Evandro Agazzi

THE HUMAN BEING AS A PERSON

Splitting person from man?

Something strange has recently appeared on the stage of the ethical and juridical debates: on
the one side, the notion of person is being increasingly admitted as a kind of neutral and sufficiently
objective basis, providing a commonly acceptable ground for giving to moral and legal principles
and norms a rational justification (or 'foundation',in this specific sense,) i.e. a justification which
should prove their being more than conventional, or just contingent upon some social or cultural
context, and therefore their being 'binding' for every rational agent. On the other side, a splitting
between the notion of person and the concept of man (i.e. of human being) is being introduced and
advocated by several people, in particular in the domain of bioethics.
The reasons for qualifying this situation as strange are at least two. First, common language
does not admit such a splitting, in the sense that "man" and "person" are used as synonymous in
everyday speach. If one says: "there are some persons in this room," one is meaning: "there are some
people (i.e. human individuals) in this room." This fact means that these two notions may be
different as to their 'intension' (i.e. as to the characters they explicitly intend to express,) but are
identical as to their 'extension' (i.e. they apply to the same individuals:) that is, the class of human
beings and the class of persons coincide, because every man is considered to be a person, and every
person is considered to be a man. The reason for this identity is easily found: the notion of person
has been traditionally considered as a pertinent description or appropriate characterization of what
a man is, so that saying that a man is a person corresponds to an analytic judgment. The logical
situation is similar to that where one says, e.g.: "a satellite is a celestial body rotating around a
planet," which is more than a simple nominal definition, since it was introduced to characterize
celestial bodies having this property when it was discovered that they exist and behave this way,
which does not prevent a satellite being also characterized through other additional features (e.g. as
being endowed with a given mass, as being incapable of emitting light, etc.) The second reason is
that even in more technical discourses realated to the moral and legal obligations, the concept of man
has constantly been used without even slightly implying that it could be different from the concept
of person. Think of the various declarations and discussions regarding human rights: these have
always been considered to be rights of human beings as such, and have never been submitted to the
condition that these human beings should 'in addition' be persons. Quite the contrary, these
declarations have been proposed precisely in order to avoid discriminations, which tended to deny
to certain categories of human beings the full status of 'human', and this was often expressed by
denying their being 'persons' in the legal sense of this term. Therefore the sense of the doctrine on
human rights is that every human being is as such a person.
In the face of this undenyable situation, we find in more recent times the above mentioned
tendency to split the two notions: man is one thing, and person is another thing. Up to now this
attitude has brought to claiming that not every human individual is a person (e.g., human embryos,
seriously mentally handicapped human beings, human individuals an a status of irreversible coma;)
but also the other claim is already surfacing, i.e. that certain non-human objects might be persons
(in the discussions concerning artificial intelligence it is sometimes maintained that future robots
might one day be endowed with consciousness, and in this case they would be considered as persons
and deserve 'civil rights'.)

The definition of person

What is the rationale (or the alleged rationale) for this splitting? It relies upon a particular
nominal definition of person, a definition which (as is necessarily the case with every such
definition) singles out a property, and in this way automatically determines a class, to which belong
all and only those individuals which possess this property (which may be simple or complex.) It is
not important to see here how this property is determined in our case: we can accept it to be
designated as the capability of having a symbolic activity, or as the capability of manifesting
consciousness, or in other similar ways. In the sequel we shall use a single term for indicating it, and
call it consciousness for brevity. In this sense, a person is whatever thing is endowed with
consciousness.
The advantages of nominal definitions are well known: they introduce clear-cut distinctions
and remove ambiguities, but they are also abstract and in a way artificial, so that there is an
enormous risk in taking them as real definitions, i.e. as tools for classifying real entities. If we admit
this step, we are first of all involved in an epistemological mistake, i.e. in the hypostatization of
abstract properties, or, differently said, in giving full ontological statute to entia rationis. This way
of proceeding may be admissible in certain theoretical disciplines, such as mathematics, where
definitions 'create', in a way, the defined objects, since these objects do not have a really autonomous
ontologicl status. But this procedure is incorrect when we want to introduce real definitions, i.e.
definitions which try to characterize entitites which exist by themselves and carry proporties which
we try to capture by an effort of abstraction, and make verbally explicit through a definition. In these
cases, as is well known, our definitions are always subject to a margin of ambiguity, since on the one
hand they might lead us to include in the 'class' they determine certain entities which our original
intuition tends to exclude, and to exclude from this class other entities which our original intuition
would include. Let us give a rough example. Let us imagine that we want to define what a cat is: we
have an immediate intuition of cats, i.e. we are spontaneously able to recognize cats, but now we
want to verbally characterize them, and we say, e.g.: "cats are mammals with four legs." This
definition is clearly inadequate for, on the one hand, it would oblige us to consider as cats also dogs,
caws, and all quadrupeds (the definition would include entities which our original intuition
excludes;) on the other hand, it would oblige us to exclude from being cats certain animals of this
species which, for some genetic reason or some accidental external cause, happen to have only three
legs (while our original intuition allows us to claim behind any reasonable doubt that they are cats.)
In the case of person, we are in the situation of real definitions, since this notion was not
originally introduced as an abstract stipulation, and then applied to human beings in order to see
whether they are persons, but, on the contrary, it resulted from the consideration of human beings,
as an effort of verbally characterizing them by singling out a set of their salient properties, properties
that were so to speak summarized under the characteristic of being "persons." In this sense the
notion of person has a 'descriptive' function, i.e. it is bound to the referents from which it has been
extracted, and should be corrected or integrated if it turned out to be inadequate (as the rough
definition of cat given above really was.) This anchorage to the original intended referents is
essential, not only because it avoids the mistake of the hypostatization of properties, but also because
it clearly reminds us that properties necessarily are in a subject, and their meaning intensionally
includes the reference to this subject, so that their application outside this referential frame already
implies a certain variance of their meaning.
Of course, this does not imply that a certain property cannot be applied also in referential
contexts different from the 'original' one, but then one must be aware that such an application is only
analogical. This was the case with the traditional Boetian definition of person (rationalis naturae
individua substantia,) which was obviously formulated starting from the consideration of human
beings, but then analogically extended also to superhuman beings, such as angels and even God in
a theological context, where it was clear that the fact of being a person did not imply an identity of
nature with man. Nowadays the preoccupation of extending the notion of person to supernatural
entities is alien to our general mentality, and the tendency appears (as we have noted) to rather
extend it to sub-human entitites (such as robots, or simply animals,) but this should be done only
with a clear awareness of the analogical character of this extension, and even with a great deal of
wisdom (analogies may easily lead to confusion.) This means, in particular, that one never should
overlook the following fundamental distinction: "person" denotes the referent, while "consciousness"
denotes a property of a referent, so that one must be open to admit, from a strictly ontological point
of view, that: (a) certain persons might not possess (under certain circumstancies) the property of
consciousness; (b) certain non-persons might posses the property of consciousness, this property
being understood in a analogical sense according to the different referents for which it is affirmed
(or denied.) For the moment this is simply a distinction of principle: we shall see in the sequel how
it applies concretely.
All these reflections are relevant from the point of view of moral investigation, since a rather
generally admitted principle in our time is the moral obligation to respect the person. Until recently,
this was considered equivalent to the imperative of respecting human dignity, in the sense that man
is that particular animal which is also a person by its nature. Now, if we take the notion of person
not as indicating an individual naturally endowed with the properties 'summarized' under the concept
of persons, but simply as an abstract set of qualities (let us say, for brevity, the property of having
consciousness,) we are led to the question: shall we respect the person because it has consciousness
(i.e. shall we respect this property,) or shall we respect the person because it is a human person? It
is clear that this question is of a decisive importance, since, if we answer it in the second sense, we
recognize that the primary obligation is that of respecting man, without this preventing us from
extending our respect also to other beings which have some form of consciousness (e.g. animals, and
may be - but much more cautiously - artefacts.) If we accept the first, we are led to the duty of
respecting consciousness, irrespectively of the nature of the being having consciousness, and have
no duty to respect beings which might be deprived of consciousness.
The central issue for deciding which of the two answers is correct is that of seeing whether
the concept of man and the concept of person can be separated, in the sense that it could be correctly
possible to claim that certain human beings are not persons. The consequences of this separation,
from the ethical point of view, are immediate and well known: if we admit as a general principle
simply the respect of person, we are led to legitimate the non-respect of man as such, i.e. to
legitimate non respecting those human individuals which may eventually turn out not to be persons.
This is why we shall concentrate now on the philosophical analysis of the said separation of the two
concepts.

