Abstract
If one were to look for the specific property of human beings, the following definition would be a promising candidate: human beings differ from other living creatures through their endeavor to lead a personal life. The aspiration to lead one’s own life and go one’s own way, to give one’s actions a “personal” touch or develop a “personal” style, are two of the numerous ways in which the fundamental aim of human life, to have one’s own personality and develop one’s own character, is articulated. The central value attributed to personal life in our culture is moreover expressed in diverse terms, which either themselves represent widely accepted values, or are lined up as ethical claims, because they are the conditions on which a personal life can be led: self-fulfillment and originality are examples of the former; freedom, autonomy or integrity of the latter. Not only as far as articulation, legitimation and defense of individuality – one of the characteristic features of modernity – are concerned, but also in such contexts as those in which the exceptional moral status of human beings in comparison to other Lebensformen is to be specified or justified, this usually occurs with recourse to the human personality:
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Notes
- 1.
“Lebensform”, used here in the Wittgensteinian sense, means our human way of being in the world (including first and second nature).
- 2.
“Biomedical ethics” does not refer to a special set of ethics with its own principles, but rather, to a specific topic area. Since the focus of my considerations is directed towards the “Principle of personal identity”, the following is only concerned with a section of that topic area.
- 3.
My argumentation is therefore committed to an internal conception that is specified within an ethical practice.
- 4.
- 5.
In a further usage, “person” in the sense of “human individual” is used, whereby “human” is meant purely biologically rather than in a possibly evaluative or normative sense. In this usage, the designation “person” neither refers to certain properties or capabilities of persons, nor is reference being made to the ethical aspirations tied to the status of being a person. This usage of the person designation is masked out in the following, as it is obviously not tied to the denotation of this term and can be replaced by the expression “human individual”. This procedure, which I favor in this study, avoids the danger of an unnoticed or unaccounted for usage of the evaluative and normative dimensions of the term person; cf. Quante (2012) for a detailed analysis of this.
- 6.
I don’t have to enter into the discussion which person-making characteristics have to or should be accepted when analyzing the meaning of “personhood” since the systematically decisive move in my argument is to analyze the persistence of a human person without recourse to personhood at all on the one hand. On the other hand I suggest an evaluative conception of personality which is compatible both with nearly all conceptions of personhood suggested in the philosophical literature and, even more important, with our daily understanding of personhood.
- 7.
For the consolidation of personhood in the species-specific properties and a (partial) justification of potentiality arguments established thereon, cf. Chap. 3. For even if the potential of becoming a person and the status of being a person are differentiated with the above implementations, this does not mean that the former is irrelevant from the ethical aspect.
- 8.
For dualists who regard the body-correlated subject as the person, the third question is immediately posed. But even then, when one comprehends the person as a psycho-physical unit, this problem arises if the unity of self-consciousness is regarded at a point in time as a necessary condition for awarding personality to an entity.
- 9.
Cf. the contributions in Friedrich and Zichy (2014) for an overview concerning the concept and conceptions of personality.
- 10.
The parlance of “perspectives” and the notion that these refer to epistemological-methodological approaches should leave open which ontological conclusions are to be drawn for the respective issues. An analysis of personal identity based on the Cartesian perspective is, however, mainly distinguishable in that ontological conclusions are drawn from the epistemic characteristics of self-consciousness.
- 11.
The differentiation between the observer and participant perspective takes preference here over the difference between first-person and third-person perspectives frequently used in the literature, because the latter does not encompass the differences relevant to my considerations. The Cartesian perspective demonstrates that the first-person perspective does not automatically include the evaluative aspects of the observer perspective, so that first-person and third-person perspectives do not coincide.
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Quante, M. (2017). Introduction. In: Personal Identity as a Principle of Biomedical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 126. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56869-0_1
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