Personhood and life issues: a catholic view.

SEVERAL IMPORTANT CONTEMPORARY moral and legal problems surround what are referred to as "life issues." These problems are often further complicated by the fact that they are discussed in reference to concepts like "personhood." Despite the obscurity of concepts like these to the average layperson, they are central to important philosophical and moral discussions--about, for example, when in fetal life personhood begins, if and when at the end of life personhood is lost, and whether some nonhuman beings might be persons. Although it is important to remain attentive to the traditional Catholic concept of personhood, it is still possible to discuss these concepts in a more humane and defensible way than usually occurs among the current leaders of the institutional Catholic church.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The meaning of "personhood" is not obvious. It would be a mistake to blithely assume the term is synonymous with humanity, for example.

The origin of the concept of a person lies in ancient theater. Three stages can be distinguished. First, the Greek prosopon, and its Latin equivalent persona, referred initially to a mask worn by an actor. Later, persona was identified with the role played by the actor. Eventually, a person was any character on the stage of life. The theatrical origin of the concept of a person, to which I will return, can help us to understand the contemporary significance of personhood when dealing with crucial life issues.

In the sixth century, Boethius defined person as an individual substance of a rational nature (rationales naturae). The introduction of rationality (or at least the capacity for rationality) into the concept of personhood has profound ramifications for contemporary life issues. The ancient, theatrically rooted notion of a person as one who plays a role on the stage of life, it should be noted, might be at odds with Boethius' notion of a person as having the capacity to be rational. Some role players neither are rational nor have the capacity to be rational.

Boethius' definition greatly influenced St. Thomas Aquinas and other major figures in the Catholic intellectual tradition. But to say that the capacity for rationality is integral to personhood is not to say that the human soul is to be identified with the human person. Rationality requires not only a soul but the whole soul-body complex. We now know that a functioning central nervous system, including a working brain and especially a working cerebral cortex, is necessary for rational thought.

The connection between the concept of a person as having the capacity for rationality and the aforementioned life issues is significant. It is because persons are capable of knowledge that they are able to make rational choices, be held accountable for their actions, and hence be seen as moral agents who might be called on to make moral decisions regarding life issues.

A final historical note on the concept of personhood: The imago Dei hypothesis, longstanding in the Catholic intellectual tradition, holds that a being is a person only if it is made in the image of God. This view is often traced back to the book of Genesis (e.g., 1:27). Because persons are made in the image of God, in this view, they stand in a special relationship with God that other beings do not enjoy.

There is a certain ambiguity about how the imago Dei hypothesis relates to a definition of personhood based on rationality. On the one hand, there is nothing about being an image that necessitates the capacity for rationality. Nonrational images are possible. On the other hand, if God is omniscient, then a person made in the divine image would seem to have the capacity for a sophisticated type of rationality.

Social role, rationality, and image of God: These three threads have been woven into the traditional Catholic concept of the person.

FETAL LIFE ISSUES AND PERSONHOOD

Several much-discussed issues relate to the possible personhood of the fetus: abortion, certain types of stem cell research, and so forth. At times, institutional-church leaders adopt an admirable reticence here that may indicate humility in the face of such problems. More typical is a dogmatic confidence: It is assumed or implied that from the "moment" of conception (which actually takes several hours), the fertilized egg is a person worthy of as much moral respect as a rational person outside the womb. The simple logic is familiar: If a fetus, even in the earliest stages of pregnancy, is a person, then to abort it knowingly (or to experiment lethally on it) is either murder or something closely approximating murder.

However, the issue is anything but simple, as I have argued in a previous work (A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, 2000). For the first 1,700 years or so of Western Christianity, the dominant view was that the fetus in the earliest stages of pregnancy was not a person, and, hence, to abort it was nothing resembling murder. Neither St. Augustine nor Aquinas defended immediate hominization or immediate personification of the fetus; rather, they defended delayed hominization or delayed personification. Their stance took seriously the idea that to be a person required at least the capacity for rationality, and such a capacity was not evident until the fetus was at least sentient. And we now know that sentiency, the ability to experience pleasure and pain, requires not only the formation of nerve cells but a functioning central nervous system. And this does not seem to occur until the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy.

There are two different senses of "humanity" at work in fetal development. The fetus at all stages of pregnancy is human in the minimal sense that it has human parents and human genetic material (as does, for example, a cancer cell). It is not clear, however, that the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy is human in the more complex sense of having the material capacity (dispositio materiae) for rationality, as it may have later when the brain starts to function. An update of Augustine's and Aquinas' developmentalist approach would incorporate research in embryology that shows the fetus only gradually acquires the prerequisites for personhood.