Simple negation

Every separation is a kind of negation. Therefore we shall try to see what kind of negation
could be advocated for denying that a man is a person. Let us start with simple, or absolute,negation.
In this case, saying that man is not per se a person, amounts to saying that he has the property of
being non-person, but a pure negation cannot denote anything real, not even a property. If we say of
x that it is not-y, we do not really indicate the slightest property of x, but simply exclude it having
the property y. Non-white, non-living, non-liquid, and so on, do not denote any positive feature, and
therefore leave an open indetermined infinity of possibilities which are all legitimately included in
what is non-something. All this is very obvious, but it has an immediate consequence: saying of man
that he is non-person may have a sense only if we at the same time propose a plausible
characterization of man, saying of him something positive (and not simply negative,) in order to
specify 'what he is', and then showing that this characterization does not include being a person.
Unfortunately, such a characterization is never proposed by those who deny that man is a person, and
is also hardly thinkable: if one says, e.g., that a man per se is an animal, or a mammal, one is
obviously giving an insufficient characterization, since we always can ask "what kind" of animal or
mammal man is; and even if we go on by giving details of his biological constitution, we cannot
arbitrarily stop, and ignore precisely other aspects of him (such has having consciousness,) which
make of him that particular kind of animal, which we also denominate "person" (and since it has
become customary to identify with 'rationality', or 'consicousness', the specific difference (i.e. the
specific property) which characterizes this kind of animal, it is very natural that this very property
be also considered as characteristic of person.)
One might try to avoid the difficulty by noting that, after all, we have examples of human
beings which are not (or not yet, or no more) endowed with consciousness, and this should be
sufficient to see that having consciousness is not a property of man per se. This objection is not
sound, since it takes the absence of a property in certain particular individuals of a given kind as a
proof that this property is accidental to this kind; but the factual absence of a property in certain
cases is not sufficient for declaring it accidental, since there are at least two other possibilities of
conceiving of this absence: privation and potentiality. The claim that this property is accidental must
be grounded on a proof, and not on factual constatation only. It is completely obvious that, in the
case of consciousness, this proof of accidentality has never been provided and one does not see how
it could be provided. We shall come back to this point later, and see why it is impossible to give this
proof (the reason being that consciousness is not an accident in man,) and shall now devote our
considerations to another possibility of negation, to see whether it could apply to the separation of
man from person.

Diadic negation

This possibility consists in diadic negation. While simple or absolute negation does not
determine anything and has no real existence whatsoever, diadic negation can be real, because it
typically consists in the opposition of two entities (abstract or concrete.) Being white is a property,
and being black is another property: they are both determined and opposed, so that one can correctly
say the one of them is not the other (so we can say that the white is not the black.) This opposition
may occur between totally disconnected realities (e.g. when we say that a man is not a square root,)
but also within a certain common genus (e.g. when we say that a man is not a horse, in spite of both
being mammals.) Now, are man and person in the relation of negation by opposition? Obviously not,
since there is no common intersection (i.e. "et...et") between opposites: e.g. nothing can be at the
same time totally black and totally white; while there may be a tertium between opposites in the
sense of "neither...nor": e.g. something may be neither black, nor white, but green, red, yellow, etc.
Now, even those wo claim that man is not a person per se, do admit that many human beings (indeed
the majority of them) are persons; therefore, owing to the admission of this non-void intersection,
man and person are not possibly conceivable as being opposite.
There is another form of diadic negation, which - contrary to opposition - is not symmetric
(symmetric means that we can say, e.g., that black is not white, but also that white is not black.) This
negation concerns the relation between genus and species: so we say e.g. that an animal is not per
se a horse, but we cannot say that a horse is not per se an animal.
At first glance this second type of negation seems to appply also to man and person, since
it is maintained by certain people that a person is per se a man, but that a man is not per se a person.
However this is not the exact status of the question. A first indication already comes from the fact
that those who define a person as anything which is endowed with consciousness are often ready to
admit that consciousness is not a property limited to man (it might also belong to animals and
artefacts,) and this implies that person is not conceived of as a species of the genus man. But the
issue is even more radical. In order to say that man represents a species, of which person constitutes
a genus, one should prove that man is not per se, but only accidentally, endowed with consciousness.
We have already said that this is not the case, but now we can see this fact more clearly: if
consciousness (which allegedly should represent the specific difference between man and person)
were to be something which is 'added' to man in order to produce a person, we should have the
following situation: in general human beings are not endowed with consciousness, while a more
restricted class of them has consciousness and is therefore constituted of persons. The real state of
affairs is the other way around: in general (but we should rather say normally or naturally) men are
endowed with consciousness, but some of them may 'accidentally' happen not to have it.

