Personhood is a useful concept when it helps us to find a common starting point on which we can all agree. That allows us to experience belonging to a common moral universe. It is useless when we cannot agree on who or what is a person or on what respect for persons and their protection requires. It is dangerous when it is used as an exclusionary device that places vulnerable people at risk of serious harm and denies them the respect and protections to which they would be entitled if they were seen as persons. Therefore, who is a person? The “status view” that all human beings are persons opposes the “criterial view” that only humans with certain capacities are persons. Our choice between these views matters. If recognition of the human rights and protection of a human being depends on their being recognised as a person, then exclusionary definitions, such as the criterial view, are dangerous.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor of Law Emerita, Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Medicine, and Founding Director Emerita of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, Montreal, where she taught from 1978 to 2016, when she returned to Sydney to become Professor of Bioethics in the School of Medicine at The University of Notre Dame Australia. She has authored several books - The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit (Penguin 2000); Death Talk: the Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (MQUP 2002); The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (Anansi 2006), which she delivered as the nationally broadcast CBC 2006 Massey Lectures; and most recently Birds on an Ethics Wire: Battles about Values in the Culture Wars (MQUP 2015).
ABOUT THE JAMES M. HOUSTON CENTRE FOR HUMANITY AND THE COMMON GOOD:
The James M. Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good is a five-year initiative of Regent College dedicated to the question of human identity and its importance for conceptions of the good life. Grounded in Dr. James M. Houston’s Christian theological vision of integrative scholarship combining academic study, practical research, and lived reality, the Centre will provide opportunities for interdisciplinary and inter-religious dialogue on the question of what it means to be human. Through planned collaboration with UBC and other academic institutions, and by inviting insights from a wide range of secular and religious perspectives, the Centre aims to engage in a broad consideration of human identity and the common good.
15 апр 2022
