Article: 9 Persons: natural, functional, or ethical kind?(Part IV: Rethinking Freedom: Persons and the Challenges of Autonomy)

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I examine alternative views of personhood and how they affect our understanding of life and death. Building on David Wiggins's insight that our concept of person tries to hold in a single focus our nature as a biological being, a subject of consciousness, and a locus of moral values, I argue against views that try to reduce persons to one of these aspects at the expense of the others. Thought experiments that have been prominent in the literature on personal identity are criticized on grounds that they sunder persons from the moral and cultural context in which they appear and ignore an essential relational aspect of persons. I argue for a ...

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