I intend to discuss the nature of being a person. Firstly I will be touching on the German philosopher Kant regarding his theories on personhood and consciousness in terms of their literal personhood. I then will be moving on to broader issues surrounding the subject using philosophers like Nietzsche and Descartes to understand what is means to be a person.
Plato was quoted as saying “The brain was the seat of the soul” while Aristotle and Kant both agree that an intellectual consciousness is how define someone that is alive. With that in mind Terri Schiavo, to Kant would not constitute a person because she has been in a vegetative state for fifteen years. Hence she is not conscious and does not think. Kant would certainly not condone the extension of Terri Schiavo’s life because it’s not really a life, the only thing that is alive is the hope of her parents that she will eventually recover, which is a hope that is always alive if you believe in miracles but it’s just not reality.
"As a human it's important to be humane. We are a protocol sons; everyone."
Dr. Myrodes Konstantinides (2013)
Terri Schiavo, due to an ongoing bout of the eating disorder bulimia collapsed in a state of cardiac arrest in 1990. The twenty-six year old woman was without oxygen for approximately five to ten minutes, at the scene she was pronounced clinically dead. Michael Schiavo Her husband for the fifteen years has been in control of her wishes and her subsequent death. While her parents The Schindler’s have been fighting against his decision to end her life from three years after her collapse. Her husband and her parents have waged legal battles over refusal of treatment, her rehabilitation and her life support. The case sparked a media frenzy, starting many a debate around the world.
Kant would first want to establish whether Terri was a rational being to justify the continuation of her life. "every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that willBeings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other hand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves." (Kant, Foundations, 428)
With the use of CAT scans it was discovered that after her collapse there was no higher cortex function, which is what differentiates humans who think about their actions rationally and animals that act purely on instinct. Before 1990 Terri was a rational being and after she was no more than an animal. Her brain simply regulated her basic functions such as her breathing and her heartbeat other than that she as completely without awareness, which Kant would determine as something that would constitute Terri as an animal. In Kant’s definition Terri as she has no rationality cannot be an end in herself so is almost classified as an inanimate object or an animal. Kant did not consider animals to be rational; he believed that rationality is what separated us from animals.
"A lower animal's attention is fixed on the world. Its perceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will. It is engaged in conscious activities, but it is not conscious of them. That is, they are not the objects of its attention. But we human animals turn our attention on to our perceptions and desires themselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious of them. That is why we can think about them And this sets us a problem that no other animal has. It is the problem of the normative *4 The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason" (Korsgaard, 93). This basically means that because she is not aware of herself she essentially is an animal and when an animal is sick with no hope of getting better you put it down. Terri can no longer refer to herself as “I”. Being able to refer to oneself as “I” raises us above animals according to Kant, its self awareness that is the key factor regarding personhood.
"The fact that the human being can have the representation "I" raises him infinitely above all the other beings on earth. By this he is a personthat is, a being altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal and dispose at one's discretion" (Kant, LA, 7, 127).
Kant would undoubtedly by his own findings that Terri was in fact an animal and sustaining her life in this fashion is almost like treating her like an animal because she has no worth in herself. She can never fulfil her potential anymore, she’s just living, she’s not actually alive.
"When you put others before you, that's the philosophy's of philosophy, that's web you understand the meaning of life."
Dr. Myrodes Konstantinides (2013)
Kant would definitely object to keeping her alive because the only reason she’s living is to keep hope alive for her parents and that’s not fair to her or her husband because she’s basically trapped in her body.
"If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men" (Kant, LE, 240).
Nietzsche looked at human nature in terms of punishment or a justification of punishment. What he is saying is that people are naturally savage and free will is a myth, and when you remove free will you remove guilt as the action was predermined. He uses the example of Oedipus who killed his father and married his mother which was all forseen by the god but still Oedipus is punished for what the gods decreed would happen.
