When
Is a Person?
Pre-Persons
& Former Persons
by
James Park
When is a person?
We are persons when we exercise the following four capacities:
consciousness, memory, language, & autonomy.
I. INTRODUCTION
If you are reading this book
or understanding it while it is being read to you,
then it is fairly certain that you are a person right now.
And the fact that I am writing this book proves that I am a person.
Only we human beings who are presently persons
are capable of raising the question of what it means to be a person.
As embodied persons we ask
what makes us different from all other objects and creatures.
But early in the life-span of each of us there was a time
when we were not yet persons in the full sense.
We cannot remember this time,
since one of the marks of personhood is being able to remember.
As full persons in the present,
we can look back upon our biological development
and identify a period of time when we were not yet full persons.
And even before our period of pre-personhood,
we can name the date before which each of us did not exist at all.
Most of us know the exact day we were born.
And if we subtract 9 months from that date,
we can estimate the date when we were conceived.
But we can never be as exact about the date
when we moved from pre-personhood to personhood
or when we made the transition from childhood to adulthood.
And if we decline mentally before we die physically
—if we slowly lose the capacities that now make us persons—
then observers of this decline will not be able to name any exact date
when we passed from being persons into being former persons.
2 WHEN IS A
PERSON? PRE-PERSONS & FORMER
PERSONS by JAMES PARK
Created
10-28-2008; Revised 1-17-2009
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When
Is a Person?
Pre-Persons & Former Persons by James Park.
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