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

3   THE COMPONENTS OF PERSONHOOD

The choice of words here, especially at the second level, is approximate. The words "consciousness" and "free will" point towards two of the most difficult problems in philosophy. Regardless of the actual words used, the left hand side is about knowing about things while the right hand side is about wanting to do things. The assertion entailed in the first split is that to be a person we must have both the knowing and the wanting components.

At the third level the components are split in two again. To explain what I mean in each case, and why I think these components are logically independent of each other, let me discuss each in turn.

CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT

As human beings we can not merely communicate with each other, we can do so using language. The distinctive features of language make up an important component of our personhood. Other higher animals can know things and to a limited extent can pass this knowledge on to others of their kind. In addition we have the power to understand things. In practice this gives us the following cognitive advantages.

• By using conceptual frameworks we can extend our knowledge indefinitely. A dog can know things that dogs are programmed to be capable of knowing: the presence of objects in the worlds of sight, sound, touch and scent, what is good for dogs to eat, what the emotional state of other dogs is like and how it is appropriate to behave towards them. We on the other hand can extend our knowledge in all directions: the workings of the solar system, the properties of numbers, the principles of relativity and even (perhaps) the nature of personhood and morality. We were not programmed directly to understand these things, but rather we were programmed to have the means of writing the necessary programs, namely conceptual language.

• Language (probably) evolved in the first instance as an enhanced mechanism of talking to each other. But as a by-product, it enables us to talk to ourselves. Once articulated in conceptual terms, pieces of knowledge can interact with each other, and through logical entailment generate other pieces of knowledge. Language can also be used to formulate questions, the starting point for directed searches for new knowledge.

• Language is an efficient way of storing and transferring knowledge. It enables us to develop knowledge as a collective, cultural item, thereby breaking through the limitations of the ridiculously small spatial and temporal extents bequeathed to us by our biological origins.

SELF-AWARENESS

One particular item of knowledge which is crucial for personhood is the knowledge each of us has of our own being as a person. One could imagine some super-computer of the future which had been programmed to use language (not one of our crude natural languages of course, but a proper Fregean Begriffsschrift), and had been given the means of knowing about certain parts of the world, but not about itself. It could discourse learnedly about, say, quantum mechanics, but when asked about itself could make no sense of the question. This defect would prevent its being said to be a person.

The expression of this knowledge of self using conceptually articulated language changes the way we are. Language is in the first instance designed for talking about the objective world beyond the self. Reference to this world reflects the way the world is, but does not change it. The truths about the world are independent of what is known or said about them. However the mechanisms of language can be recycled for reflexive use, to express facts about our experiences of self. Using an objective-reference machine in this way has the effect of distancing ourselves from our experience of self, of introducing an objective flavour to what is primarily subjective. By talking to ourselves about ourselves we are able to stand back from our subjective being and think about it, comment on it, criticise it. It is like looking at our reflection in a mirror, except that with language the reflection is no mere depiction, but contains conceptual articulation. This means we can combine and contrast different parts of our experience, and follow through their logical entailments. We can explore other possible worlds, and decide which of them might be preferable to the actual world, and think about how we might change things for the better.

Once we have the description of ourselves written down, we have the possibility of reading this description, evaluating it, and if we desire, rewriting it. We have the power of reflexive self-invention and re-invention. I am not saying this is easy. The inarticulate grounding of our mental being is a powerful force, and it is difficult to push against it. The astonishing thing is that, through the faculty of conceptualised self-awareness, we have at least the possibility of self re-invention. This is something even the higher animals lack. Even they are largely creatures of their nature, driven by behavioural programs written by their genes. In more advanced animals the behavioural programs contain more and more facilities for writing additional subroutines through learning, enhancing the behaviour in different ways. But the core program remains the same, driven by the underlying biological imperatives of the genes. With us however, the potential for rewriting diverges - everything is in principle available for critical scrutiny and improvement.

Because of this we no longer have a fixed nature: the only constant feature, the meta-nature if you like is that we can reinvent ourselves. This reveals the literal truth behind the apparent paradox:

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

We obtained this facility through the natural processes of biological evolution. And yet this very facility subverts the whole idea of "having a nature", that is, of there being a fixed underlying framework of efficient causation of which all historical processes are a reflection. This explanatory framework works perfectly well in physics (the subject which takes its name from the Greek word for "nature"). Darwin and his successors showed us how biological nature works - a different dynamic, with overtones of the teleological about it, but an efficient dynamic nonetheless.

There are therefore two quite different modes of relating language to the world. The "normal" mode deals with the objective world - in its most highly developed form this becomes the "scientific mode". (Despite the propaganda of the proponents of its "official" interpretation, quantum mechanics by no means necessarily entails the breakdown of the barrier between knowing and the known.) I claim here that the scientific mode of discourse and research is inappropriate for the understanding of personhood. It must be replaced by the "literary mode", the telling and retelling of stories, the continual recursion of texts commenting on other texts, with the result that our being becomes less and less a product of our genes, and more and more a product of the texts - including, ironically, all those texts which tell us how we are products of our genes. (We are of course products of our genes, but along with all the normal biological baggage, human genes give us the wherewithal to over-rule them.)

The idea that there are these two radically different modes of using language refutes two common fallacies. The first, known, at least by its enemies, as "scientism", is the belief that science can explain everything. Mystics refer vaguely to some world beyond the competence of science, without saying exactly why. I assert here that science is not competent to deal with precisely those entities which can understand their own description. Scientism can be maintained only by a wilful blindness to the basic everyday facts of human experience. The contrary fallacy, for example appearing in the beliefs gathered together under the heading "post-modernism", is that only the literary method makes sense. All vanishes, save texts referring to other texts. This too requires a wilful blindness, this time to the overwhelming success of science in explaining the non-human world in objective terms.

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