Personhood in Bioethics

Bioethics and Non-psychological Views of Personhood

Bioethics is probably the sub-division of ethics that is currently of greatest interest to the public, since there is a widespread sense that recent and likely future scientific and technological developments will pose significant ethical challenges. The “culture wars” surrounding such life-and-death issues as abortion and euthanasia also generate interest in bioethics. Accordingly, effective t...

Abortion, Bioethics, and Personhood: A Philosophical Reflection

Abortion is the issue that first brought evangelical Christians and other cultural conservatives into the arena of bioethics. Although today bioethics is dominated by other issues that are perceived as more pressing, the answer to the philosophical question lurking behind abortion--Who and what are we?--turns out to be the key that unlocks the ethical quandaries posed by these other issues. Aft...

Presumptive personhood.

Simplicity, personhood, and divinity

In contemporary philosophy of religion, it is customary to think of God as an individual person, who exists in time, and is related to things in the world not only as their cause but also in various respects as their effect.1 On the whole, this model has displaced the so-called 'classical' account, according to which God is pure being and therefore 'simple'. Two kinds of consideration lie behin...

Interrogating personhood and dementia

OBJECTIVES To interrogate the concept of personhood and its application to care practices for people with dementia. METHOD We outline the work of Tom Kitwood on personhood and relate this to conceptualisations of personhood in metaphysics and in moral philosophy. RESULTS The philosophical concept of personhood has a long history. The metaphysical tradition examines the necessary and suffici...