Nietzsche puts forward that punishment will never die as long as people have free will it is literally everywhere it is entrenched in every part of social life from the bottom up; Your essay is late you lose marks, your car is illegally parked you get a ticket, you say a naughty word your mother scolds you, you don’t pay attention in class you receive a detention. Punishment exists everywhere in an infinite amount of application, so to remove punishment is impossible as you would literally have to change every system in our society, so it doesn’t matter in the slightest if punishment isn’t justified our entire world is based on it so it isn’t going anywhere because people would destroy themselves without it. This may sound closely linked to Bentham’s work; that of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but Nietzsche denounces Bentham’s work as “Alright for English people but not for real men” because it’s a slightly more relaxing in the arm chair with a nice warm cup of tea theory than it is a real theory about tackling life according to Nietzsche.
The French philosopher Descartes, looked for the nature of man in the existence of god. What he’s asking is basically; ‘Is what I believe a product of god or truth or does it come from false extraneous elements’. He wants to know if he believes in god because god is real or if simply he was raised to believe in god because he was ‘told’ god was real when all evidence points to him/her/it not existing at all. The importance of this is related what it means to be a person because everything we base our lives on comes down to some religious principle in one form or another. He starts by attacking the foundations of his knowledge so that he can begin a fresh and try to discern one factor which he knows without a doubt to be true from which he can build new beliefs on. In his first meditation is he questions the validity of the beliefs he held up to that point. The reason for this is simple; Descartes wanted to find something that it was impossible not to be true, something that was core and irrefutable, his method of doubting was one of isolating that belief that he knew to be true and then breaking it down and analyzing all its elements and pick out what about it put that truth above doubt. He hoped that from this one truth he could build a new set of absolutely true beliefs on a foundation that left absolutely no room for doubt. He realised then that the only thing he knew absolutely for certain was that “I am, I exist” (Section 25) from this he is certain he exists in some capacity because he is thinking and feeling and is self aware but he is yet to establish what exactly he is.
"But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses." (p. 31)
Descartes (1641)
He goes on to elaborate that because he is thinking he must be a thing that thinks; a thinking thing. When Descartes talks about thinking he’s speaking broadly about the soul and the mind as sort of being one and the same, the mind is the spiritual component of the entity. That is a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, has a will of its own, refuses, has an imagination and senses.
Upon breaking this down Descartes begins to realize that all these elements also exist in dreams and it is very difficult for him to create a clear distinction between dreams and reality because they share the same elements and often you have a dream that seems real but then is justified as a dream by the act of waking. In theory as I am sitting at my computer now typing if I were to then black out and wake up in my bed I would have to attribute what I am doing now to a dream. Descartes eventually concedes that in retrospective we can indeed tell dreams from reality by waking. A devil or an evil genius that may have the powers of god and may want us to believe we are real people when in fact we could just be concepts or brains floating in vats, he can deceive our minds into believing false claims such as two plus two equals five and we have no means to disprove that as we are blinded by this devil. He can make us believe wax is solid and then changes into a liquid.
The only argument Descartes poses against the idea of the devil tricking us is that for a loving god to exist this has to be false because a loving god who created us in his image would not want us to be deceived because by definition this god is good and if something is all knowing and powerful and good this being would never allow something evil to make us believe something that is in fact false. What he’s referring to is obviously more or less believing core principles like two plus two equals four because we’ve already established that our senses deceive us but that is just common error not a conscious deception. It’s not a foundational deception which affects all other judgments about the world because we can easily prove that what our senses are experiencing are correct or not. On the other hand for something to make us believe that two plus two is five is something we cannot prove one way or another because we won’t actually know we’re being deceived, there’s no way of knowing that we’re not actually brains in vats other than trusting in a loving god.
In theory if we were being deceived we might not in fact be people at all, there would be nothing to prove whether or not we were all androids or characters in someone else’s dreams.
Works Cited
Descartes, Rene (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy. Print
Kant, Emmanuel. (1804) The metaphysics of ethics. Translated with an introd. and appendix by J.W. Semple (1836)
Nietzsche, F. (1887). The Genealogy of Morals. translated by Samuel, H. B. New York: Courier