Triadic negation
Having excluded through the foregoing analyses that the separation of man and person may
correctly be envisaged as a form of simple or diadic negation, we approach now what seems to us
to be the correct solution of the difficulty. This solution will come from the consideration of the
triadic negation (the sense of "triadic" will become clear in the sequel.) The clearest example of this
kind of negation is privation, and rather similar to it is also potentiality.

A. Privation
The privation of a certain property or quality always concerns an entity which has per se the
capacity, the nature of possessing this property or quality, in the sense that in the nature or specific
essence of this entity are inscribed the conditions which should endow it with the property of which
it is deprived. This discourse might seem too metaphysical, since it uses the concepts of nature and
essence, but little reflection shows that it is unavoidable, and this simply because the property of
which we say that this entity is deprived receives its meaning only through a reference to this
property as something which ought to be possessed by the entity. For exaple, if blindness is the
privation of sight, it is clear that it would be meaningless to say, e.g., of a stone that it is blind, or that
it has lost sight, or that it is not yet endowed with sight, and this simply because the capacity of
seeing does not belong to the nature or essence of stones. Privation therefore necessarily entails an
ontological reference to the intrinsic essential properties of the carrier of the particular privation
involved.
But this ontological substratum is not only a necessary meaning condition of any privation,
it is also not really modified by the occurence of the privation. If a man were transformed in a statue
by some magic action, it would be absurd to say that it has become blind, since his whole nature
would have been transformed in something for which the ability of seeing does not make sense. But
symmetrically, if a man becomes blind, it would be absurd to say that he has become a statue, or that
he has changed is human nature. This shows that the 'ontological determinateness' of the carrier does
not coincide with the possession of the property, but simply with the possibility or capability of being
the carrier of this property, and in this sense is not eliminated by the concrete absence of the
property, if this absence is to be understood as a privation (the carrier does not become 'something
else' or a 'differnt thing'.)
The argument outlined above becomes more perspicuous if we consider the fact that privation
admits of degrees (which is never the case with essential properties.) So e.g. sight is a normal
property of human beings, but may be possesed in different degrees. If we should pretend that a
being, in order to really be what it is, should posses all its properties in the maximal degree, we
would make the absurd claim that everything must be perfect in its proper genus, in order to belong
to this genus, while everything existing is limited, this limitation meaning in particular absence of
perfection in the possession of its characteristic properties.
If we now focus our attention on consciousness or symbolic activity, and pretend to make
of them the characterizing (i.e. the essential) properties of person, we are confronted with the
difficulty that consciousness and symbolic activity appear in degrees in several senses: because one
and the same individual only gradually arrives at the full level of these capacities, because these
capactities are present in different degrees in different individuals, because they can decline with age
or as a consequence of deseases, and so on. Briefly, we have all the reasons for maintaining that
consciousness is something that can undergo privation, but now we must consider the general
condition, according to which privation only makes sense in an ontological substratum. Which is this
substratum? It cannot be the person, because the person is (allegedly) an entity which is essentially
characterized by consciousness and cannot have it only in degrees, and if consciousness totally
disappears, what remains of the person? Nothing, if consciousness is the only essential definitory
characteristic of the person. But this is absurd, since the total deprivation of consciousness does not
imply the ontological annihilation of the person.
It remains as only way out of the difficulty that the ontological substratum of consciousness
is man, which is the carrier of consciousness, this being one of his features which can undergo
privation. But what we have already seen above implies that the constitutive essence of the
ontological substratum must be distinguished from the essence of the properties with which it is
normally endowed, and can accidentally or temporarily be deprived of; this properties are only a
constitutive part if its essence which are among its possible possessions, but in any case fall under
its proper essence.
We are now in the position of explaining why we have called 'triadic' the negation implied
by privation. The reason is that privation is the suppression of an having or possession of a property,
and not an alteration of nature in the being which has the property. We have thus three elements: the
possessor (the ontological substratum,) the property, and the having or possession of the property.
Privation only takes away the possession, but never the ontological substratum of the possessor, nor
the property itself, which (being nothing in itself, but being simply real in the ontologically real
substratum) necessarily remains that property only with reference to the capability of that substratum.
This conception is far from abstractly hypostasizing the having, but rather underscores the deep
relation between this having and being. Indeed it is through this having that a feature or property,
which is abstract and ontologically non existing without a possessor, receives the pervasive
characters of its possessor. This is why even the biological functions of the human body are human
and not simply animal functions: a truth which has been forgotten for too long a time, and comes
back again nowadays. As to consciousness, it is not something abstract which can be attributed to
whatever entity and make of it a person: consciousness is primarily human consciousness, and may
by analogically extended to other beings, but its ontological connotations are given it by the nature
of these beings, and not the other way around. Privation, being the dramatic cutting of the natural
link existing between a being and its properties, certainly empoverishes this being, but neither does
it affect its intrinsic dignity, nor does it necessarily diminish its possession of other properties (think
of the deafness of Beethoven, or of the terrible physical conditions of a scientific genious such as
Hawking.)
Nowadays is fashionable to praise being instead of having, but this is often understood only
as expressing the dignity of what a man is, in comparison with what he can have in terms of richness,
glory, social status, and similar 'external' possessions. But it is also undeniable that there is a
widespread trend in favour of appreciating the deepest being of man in spite of his being deprived
of several 'possessions' of a more internal nature. The progress of manking has been marked by the
vindication of the human dignity of people that had suffered different kinds of discrimination owing
to their being 'deprived' of certain characteristics (slaves, blacks, women, poors, illitterates,
handicapped,) and this vindication was based on the fact that these people were in any case human
beings. Why should the possession of consciousness be an exception? If consciousness is only a
property which a man should posses owing to his intrinsic nature (and we have seen this to be the
case,) the privation of this property could not be a reason of discrimination more than the possession
of any other human property. Introducing the concept of person as if it were an ontological category
different from that of man (while it has no ontological character outside an ontological substratum)
risks to be a terminological device for justifying new forms of discrimination among human beings.

