FIRST THINGS.

Who Count as Persons?
Human Identity and
the Ethics of Killing
John F. Kavanaugh
Georgetown University Press, $24.95,
240 pp.

John Kavanaugh, S.J., well-known author of the "Ethics Notebook" column for America, has written a book at odds with the conceits (in both senses) of much recent philosophy and ethics, including bioethics. Despite its modest length, the book is ambitious in scope. Kavanaugh surveys recent ethical theory and faults it for a general unwillingness to develop a philosophical anthropology. To be sure, many popular theories--whether they emphasize duty-based principles and rules or develop strands of utilitarianism--assume that ethical values serve and sustain persons. Yet few theorists spend time establishing a robust account of personhood itself. The danger in that failure, for Kavanaugh, is that while "people [including those theorists] may want to believe in the intrinsic dignity of human persons...they seem unable to muster any rational defense for their beliefs and desires."

The book's eight chapters are wide-ranging and insightful, richly allusive, trenchant with the insights of a trained philosopher, and often deeply personal and poignant. Yet it is startling to realize how unfashionable Kavanaugh's sort of discussion has become in much of mainstream bioethics, which tends to focus on analyzing moral dilemmas without regard for the anthropological issues Kavanaugh engages. Kavanaugh's interest in teleology--the appropriate ends of human choice and action--also seems largely out of favor in recent theory. Instead, the central value of autonomy and the paradigm of contract have become, for many bioethicists, all that pluralism can offer the negotiations between supposed moral strangers. (For example, the issue of physician-assisted suicide is often reduced to questions about the patient's competence to consent and the doctor's willingness to participate. Larger matters, including the common-good implications of legalizing consensual killing or questions about the integrity of medicine as a practice, are excluded from consideration or dismissed as merely symbolic.) At the same time, notions of natural limits to human striving--bodily vulnerability, the constraints of human finitude--are largely ignored by accounts that focus on will, choice, and negotiation as the only decisive features of moral action. An irony thus results, one too obvious for Kavanaugh (or his readers) to ignore: While many philosophical approaches celebrate liberty and self-transcendence, few spend time discussing the nature of the initial self who is to be liberated in the name of authenticity or progress.

Kavanaugh is not unsympathetic to the difficulties posed by ethical pluralism. But, unlike those who find, in the facts of moral disagreement, reason for thoroughgoing skepticism and/or for merely procedural solutions to contested issues, Kavanaugh insists on pressing "the great integrative question of all philosophy," namely, What is the human? Who are we, how are we constituted, that moral issues matter to us in the first place? And how do questions of identity shed light on appropriate moral judgments and practices?

The key to Kavanaugh's discussion is captured in his subtitle. He argues that "human identity" is constituted by what he calls "reflexive awareness." While this concept is difficult to capture in short summary, Kavanaugh describes it as the human ability to "turn back upon itself and [be] aware of itself in being aware of the world." That capacity is not merely self-consciousness, which can be explained away by materialists or reserved for a "spiritual soul" by Cartesian dualists. Rather, "to be a human person is to be inseparable from the facticity of body. To be a human person is to abide in time and history."

Based on his account of personal identity, Kavanaugh then argues for an essential linkage between the "irreplaceable value" of the human person and an ethic of "radical personalism" that precludes any directly intended killing. The prohibition against intentionally killing persons, he argues, is "the limit situation in ethics"; it is "the ultimate constraint on all exercise of autonomy because the very appeal to autonomy is an appeal to the dignity of personhood." If we intentionally kill, "we violate the moral order and the claims that personal reality make on us." Kavanaugh's approach, therefore, leads to the "exceptionless moral principle that personal life must not be negated--because in doing so, the foundation of moral experience itself is rejected."

Kavanaugh's personalism here contrasts with the dominant tendencies of much recent ethics toward utilitarianism, where maximizing outcomes takes precedence, or forms of what he loosely calls Kantianism, which emphasize the priority of internal dispositions. Drawing on sources that range from Aquinas to Merleau-Ponty, Kavanaugh grounds the moral universe in the "intrinsic constitution of persons" and rejects accounts that define personhood according to observable benchmarks of action, functions, or achievements. Instead, "intrinsic personal value--the foundation of ethical value--starts when our individual life journeys begin" and "ends only with the cessation of our existence."

This is a radical notion, in the literal sense of that adjective. Kavanaugh applies his understanding of personhood to abortion and to euthanasia, and finds both to be forms of illicit intentional killing. He judges conception as the moment that a "unique, genetically endowed life is launched." On this reading, zygotes and fetuses are not potential persons but persons with potentials, early and unactualized potentials, to be sure, but decisively already uniquely human kinds of beings. So, too, at the end of life, the endowments of one's humanity may be severely, perhaps irreparably damaged, but personhood is not lost. Once an individual journey begins, with genetic identity, until the moment of death, Kavanaugh finds "personhood" present as an "ontological reality," not a "social construction." More pointedly, personal reality is not to be confused with "the presence of certain activities" (either in the conceptus or the adult). For Kavanaugh, rowing against the dominant currents of recent bioethics, "our actions...only reveal our personal nature; they do not constitute it."

There is room for counter argument here, to be sure. While Kavanaugh's proscription of intentional killing does not require passivity in the face of illicit aggression, the stringency of his position would seem to rule out just-war theory as traditionally espoused, which, in its jus in bello discrimination between civilians and combatants, does not preclude intentional killing of the latter. Moreover, the judgment that conception launches both genetic and uniquely personal identity remains the topic of spirited exchange, as debates about embryonic stem cells make clear. (In that discussion, many Christians, and even some Catholics, point to the possibility of spontaneous embryonic twinning up to two weeks after the fusion of gametes as suggestive evidence that a unique principle of individuation [ensoulment] is not present from the moment of conception.)

Yet despite such lingering and nontrivial questions, Kavanaugh's discussion emerges as cogent and largely persuasive. And in light of the moral minimalism at work in recent ethics, his engagement with the most fundamental of matters--who we actually are and why that full-fleshed portrait matters to moral theory and practice--provides a prophetic alternative to much of what passes for conventional wisdom.

Andrew Lustig directs the Program on Biotechnology, Religion, and Ethics, which is cosponsored by Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine.