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Ambiguity Of Person And Personhood Essay

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Isn’t interesting that we, as persons, are asking the question “who are persons?”. We probably don’t have doubts that we know we are persons and human beings. If this is the case, why we are bothering ourselves asking about personhood? There are some philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin and Richard Hare who believe that the predicate “person” is too fuzzy and ambiguous to help us for settling the disagreement between “pro-life” and “pro-choice”. Thus, they hold that personhood is largely irrelevant to the problem of abortion. In his Life's Dominion, Dworkin, writes it would be wise [...] to set aside the question of whether a fetus is a person [...] because it is too ambiguous to be helpful (1993, 23). However, although one can agree that the concept of person and personhood is ambiguous, this does not entail that we should not discuss and qualify what is a person. Being ambiguous is not an enough reason to leave a complicated concept such as personhood. Although we addressed, negatively, why …show more content…

One might think that the Lockean notion of personhood is wrong and we should stick to a definition in classical term. However, whatever we believe about the constituents of personhood, it seems possible to distinguish between the metaphysical and moral notion of personhood. If we believe that we can recognise at least two different notions of personhood, we then lead to another question whether a person in the metaphysical notion is a necessary condition of being a person in the moral sense or vice versa? The answer is very simple: although we suppose that the metaphysical notion and the moral notion must be distinct, we have every reason to believe that metaphysical personhood is a necessary condition of moral personhood. Here is the

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