treatment in virtue of their common features. “As besouled children of God, we are equally objects of divine love, and therefore equally entitled to one another’s regard.” (p. 225) Bibliography Becker, Lawrence, ‘Human Being: The Boundaries of the Concept’, in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Princeton University Press, Summer 1975. vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 334-359. Feinberg, Joel, ‘The Problem of Personhood’ in Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, T. Beauchamp and L. Walters 2nd ed. (eds). Wadsworth, 1989. pp. 109-115. Locke, John, Of Identity and Diversity, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book Two, Chapter XXVII, pp. 206-212. Green, Michael & Winkler, Daniel, ‘Brain Death and Personal Identity’, in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Princeton University Press, 1980. vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 105-133. Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe, , Book III, Life and Mind. Penguin Classics, 1957. pp. 121-129. McMahan, Jeff, ‘Brain Death, cortical death and persistent vegetative state’ in Helga Khuse and Peter Singer (eds.), A Companion to Bioethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. pp. 250-260. McMahan, Jeff, ‘Death’ in The Ethics of Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. pp. 145-188. Nagel, Thomas, ‘Death’, in Mortal Questions. Cambridge U.P, 1979, pp. 1-10. Tooley, Michael, ‘Personhood’ in Helga Khuse and Peter Singer (eds.), A Companion to Bioethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 117-126. Rachels, James & Ruddick, William, ‘Lives and Liberty’, in J. Christman (ed.) The Inner Citadel. New York: OUP, 1989. pp. 221-233. Williams, Bernard, ‘The Makropolous Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’, in Problems of the Self. Cambridge, 1973. pp. 82-100. Read More