Of course, one might say that consciousness is a very special property, which cannot be put
on the same footing as sight, physical integrity or anything of this kind. It cannot even be considered
as an 'accident' with respect to man, such as having black hairs or belonging to a certain race: it is
characteristic of man, and therefore is determinant of his real nature, so that we cannot equalize the
privation of consciousness with any other privation of human properties. But this argument, if
applied consistently, plays against those who have elaborated the fictitious distinction between man
and person, for if consciousness really is an essential characteristic of man, privation of
consciousness would make of an individual a non-man, and not simply a non-person. The only
possibility is to recognize that consciousness, without simply being an accident for man, is a
proprium of him, and a proprium is something which can undergo privation without dissolving the
essence of the ontological substratum. This is exactly our thesis: consciousness is a consequence of
the intrinsic structure of human nature, in the form of something that a man can have, and normally
also really has, but is no substantial characteristic of him, since it may be acquired, lost, suspended
without making of it a non-man.
If things are so, being a person is not something as being an adult, which is a quality which
is contingent upon time and is gradually acquired: if we want to link the concept of person to
consciousness, symbolic activity, creativity, moral sense, selfdetermination, and many other features,
we can certainly do that, and this is the sense of every 'personalist' philosophy. But this simply means
that man is a person, because his nature is such that he is capable of all these activities.
The traditional definition of person was in keeping with this, since it defined person as an
indivdual substance of rational nature. The correct stress was on nature, that is on the characteristics
of the ontological substratum which, being qualified as rational, was for that reason considered as
capable of all the manifestations of rationality. But this does not imply that the possession of these
habilities could not undergo some privation, without changing the rational nature of man, and
therefore his nature of person. Even many statements very common in the pages of personalist
philosophers, who stress that man is not just a "human individual", but a "person", cannot be twisted
as if they maintained that the human individual is one thing, and a person is another thing. Their
intended meaning is that when we speak of a human individual, we usually refer simply to his more
extrinsic and material features, or to the anonymous place he occupies in society, while when we
speak of him as a person, we explicitly make allusion to the richness of his internal capacities and
originality, but these remain capacities and qualities of this human individual.
For the same reason it is fallacious to say that we cannot confuse the philosophical concept
of man with the biological concept of man when we speak, say, of the embryo. In fact man is man
and may certainly be considered under several points of view (e.g. philosophical and biological, but
also psychological, sociological, chemical, and so on.) But when we consider a concrete human
being, he is all these and other possible things, depending on the point of view adopted. Therefore
it is perfectly arbitrary to say that when we say "the embryo is a man", we are speaking of a
biological man, while when we say "it is not licit to kill a man," we are using a philosophical concept
of man, so that no inference can be made using these two premises. The biological man is simply
a conceptual abstraction, and whatever may be said concerning man philosophically, must be
pertinent to man as such, ancd therefore apply to every concrete human being, that is to any really
existing man, be it an embryo or not. Unless one want to maintain that the so-called biological man
is not really man, but then, what is it?
It is probably in order to escape this difficulty that the distinction has been introduced
between man and person. This distincion allows one to say that the embryo is a man, but not a
person, so that the philosophical (moral) principle becomes "it is not licit to kill a person" (while it
is licit to kill a man when he is not a person.) But what we have seen above does not permit to take
this position, since we have presented the reasons which lead to the conclusion that a man is always
and per se a person, in spite of being possibly deprived of consciousness.

