From Human to Person: Detaching Personhood from Human Nature

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.