Why We Shouldn't Define "Person" as "Human Being"
I had a discussion with a pro-life person on-line earlier this week. This person essentially said that a person should be defined as “human being”, which is the only scientific criterion one can point to as a determinant of personhood. There are a few problems with defining “person” in this way, however.
This person’s intention was good — we want to have a definition of “person” that includes all human beings. But what is wrong with this definition? For one thing, it’s ad hoc. We want a definition that includes all human beings, but simply defining “person” as “human being” won’t do because it’s clearly just a definition that’s intended to support your point of view when other points of view exist that defenders of those viewpoints argue for.
Another problem with this definition is it’s too narrow. For religious people, this would exclude supernatural beings such as God and angels. For even non-religious people, this would exclude intelligent alien beings from personhood, if such beings exist.
A third problem with the definition is it is not really a scientific criterion for personhood. That’s because personhood is a philosophical concept, not a scientific one. If I were to ask this person “why are all human beings persons”, the answer he would give would be philosophical, not scientific. Conception is a scientific criterion, and I agree it’s the only non-arbitrary point in a human being’s development to place the establishment of personhood, but pro-choice people who point at sentience or self-awareness as their determinant of personhood could claim their view is scientific, too. But just like with the conception criterion, they’re not scientific criteria — they’re philosophical criteria using science to determine who counts. Scientists can tell us when an individual human life begins, or when sentience or self-awareness approximately start, but this, alone, cannot tell us when personhood is present.
Personhood, as it is discussed in the academic literature, is just the point at which an individual has rights. If you are a person, you have rights, such as the right to life. So this brings us to a fourth problem with this definition of personhood: it doesn’t really get at what makes human beings what they are. We are biological human beings, but humans are more than the sum of their parts. So a better definition of personhood, one which was adopted by ancient Christian philosopher Boethius and is accepted by many modern Christian philosophers such as Francis J. Beckwith, is “an individual substance of a rational nature”. Next week I’ll unpack this definition and explain why this is how we should understand personhood.