Abstract
The traditional idea of equivalence between the concepts of human and person lies behind the core of many contemporary legal controversies. As an example, the issues of animal rights, human bioenhancements and post humanism, are common in the literature. Particularly, one can pinpoint the controversy about equality amid persons being a political value inherent to a shared human nature (and dependent upon it). Such equivalence has its grounds on an anthropocentric ontology that projects itself over the ethical and epistemological spheres: man as a self-referent being, measure of everything and self-contained. The aims of this paper are: (1) to criticize essentialist normative views based on the idea of human nature and; (2) identify the concept of person as an axiological concept with no roots in any paradigmatic ontology. To achieve these goals, the paper seeks a better understanding of the concept of person, especially of its dimension of alterity (therefore openness). It also argues about the true meaning of equality as a political value in order to clarify what is really at stake when one talks about expanding the concept’s limits to include a radically different other.
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Notes
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La Metrie, for example, argued that a murderer or a dishonest man could not be blamed guilty because his actions were determined by its nature or his natural inclination towards particular behaviors of that type. It is worth noting that quite recently Laurence Tancredi (2005) has brought to debate a claim to rethink the notions of civil and criminal liability due to new discoveries in neuroscience concerning the relation between physical and mental elements in human beings. Would we be looking at the end of tort law?
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Astonishingly, all the obstacles imposed when talking about personhood of concrete entities other than those belonging to the human species are never considered when talking about legal persons, what might show the strength of the “rational spooky” approach. Especially when, despite presented as “instrumental entities”, there is a growing tendency in equalizing its legal capacity to that of natural persons, as recently seen in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court in which, for the first time, a for-profit corporation’s claim of religious belief has been recognized.
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One must notice that such definition stands even in the face of other contemporary different conceptual frameworks for a theory of justice, such as the one of John Rawls (2000). In fact, it is a definition of equality that, considering its rationalist limits, would fit even in a Kantian framework.
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The nature and extent of such positive discriminatory measures, and also, of course, of its content, is in dispute. Though, it can’t be denied that even the Aristotelian conception of equality assumes empirical inequalities by chance and demands some amount of substantive unequal treatment as a political choice. This fact is highlighted so as to answer in advance any objections to such partial conclusions on equality that are made through the denial of Rawls’ or Dworkin’s framework.
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Regarding this argument, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu make a strong point on the need for moral enhancement so that broader interests, such as those of future generations, can be considered. The authors hold being unlikely that traditional methods such as moral education or social reform alone can obtain results swiftly enough to avert looming disaster, which would undermine the conditions for life on earth forever (Persson, Savulescu 2012).
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Silva, D.F. (2017). From Human to Person: Detaching Personhood from Human Nature. In: Kurki, V., Pietrzykowski, T. (eds) Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53462-6_8
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