CONTENTS

1   INTRODUCTION

2   TRANSCENDENCE AND THE PERSON

3   THE COMPONENTS OF PERSONHOOD

4   THE VALUE OF THE PERSON

5   OBJECTIVE MORAL IMPERATIVES

6   AUTHENTIC PERSONHOOD

7   CONCLUSIONS

1   INTRODUCTION

This essay, and the collection of essays it summarises, are written to defend, within the context of a purely naturalistic world-view, the following two strong, and possibly counter-intuitive, assertions about the nature of the human person.

A	The human person, although wholly natural in origin, transcends the natural order of the world (Personhood can be seen as being a revolt against nature.)

B	There is an objective moral law, to which all persons are subject, independent of the views of any persons or societies of persons.

Each of these assertions, as formulated here, requires a considerable amount of conceptual analysis before they can be understood, let alone defended. To understand the first requires careful analysis of the concepts:

        "person", "natural", "origin" and "transcends" ,

each of which carries here a depth of meaning based on, but going a long way beyond, ordinary English meaning. Likewise the understanding of the second sentence depends upon a deeper analysis of the concepts:

        "objective", "moral", "law" and "subject" .

The nature of persons and of our moral obligations can be captured succinctly in the form of three apparent paradoxes:

P1     It is the nature of a person not to have a nature.

P2     The actions of a person are constrained to be free.

P3     Moral laws are the constraints of freedom.

I conjecture that a necessary (though probably not sufficient) condition for understanding personhood and morality is to understand in what straightforward, non-paradoxical sense these three sentences are true.

2   TRANSCENDENCE AND THE PERSON

there are no minds in the world save those dependent on a physical substrate;

there are no prior final causes (purposes) lying behind what happens in the world.

In particular the existence of the human person depends entirely on the existence of a human body (unless in the future we are able to develop some artificial physical substrate to which the support of a person can be transferred).

And yet, for all this, I claim that there is an important sense in which the human person, through natural processes, transcends the realm of nature. The development of what that sense might be is sketched here, and developed in much more detail elsewhere. My objective is to give the apparently mystical phrase "the natural transcendence of nature" a plain and literal meaning.

The story is then, that the world is governed by "laws of nature", a universal structure of efficient causation. Things that happen can be explained, in the efficient sense, in terms of this framework of law. There is however no final causation - nothing can be explained as being for anything else. In this sense, things just happen. Under very special conditions however, emergent processes and properties can appear within this world which share some of the features of final causation. The name given to this "half-a-teleology" is "life". These emergent features are so different to those of the physical world that they require a new mode of explanation, namely that discovered by Darwin, as opposed to that discovered by Newton and developed by his successors. The emergence of life is the first transcendence.

Under still more special circumstances there emerges yet another radically different set of features: human personhood. This emergence is sufficiently radical to overthrow the Darwinian pattern of explanation, and therefore to constitute a second transcendence. The new explanation is in terms of a fully developed framework of final causation (or rather a multitude of such frameworks, one for each human person) and replaces explanation in terms of evolutionary advantage with notions of free will and moral responsibility. Although the universe has no prior teleology, through the emergence of life and then human evolution, it acquires posterior teleology.

The two processes of transcendence are accumulative rather than substitutional. The old method of explanation is not abolished, but rather a new method is laid over the top of it. Molecules of DNA and the bodies of organisms are still physical objects and carry on doing physical things. But there are also genes and organisms, depending on the same ontological substrate, which are doing new, biological things. The human being has three layers: the physical body, the genotype and organism, and the person. We should not underestimate the impact of evolutionary factors on our desires and actions. And yet, and yet - these are changed utterly by our coming into personhood. A whole new set of considerations come into play, sometimes collaborating with biological tendencies and often in conflict with them.

It must be understood that this sort of transcendence is secular; it is rooted in the here-and-now. It does not refer to some distant end-state, but is something already achieved, by each of us when he or she became a person. Knowledge of our transcendent state is the most intimate knowledge we can have. People untouched by the scientific revolution have almost universally interpreted this knowledge in terms of a supernatural component to the human being. Words like "soul" and "spirit" were (and still are) used to name this component. The ontological independence of the component from the physical body suggested that it could survive the dissolution of the body, and float free as a purely spiritual entity. After Newton and Darwin, the scientific revolution has purged our basic ontology of spiritual entities. What I am attempting here with this talk of transcendence is to provide this common knowledge of the human condition with a new understanding which is consistent with a naturalistic world-view, and yet does not reduce the condition to something it is not.

Transcendence involves a discontinuity in the process of explanation. This entails a result which might be called "the irrelevance of origins". Our instinct, when trying to understand the way things are now, is to examine how these things came to be this way. This is usually a sound move, but it breaks down if a transcendence event lies between the present state and the origins. How we human beings came to be the way we are now is fully explained by Darwinian evolution. But when it comes to understanding what it is we have now become, then the Darwinian explanation is seriously incomplete. (Because of the strong coupling between our continuing animal nature and our personhood, this explanation is not irrelevant.) The myths in the opening chapters of Genesis (as long as they are not taken literally, of course) are at least as relevant to what we are now as is the Darwinian explanation. Darwin can take us right up to the point we cross the discontinuity and become persons, but thereafter another guide must take over. Virgil must be replaced by Beatrice. Studying the bones of our remote hominid ancestors is a fascinating, I would even say, necessary, piece of biological science but we should not delude ourselves into thinking it will greatly illuminate the present human condition.

The assertion here is therefore that each time a human being develops a special process happens (transcendence) which brings into being a new sort of object, a person. This process causes a discontinuity in the mode of explanation; when explaining the actions of a person we use a different conceptual framework from that applicable to physical objects, or to biological organisms. The new object, the person, remains ontologically dependent on a physical object, the person's body. (One might imagine the person being transferred into some other physical substrate, such as some future supercomputer. It may for some reason turn out that this is impossible, but at least it would not violate the principle of ontological dependence on the physical - which in general states that there must be some physical substrate on which the person is ontologically dependent.)

To make sense of these assertions requires, at least, the analysis of the following concepts:

fundamental, emergent, ontologically dependent, transcendent.

This detailed conceptual work is carried out in the essay "Emergence and Transcendence" . In this synopsis, the next task is to sketch in more detail what it is to be a person, to begin to answer the question: once we have passed through this process of transcendence, what is it we have become?

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