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My purpose in this short space is obviously not to solve all of the difficult moral issues surrounding fetal life, but rather to indicate some of the complexities, so as to open up conceptual space for dialogue on the issues and for constructive criticism of what is often assumed to be the Catholic view. My alternative view, which would permit both abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and various sorts of stem-cell research, is a Catholic stance that at least deserves a hearing.

In one way, the institutional Catholic church itself implies a stance that is close to mine: When a spontaneous (rather than induced) abortion occurs in the first trimester (i.e., when a pregnant woman miscarries), no funeral mass is said for the fetus. After all, at the earliest stage of pregnancy, the fertilized egg is a microscopically small, single-celled organism. According to the view I am defending explicitly, and according to the implications of the official view of the institutional Catholic church, a person is not lost when a pregnant woman miscarries early in pregnancy.

END-OF-LIFE ISSUES AND PERSONHOOD

Regarding end-of-life issues, one often hears the following argument: Even if someone who is mentally impaired or comatose toward the end of life has lost the capacity to be rational, this individual is nonetheless a person; as a result, this individual has a life that is sacred and hence ought not be euthanized. Again here, alternative stances deserve a hearing.

The traditional definition of the person in terms of an individual substance of a rational nature is problematic in some ways. It is nevertheless unfortunate to see it abandoned altogether by those in the institutional church who oppose euthanasia. Unreflective dismissal of the connection between capacity for rationality and personhood demonstrates a convenient ignorance of, or a considered disregard for, the Catholic intellectual tradition. There is something right about the idea that part of what makes persons worthy of respect is their rationality. It would seem to follow that when this rationality fades, their personhood fades as well.

Accordingly, a human being in a persistently vegetative state either is no longer a person or is a greatly diminished form of the person who existed before the loss of rationality. Put another way, when one visits "one's mother" in the hospital after a serious injury or illness has deprived her of her personality, it is not really one's mother that one visits.

To defend certain types of euthanasia is therefore not to exhibit disrespect for the human person. Many of the candidates for morally permissible euthanasia either are no longer persons or are greatly diminished persons, and hence, no disrespect need occur. The paradigm cases of morally permissible euthanasia would be those where rational adult persons request (for example, through a living will) to be euthanized under certain circumstances--say, terminal illness that causes excruciating pain, or persistently vegetative existence.

Indeed, voluntary euthanasia can be a sign of respect for the rational person who has requested it. To refuse to grant such a request could be seen as a sign of disrespect for that person. And nothing I have said here should be construed as supporting involuntary euthanasia, which I oppose categorically. Those who wish to live as long as possible, no matter how bad the conditions, should be allowed to do so as a sign of respect for their rational personhood.

A more difficult case, though, is nonvoluntary euthanasia, as when a rational person is thrown into tragic circumstances--say, an automobile accident--without having thought about the prospect of euthanasia. Provided the proxies for this individual act in the patient's best interest rather than their own, I can easily imagine morally permissible examples of nonvoluntary euthanasia.

Lastly, once a distinction between passive and active euthanasia is made, we should be skeptical of religious "traditionalists" who claim that they are absolutely opposed to euthanasia. (By "passive euthanasia" is meant the withholding of treatment that is necessary for life to continue, or the refusal to do everything possible to keep a terminally ill patient alive; by "active euthanasia" is meant the decision, for example, to give a lethal injection to a patient who requests it or whose proxies request it.) All reasonable people are in favor of euthanasia in some form. That fact, though, is concealed by self-styled opponents of euthanasia when they refuse to recognize passive euthanasia as a type of euthanasia, preferring to employ euphemisms like "letting nature take its course."

The crucial question is whether to euthanize. Once a decision to do so is made, as it is on a regular basis even by those who claim to be opposed to euthanasia, then active euthanasia is often more humane than passive euthanasia. Consider a case where passive, voluntary euthanasia would cause the patient to wither and die painfully over several days (as occurs regularly and legally in hospitals), but active, still voluntary euthanasia would provide a literally good death (eu thanatos).

We need calm, rational debate on these issues, and a congenial spirit of toleration for reasonable differences. There is no algorithm to settle issues regarding the connection between personhood and fetal life and end-of-life issues; the result is arbitrary, disingenuous argument. For example, when the capacity for rationality starts to break down in various end-of-life cases, self-defined opponents of euthanasia, rather than admit that personhood can be lost, conveniently pick up the other threads of personhood: the social role that even the comatose continue to play (for example, as mother), or the unverifiable claim that even nonrational human beings exist in the image of God.

