I. Introduction
The way in which human beings understand and related with one another contributes greatly to the development or acknowledgment and maintenance of personhood. Being an actual person is critical, and establishing who or what a person is entails the setting of boundaries. It is where an individual falls in connection to these boundaries that determine whether that individual can be thought of as being a person or non-person. Therefore, this is to say that personhood can be defined as simply being a human being.
II. Elements of Personhood
A. There are various approaches to personhood
1. The transcendental/inherent personhood equates being human to being an individual. Personhood is unique and sacred and every individual has a moral status and as such should be accorded respect.
2. On the capacity-based approach, for one to qualify as a person, then he or she should possess rationality and be capable of communicating this rationality to other people.
3. On interpersonal theories, personhood is bestowed upon one by others.
B. Others define personhood as the legal and cultural recognition of the equal and unalienable rights of individuals. Applying the word person to a certain class of humans is basically affirming their individual rights.
C. Genetically, a human being is considered as always being a person. This is to say that personhood starts at conception.
Chapter 9 Self and Society. World as Lover. World as Self by Joanna Macy
Chapter 9 focuses on the importance of self-relation on the basis of self-respect. The author takes the essential aspects of personhood into consideration. It illustrates that there are varieties of an individual entitled to being treated and regarded with respect by others. The second regards one’s independent regard and treatment of self as a rational and moral agent. The chapter argues that the corresponding forms of arrogance with respect to violations of the self-respect forms focus on the corrupt personhood (Macy 89). In this view, the appreciation of the connections between different forms of self-respect, arrogance, personhood and respect for others is integral in understanding sub self-respect. However, the popular ‘recognition respect’ for an individual (person) involves the understanding of oneself as that of the utmost dignity and moral status through the virtue of a rational agent status. The recognition of self-respect exists in forms such as the view of an individual as someone with entitlement to respectful regard and treatment by others. The other relates to one’s own treatment of oneself as a rational agent. The focus narrows down to the correspondence of various forms of arrogance with respect to violations of the self-respect forms. These are corrupt aspects of personhood. In Macy’s view, the understanding of the connections across different arrogance and self-respect kinds trigger respect for others while personhood remains significant in understanding the subtle (Macy 102). However, there are ways through which arrogance continues to corrupt the qualities making the persons. This is exactly the intimate intertwinement for ontological and moral dimensions of is relevant. It arguably makes the composite personhood notion philosophically useful and more important. As a whole, the collection allows for illumination of this intertwinement across different and mutually complementary views.
Chapter 7 Body and Mind. World as Lover. World as Self by Joanna Macy
This chapter delivers on the approach of personhood that involves interrelated concepts. The composite aspects include Verbal Behaviour or Language, the Real World and Reality, Deliberate Action, and the Person. All these concepts need full articulation for each of them to attain full intelligibility. Specifically, an individual is a person with the paradigmatic history of deliberate action within dramaturgical patterns (Macy 123). The deliberate actions are behaviours that persons engage in through intentional awareness or are cognizant of the same, and have chosen to do. Persons are not entirely engaged in the aspects of deliberate action even though they are eligible to do the same. Human beings are individual who are both persons and Homo sapiens specimens. While persons are deliberate actors, they employ prudent, hedonic, ethical and aesthetic reasons in choosing, deciding or selecting on action courses. While this focuses on the social contracts expected in the normalcy of persons, it makes use of the stated motivational perspectives. Individual persons weigh the motives in ways that reflect personal characteristics (Macy 172). The life is conducted through dramaturgical patterns meaning that people achieve at much sense while their lives have significance patterns. The case of paradigm allows the former, potential, nascent, nonhuman, manufactured, "deficit case", and "primitive" persons. Through the paradigm case methodology, there are different observers pointing to cases that agree about on the qualifications of an entity as a person. However, moral statuses rest on the ontological features in more than two senses. Philosophers unanimously accept through the support of common sense that our rationality, being creatures gives persons and makes us deserve special moral statuses based on each other’s consent.
Works Cited
Macy, Joanna. World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent times. New York: Parallax Press, 2007. Print