B. Potentiality

The reflections developed on the subject of privation apply to a large extent to the subject
of potentiality, so that we can be more concise on this point. Potentiality also entails a form of triadic
negation, as far as it explicitly concerns a property which is not possessed yet by a being, but which
should under normal circumstances be possessed by it in a subsequent time. Here the reference to
an ontological substratume is even more evident, since potentiality (we mean here, of course, active
potentiality, which is the only interesting in our context) not only points in the direction of a given
precise actuation (the actual possession of a certain property,) but presupposes a being which is in
act and contains in its intrinsic nature that potentiality. Therefore, potentiality has some features of
privation: the possession of the property being not yet there, the individual is temporarily 'deprived'
of it, and it is very clear that this property is 'inscribed' in the nature of the individual, since
potentiality is much more than simple possibility (it is a goal-oriented possibility.) But why is this
possibility goal-oriented? Because the individual already contains in its nature the property
concerned, and only waits for the moment of concretely availing itself of it, thank to the development
of suitable conditions. It is only the accidental failing of realization of these conditions which could
prevent it from entering in possession of the property.
All this seems to deprive the concept of potential person of any sound ground, since the
transition from potency to act never changes the nature of a being, but rather leads to the full display
of what it is. Following its intrinsic active potentialities, a being can become only what it is already
by its nature. This very general principle must also apply to person: nothing can become a person
unless already is a person. The only way of avoiding this conclusion is, as in the case of privation,
to conceive of person not as something ontologically given, but as a status (let say the status of
possessing consciousness,) but in this case the concept of potential person becomes completely void,
since a status necessarily must be the status of something. What is this something? This something
is the human individual, which gradually reaches the status of possession of consciousness, but
ontologically remains the same substance, so that if we can say that it is a person at a certain stage,
we cannot avoid admitting that it was a person from the beginning (substance does not undergo
change or growth, but only its possession of properties does.) The conclusion is therefore: man is
a person in act, which in the various phases of his development is continuously in potency with
respect to the full realization of its faculties and properties, including consciousness.

The foregoning reflections enable us to uncover the fallacy of a subtle argument, which is
sometimes used in order to vindicate the notion of 'potential person', and at the same time to exclude
the application of this notion to human beings not having reached a certain stage of their
development. The argument runs as follows: one must distinguish first between possession and
exercise of a certain capability (be it 'congenital' or 'acquired'.) The argument at issue maintains that,
in the same way as it would be conceptually inadequate to qualify as "musician" a man who has
simply the congenital capability of playing an instrument, but not yet the acquired capability of
doing that, so it is conceptually inadequate to describe as "potential person" a being which simply
has the congenital potentiality of consciousness or symbolic ativity, but still lacks the organic
preconditions for even possessing the congenital capability of having these properties. According
to this argument, 'potential person' could be only an individual which has reached (and still
preserves) the 'congenital capability' of exercising consciousness or symbolic activity. Therefore
'actual person' could be only an individual which is really exercising consciousness or symbolic
activity. But this is hardly admissible, since it would mean that any accidental prevention or
interruption of this exercise (like during sleep, or being drunk, etc.) would transform an individual
from an actual person to a non-person or, at best, to a potential person.
In order to escape this difficulty, the proponents of the argument say that it is enough that
someone has manifested at least on some occasion the exercise of this capability, and preserves the
basic organic conditions which ensure this capability (.i.e. its possession), in order he to deserve
being considered as a person, even durig the time he is not really exercising it. This escape is very
gratuitous and ad hoc, but moreover it defeats the basic distinction it presupposes. Indeed, this
escape implicitly recognizes the correct fact that the concrete exercise of a given capability simply
is a contingent external evidence, and a simple factual consequence, of the possession of this
capability. Therefore, if an individual does not manifest or exercise for accidental reasons a certain
capability he really possesses, this is obviously not sufficient for denying that the said individual
possesses this capability and therefore is that kind of individual which is characterized through the
possession of the capability. For example, it would be simply ridiculous to say that a pianist is a
musician only during the time he is actually playing his instrument, while he goes back to the status
of a 'potential musician' during the pauses of his recital, or while he drinks a coffee, and then comes
back to his status of 'musician in act' when he starts again playing. He remains a musician at least
all the time he possesses the acquired capability of playing a musical instrument. We must therefore
conclude: the possession of a capability is a necessary and sufficient condition for qualifying a being
as belonging to the kind characterized through this capability, and the exercise simply is a kind of
external confirmation of this possession, and by no means a transition from potency to act.
If we now apply this general conclusion to the concept of person, and accept this to be
characterized by the presence of consciousness (or symbolic activity), we may ask what this
'presence' should really mean. According to our general conclusion, we are forced to say that this
presence does not mean the exercise of the capacity of being conscious, but only the possession of
this capacity, so that an individual which does possess this capacity is an 'actual person',
independently of the contingent fact of not having exercised it yet, or of having been accidentally
deprived of the possibility of exercising it for a certain time. This is tantamount to admitting that
what makes one a person is the possession of the congenital capability of consciousness, and not its
exercise.
As a consequence, one must say that the full articulation of the argument we are discussing
here (and which wants to claim that actual person is only someone who has exercised consciousness)
is self-defeating, if one wants (legitimately) to avoid the paradoxical implication that accidental
suspension of this exercise reduces back the individual to the status of potential person. On the
contrary: an individual which has reached - and still possess - the conditions for the exercise of
consciousness, or (to use the terminology of the argument) which possesses the congenital capability
of being conscious, is an actual person. But then it is unavoidable - if one wants to preserve the
notion of potential person within the conceptual framework of the argument we are discussing - to
trace back the notion of potential person to the stages which occur before the acquisition of such a
congenital capability, that is to call potential person any individual which has the congenital
potentiality of possessing consciousness.

