On the Moral Problems Raised by the Existence of Personites

Philosophia, 2019

Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to both. Would such a system be just? Theodore Sider argues: no. For, any possible criterion of determining where people go will involve treating very similar (possible) individuals very differently. Here, I argue that this point has deep and underappreciated implications for moral philosophy. The argument proceeds by analogy: many ethical theories make a sharp and practically significant distinction between persons and non-persons. Yet, just like in the binary afterlife, this involves treating very similar individuals very differently. I propose two ways out. The first is to deny that such theories are strictly speaking true, but to claim that it is practically best if people adopt them. The second is to modify such theories so as to allow for continuous variation in the scope and strength of the moral obligations arising from personhood.

2001

Logos i Ethos

The relationship between paradox and person has a long history. The term "person" in philosophy first came into use at the end of antiquity in an attempt at unravelling the paradoxes of Christian faith, and was later introduced into the field of anthropology. While it did not undermine the Greek concept of man as a living and rational being (animal rationale), it led to its reinterpretation. Under the influence of religion, the discrepancy in the way man used to be understood between those characteristics that make him more like other beings and those that highlight his difference from them became increasingly clear. The tension between these different properties has found its expression in paradoxes. Today, the problem of the paradoxes of person is rarely discussed in philosophical, or even personalist literature. Compared to many other paradoxes, even individual ones, which are the subject of major disputes, their discussion is marginal. And yet, without considering the paradoxes of person, it is not possible to understand the specificity of man's existence.

Bioethics, 2019

The debate on the question of the moral status of human beings and the boundaries of the moral community has long been dominated by the antagonism between personism and speciesism: either certain mental properties or membership of the human species is considered morally crucial. In this article, I argue that both schools of thought are equally implausible in major respects, and that these shortcomings arise from the same reason in both cases: a biological notion of being human. By contrast, I show to what extent being human is morally relevant in a non‐biological sense. I establish the living human form as the essential criterion for belonging to the moral community, and defend it against a number of possible objections. This new morphological approach is capable of capturing essential elements of personism and speciesism without sharing their faults, and of reconstructing widespread moral intuitions.

There is a growing number of objections to the possibility and the practical use of personhood and theories based on it, particularly in bioethics. Chief on this attack has been the suspicion that many in the philosophical literature have expressed about the concept of person, both in its metaphysical and moral aspects. The charges leveled against this concept by different authors from different theoretical standpoints fall into four groups which I shall first try to discriminate – in doing so, I will count the over-simplification charge, the charge of vagueness/ambiguity, the cover-up/begging the question charge, and the irrelevance/superfluousness charge (I will use Bert Gordijn’s (1999) basic formulations of the charges, subsuming under the former many other similar objections from other authors). It is my claim that we can answer all the charges in a non-problematic way, since most of these are unjustified or, at least, they could equally well be applied to many other concepts who play a fundamental role in philosophy, science, and in our own practical life. My ultimate interest, however, is not so much on the objections themselves but on showing how they all share a deeper metaphysical cum moral question - in each charge we will inevitably reach the point where the metaphysical and the moral aspects of personhood meet and that link is what will prompts us from one charge to the other, until we finally devote our full attention to the kind of connection there is or should be between metaphysical personhood and moral personhood (or, to frame it in another possible manner, the link between the descriptive and the normative aspects of the concept of person).

2001

Phiilosophical Studies

The purpose of this paper is to provide a justification of punishment which can be endorsed by free will skeptics, and which can also be defended against the “using persons as mere means” objection. Free will skeptics must reject retributivism, that is, the view that punishment is just because criminals deserve to suffer based on their actions. Retributivists often claim that theirs is the only justification on which punishment is constrained by desert, and suppose that non-retributive justifications must therefore endorse treating the people punished as mere means to social ends. Retributivists typically presuppose a monolithic conception of desert: they assume that action-based desert is the only kind of desert. But there are also personhood-based desert claims, that is, desert claims which depend not on facts about our actions, but instead on the more abstract fact that we are persons. Since personhood-based desert claims do not depend on facts about our actions, they do not depend on moral responsibility, so free will skeptics can appeal to them just as well as retributivists. What people deserve based on the mere fact of their personhood is to be treated as they would rationally consent to be treated if all they had in view was the mere fact of their personhood. We can work out the implications of this view for punishment by developing a “hypothetical consent” justification in which we select principles of punishment in the Rawlsian original position, so long as we are careful not to smuggle in the retributivist assumption that it is under our control whether we end up as criminals or as law-abiding citizens once we raise the veil of ignorance.

The New Bioethics

This monograph rigorously argues for a Thomistic (after the thirteenth century theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas) account of the human person. Each chapter addresses different stages of human existence, considering the metaphysical and philosophical issues arising from these. Dualist and materialist accounts are considered, and Eberl's Thomistic position is carefully elucidated. Eberl argues that the Thomistic account is as a via media between dualism and materialism, combining the strengths, whilst avoiding the weaknesses, of both camps. Chapter One: 'What Am I?' sets the scene. The desiderata for an account of the human person are delineated and justified, and the reader is introduced to the distinct, but closely related, concepts of 'human being' and 'person'. Eberl outlines the many different ways these two terms are used and shows that whilst some thinkers will use them as synonyms, others will use them to refer to very different concepts. Ultimately, Eberl settles on the term human person to allow for the possibility of non-human persons. During this chapter, the outline of the rest of the book is laid out. Chapter Two: 'This is Us' sets out Eberl's Thomistic account of the human person in broad strokes. Along the way, cerebral transplant thought experiments, in which one person's cerebrum is transplanted into a different person's body (I shall return to this topic later), and dicephalic twins are considered. Chapter Three: 'I Think, Therefore … ' introduces the reader to two contemporary alternative dualist accounts, substance dualism and emergent dualism, with Swinburne's substance dualism and Hasker's emergent dualism being used as quintessential representatives of each. Both views are considered and critiqued. Chapter Four: 'Thou Art Dust' introduces the reader to one reductive and three non-reductive materialist alternatives: animalism, constitutionalism, four-dimensionalism and the embodied mind theory. Olson's animalist approach is considered as a representative reductive physicalist account. Baker's constitutionalism, Hudson's four-dimensionalism and McMahan's embodied mind account are the three non-reductive materialist accounts considered. In the process of doing this, teletransporter thought experiments and their correct interpretation are also considered. Chapter Five: Starting Out then applies these accounts to the beginning of human life and the various questions and issues raised therein. Eberl argues that his Thomistic account is superior based on the arguments of previous chapters. He shows how, according to his Thomistic account, a human person comes into existence at conception. In doing this, he also spends quite some time carefully engaging with the new bioethics, 2020, 1-4