The Concept of Personhood Especially in Recent Times Essay

What is a person? Is it possible to define “person”? Or can we only list certain characteristics that we normally associate with beings that we consider persons? Is “person” different from “human being”?

Consider the following viewpoints:

First, find the link on the Modules page to the essay “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” by Mary Anne Warren. Read paragraphs 30 and 31 in which she discusses the defining characteristics of persons. Her basic argument is that not all human beings are persons and only persons have a right not to be killed. There are human beings who are genetically human by virtue of possessing human DNA, and then there are human beings who are both genetically and morally human, that is, persons with a right to life, because they have attained the specific characteristics of persons that she lists (or at least some of them). As you will notice, not only do unborn human beings not qualify as persons according to her criteria, but neither do babies or toddlers or adults suffering from dementia or serious brain damage.
LINK HERE: http://www.amber-hinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/warren-moralandlegalstatusofabortion.pdf

Second, some people have adopted an essentially reductionist understanding of human nature, that is, they reduce human beings to biology and chemistry. For example, in the Introduction to his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Francis Crick (one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA) says, “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons!’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.” Crick goes on to state that “a modern neurobiologist sees no need for the religious concept of a soul to explain the behavior of humans and other animals….They have no need for that hypothesis.” Scientists seek to understand the “soul” in scientific rather than religious terms. He states his hypothesis in stronger terms: “The scientific belief is that our minds—the behavior of our brains—can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.” At the end of the book Crick says, “If the scientific facts are sufficiently striking and well established, and if they support the Astonishing Hypothesis, then it will be possible to argue that the idea that man has a disembodied soul is as unnecessary as the old idea that there was a Life Force.”

Crick acknowledges that this is a hypothesis, and that something quite different might eventually turn out to be true, but, as a scientist, he is much more inclined to believe the materialist hypothesis that human beings have no spiritual souls and no genuine faculty of free will. “Free will,” he believes, can be reduced to and explained entirely in terms of brain activities and processes. He thinks that the reason why many people would not accept the scientific account of human consciousness and free will is that “their views are predetermined by a slavish adherence to religious dogma.”

In a similar vein the Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson wrote that “The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.” [Sociobiology seeks to explain all human traits and behaviors in terms of evolutionary advantage and natural selection.]

And the biologist Richard Dawkins mentions what he calls “the deep problems”: “Is there meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?” and then quotes George Gaylord Simpson’s comment on these questions: “The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1858 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.” [1858 was the year before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.] In one of his books [The Blind Watchmaker] Dawkins wrote that the Darwinian theory of evolution made it possible for someone to be proud of being an atheist. For Dawkins and other Darwinian evolutionists human beings are the accidental products of an entirely random and purposeless process.

Third, on the other hand, Socrates and Plato clearly believed that a human being has a non-material and immortal soul that is drawn toward a divine transcendent realm and we can fulfill our spiritual nature only by seeking union with the divine. They also believed that human beings have free will.

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