In spite of the the weak points we have indicated, the argument examined above contains
certain illuminating elements which deserve attention and appreciation. In particular, the notion of
congenital correctly stresses the real nature of potentiality, which is something strictly connected
with the nature or essence of a given reality. In fact we can say that a given capacity is congenital
only because we consider it as being inscribed in the intrinsic nature of a being, so that (unless some
accidental causes intervene, this capacity will be reached, and will also normally be followed by its
proper exercise.) But this is tantamount to admitting (as we have alrady stressed in the above
reflections) that the individual in consideration must already be what it is able to become manifest
afterwards. In our case, this individual must already be an (actual) person, which needs time to
completely acquire the congenital capabilities of manifesting consciousness, and of concretely
exercising it. This remark shows us that, contrary to a superficial impression, 'congenital' and
'acquired' are not necessarily opposite features: many times acquisition is contingent upon one's free
decision, action and practice (and in this sense it is meant to be an opposite to 'congenital',) but in
other cases acquisition simply means the gradual realisation of congenital capacities: an acquisition
which (without depending on our decisions or actions) may be stopped or prevented by external
obstacles.
But this reflection entails a confirmation of the conceptual weakness of the notion of
potential person: if the 'acquisition' of congenital capabilities only is a display of what is already
inscribed in the nature of an individual, and an individual cannot avoid being in act what it is (i.e.
to possess in act its own nature), one must say that an individual must be from the beginning a
person, in order to display in the course of time the potentialities implied in its being a person. The
notion of potential persons is therefore a logically and ontologically misuse of the concept of
potentiality, which never concerns the nature of a substance, but simply the full realization of what
this substance intrinsically is.

It is perhaps not without interest to take the opportunity provided by the above clarifications
in order to show the unsoundness of another application of the concept of potentiality, which is
sometimes made in the context of the discussions regarding 'potential persons.' It is sometimes said:
if we lay such a great stress on the final stage of the development of a person (i.e. acquisition of
consciousness) that we consider it to be illicit to kill a 'potential person' (e.g. a foetus) in the name
of the respect we ow to its destination of becoming an 'actual person', in the same way we should
respect the 'potentiality' of the gametic system (constituted by the egg and the spermatozoon,) which
will 'naturally' lead to the formation of a person. Therefore - it is claimed - contraception, which
prevents the actualization of this 'potentiality,' should be morally condemned for the same reasons
which morally condemn abortion.
The fallacy of this argument resides in the fact the the so-called 'gametic system' is not a
substance, i.e. it is not even a system in the correct and precise sense of this concept (such as it is
clarified, e.g. in general system theory.) Indeed, a real system constitutes an organic unity, in which
the different sub-systems cannot survive and develop without a permanent and strict
interdependence. The organism is the best example of a 'natural system': its organs cannot survive
and develop (at least in 'natural conditions') outside the organism, and they have no full separate
individuality, so that their 'potential' development is inscribed in the 'potential' development of the
whole organism. But in the case of the egg and the spermatozoon this condition does not obtain: an
egg and a spermatozzon do grow, develop and die as egg and as spermatozoon, realizing in such a
way their potentialities, even without interacting. They are each an individual substance, and as such
each of them is endowed with its potentialities, while their alleged 'system' is not a substance, but
only a conceptual entity. When they come to interact in the biological phenomenon of fertilization,
they cease to exist as substances, and a new and different substance results from their fusion: the
zygote; and it is this new substance which (in the case of a human zygote) has the potentiality of
reaching consciousness and may deserve the moral respect due to a person.
Applications to bioethics