Granted, part of what constitutes moral status is the social bestowal of value--for example, by family members who may understandably continue to see a relative as a person long after the criteria for personhood have been lost. But equally important for outside observers are the criteria for personhood themselves.

NONHUMAN LIFE AND PERSONHOOD

One way to describe what it means to be a religious believer is to say that such a person defends theocentrism, a God-centered view of the universe, rather than anthropocentrism, a human-centered view of the universe.

The concept of personhood has never functioned anthropocentrically. The Catholic intellectual tradition has, since the time of Tertullian in the third century, been committed to the existence of nonhuman persons, both divine (three of them) and angelic. In addition to these persons "above" the human, might there be persons "beneath" us? I think so, for two reasons.

First, even if nonhuman animals are not persons, they are nonetheless morally considerable if they are sentient--are able to feel pleasure and pain. Any being that can experience pain has the right not to be forced to experience it unnecessarily or gratuitously. This is a fundamental axiom for developing any defensible moral theory. Think of the boy in the play Equus, who slashes with a knife, for no reason whatsoever, the eyes of a horse. Who does not shudder for the horse?

Second, it is not clear to me that we can consistently exclude all nonhuman animals from the class of persons. Rather than thinking of rationality as an all-or-nothing affair, it seems more accurate to see it as a range concept that some (an omniscient God) possess preeminently and others (including us) possess to various lesser degrees. It is simply not true that all human beings are rational: Think of an anencephalic infant without certain parts of the brain, severely mentally impaired. It is also simply not true that all nonhuman animals lack rationality altogether. Great apes, for example, often have mental lives that are at similar levels to those of healthy humans up to three years old.

Many nonhuman animals remember the past (a dog does not forget the cruel person who kicked her yesterday, or last year) and plan for, or at least anticipate, the future (as in a squirrel who hides nuts for the winter). A nonhuman animal's existence can be temporally thick, in the sense that the animal is a subject-of-a-life that can go well or ill. This claim is not as far from common sense as it may seem initially: who has not noted individual personalities in pets?

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Perhaps it will be objected that too much attention has been paid to the capacity to be rational, rather than to the capacity to love. Indeed, the imago Dei hypothesis presumably means that persons in the image of the all-loving divine themselves have the capacity to love. But if the capacity to love is, like the capacity to be rational, a range concept, problems again arise. Some human beings who are severely disabled have an ultraminimal capacity to love or no such capacity at all-whereas healthy nonhuman mammals are famous for their bonds of affection for both conspecifics and humans.

Nonhuman mammals and other nonhuman animals have also often been known to care for and indeed to risk their lives for their offspring. To deny that they love is to presuppose a standard for love that is so exalted that some of us humans would fail to meet it.

It seems to me clear that nonhuman animals are often capable of love. It may be overly anthropocentric of us to deny them personhood status. It makes more sense for religious believers to be theocentric. As Matthew has it (10: 28-31), God cares even for the fall of a sparrow. I am not criticizing humanism here. All human beings (not merely human persons) deserve moral respect. But moral respect is not like a pie of a fixed size, such that by giving a slice to nonhuman animals, there is less to sustain human beings.

CONCLUSION

The foregoing considerations suggest a two-tiered conception of morality. First, all sentient beings deserve at least minimal moral respect such that suffering or death should be inflicted on them only when necessary--say, when the suffering inflicted on them by a physician or a veterinarian is for their own benefit. These sentient, nonrational beings might be fetuses late in pregnancy, certain human beings outside of the womb, or nonhuman animals with functioning central nervous systems. Many beings are morally considerable even though they are not persons.

Second, persons deserve added moral respect owing to the fact that, beyond the ability to experience pleasure and pain, they are capable of playing certain more exalted roles that are especially worthy of moral consideration. Notable among these roles are those associated with the capacity to think rationally and the capacity to love. Beings that can perform these roles give us especially compelling, imaged evidence of the divine.

Even though personhood is not a necessary condition for being morally considerable, it makes sense to take personhood seriously when deciding who deserves moral respect. Fetuses late in pregnancy finally acquire the preconditions for personhood; although the vast majority of human beings are persons, some either are never persons or lose their personhood; some nonhuman animals may very well be persons. The important thing is to try to keep reasoned debate on these important topics alive and well.

DANIEL A. DOMBROWSKI, PH.D., is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, where he has taught since 1988. Dr. Dombrowski is the author of fifteen books, including A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, with Robert Deltete (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and over 100 articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature.