Abstract

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This essay is an introduction, covering the material in the "Value" section. It sketches out the whole field, introducing ideas to be examined in more detail in the later essays.

The purpose is to articulate and then defend 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.

These two assertions are taken together, because part of the argument is that the existence and nature of the objective moral law derives from the "post-natural" nature of the person.

Another approach to this treatment of the nature and value of the person is provided by 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 shall endeavour to show how these statements are not paradoxical, and are in fact true.

A preliminary model identifies four necessary properties of the person: conceptual thought, self awareness, autonomy and unboundedness. Acting together these produce the person as an emergent object, still entirely ontologically dependent on the natural world, but in an important sense transcending it. This transcendence comes about through the emergence of final causation out of a natural world which is otherwise devoid of it. This emergence brings about a break in the explanatory chain, forcing us to start again with a new mode of explanation and preventing us from identifying the human person with any physical object.

At the heart of personhood is value, the primary "I want", the view that some states-of-affairs are better than others. Each individual person is a source of value, a first final cause. There are no prior values in the world.

There is however a posterior value-system, namely morality, outside all individual persons. This emerges as the collective result of all the individual value-monads (namely the persons). The individual wills of persons can not simply combine to form a General Will, because they contradict each other on many points. Society is a collection of valuational universes, which is itself not a valuational universe in the way each of its constituents is. Seen from this objective viewpoint, the only values that remain are the autonomies of each individual, that is, the categorical, qualitative values, one of which attaches to each individual. The imperative corresponding to this residual valuational content of the social world is that one ought to respect the autonomy of all other individuals. This is very close, if not identical, to Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative.

The authority of this moral imperative comes from the collective wishing of all persons. It treats not of specific things wished for, but of respect for each individual wishing-system. No person's desire has absolute moral authority, but each person's desires are morally significant - they have to be treated as something to be taken into account. No one person has this authority, not even God, if there were such a prior person. The authority is however not purely impersonal. The authority of imperatives derives from values, and values exist only in the context of feeling persons. Moral authority is an emergent property of the community of persons, ontologically dependent on, but distinct from, the desires of individuals.

There is a second set of objective values; those associated with the notion of authentic personhood. These entail the imperative that we all should be true to ourselves as persons. Unlike morality, this imperative is advisory rather than binding. We can not be forced to be authentic - to be so forced would contradict our autonomy and violate the moral imperative.

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