Let us now draw some conclusions regarding bioethics. The dissolution of the artificial
separation of man and person obliges us to replace at the basis of bioethics the respect for man, that
is for all human individuals, simply because they are human beings, without the pretestuous
exception that certain of them might not deserve this respect because they are not persons. This
conclusion does not automatically solve in a given sense certain difficult moral problems which have
suggested the introduction of this separation, but imposes a honest, clear and corageous discussion
of these problems. One might suspect that, by denying the separation of man and person, and
affirming that all men are persons, we have tried to 'force' to the acceptance of certain theses (e.g.
that abortion is always illicit, that embryos can never be killed or used for experiments, that seriously
handicapped people can never be condemned to die, etc.) This is not true. This simply means that
we must lucidly consider these questions in all their gravity, i.e. being fully aware that they involve
the problem of the respect for person, with all the richness of contents and implications which has
made of this concept one of the most powerful spiritual forces of our civilization and of the real
progress of mankind.
When in most of the examples just mentioned the question is whether we can or cannot kill,
it would be a pitiful escape to say that we can kill because we do not kill persons. The real issue is
that not killing persons is a prima facie moral obligation, but the whole history of mankind shows
that this fundamental commandment "you shall not kill" has undergone numberless exceptions in
the name of other real or alleged moral obligations. Wars, capital punishments, burning of heretics,
extermination of whole populations, have been practiced and morally justified in many ways, and
no culture, no religion, no philosophical tradition is probably immune from having provided or
accepted such justifications. In our time we are still confronted with the same kind of problems in
other contexts, which are to a great extent the consequence of the development of our science and
technology, and we feel pushed to look for reasons for possibly not respecting this prima facie
obligation. Some of these reasons may be pretextuous, certain probably are, but other may be not.
In certain cases it is perhaps thinkable that interrupting the life of a person be licit and even dutiful,
but this terrible responsibility must be faced honestly, and without disguising it under the fiction that
this is not really a person.
What we have said for killing may obviously be repeated for less dramatic aspects regarding
the respect for persons, and in those cases the fact of having to do with 'persons without
consciousness' (which means with real persons, which have not reached the 'congenit capability' of
being conscious, or which are affected by so serious defects that they never will reach this capability,
or that they have definitively lost it) may have an influence on the moral decision. We want to stress
this in order to avoid the impression that, having excluded that the possession of consciousness is
a necessary condition for making of a man a person, we underestimate the importance of considering
the rich display of aspects which are contained in the concept of person in bioethical questions. In
particular, we have already stressed in the initial parts of this paper that privation may undergoo
degrees, since privation concerns the possession of a quality. This may imply that, while the respect
for person is a prima facie moral obligation, it may happen that, when other moral obligations are
present, the considerations leading us to a correct moral decision could take into account the 'degree'
of privation of consciousness which affect a person, and be a sufficient reason for not respecting that
prima facie obligation.
Moral problems arise (also in bioethics) not only when consciousness, or other features of
person, are absent, but precisely when they are present, and risk to be neglected, frustrated,
conculcated. This means in particular that the feature of consciousness is of a such high value (a
value which we have discovered in considering human persons,) that it may deserve respect and
protection also in those cases in which it is present outside persons. This has to do with the
'analogical' meaning of consciousness that we have already discussed, and means that, when
consciousness (in some degrees and with particular specific characters) is present in certain natural
beings, such as animals, we are morally obliged to respect these beings, in a manner analogous to
that which we adopt regarding persons, i.e. not because they are persons, but because they share with
persons a very significant feature. Therefore, there is a prima facie obligation not to kill them, not
to submit them to ill-treatments and, as in the case of real persons, this obligation may be ignored
(totally or at least to a certain degree) only if there are sufficient reasons for so doing. But this would
be matter for a completely different discourse.

Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)

Department of Philosophy, University of Genoa (Italy)