The Human Person

Perhaps one of the greatest of Agazzi’s contributions to bioethics comes from his reflections on the concept of the human person (cfr. Agazzi 1993).

The author comments on the attempts at separating the concept of “person” from that of “human being”.

Starting from the premise that “every kind of separation is a denial”, Agazzi discards the logical possibility of applying a simple or absolute negation (“man is not per se a person”), since pure negation does not say anything about the reality to which it refers. Similarly, we must exclude the logical possibility of a dyadic negation, understood as the opposition of two entities, since it is not possible to conceive of ‘man’ and ‘person’ as opposites.

Then he shows that we can perfectly understand that all human beings are per­sons, even those lacking certain distinctive characteristics of the person, like con­sciousness, if we consider what he calls the triadic denial, which is the negation involved in deprivation as well as in potentiality.

Regarding deprivation, one must consider the three elements that make up the deprivation of any one property: the holder (ontological substrate) according to its nature; the property itself (for example, consciousness); the factual possession of that property. In this way we can understand that

Deprivation removes only the possession, but never the ontological substratum of the holder, and not even the property itself, which (being nothing in itself, but simply being real in the ontologically real substratum) remains necessarily that property only in refer­ence to the capacity of that substratum (ibid.).

Potentiality, Agazzi explains, also involves a form of triadic denial “since it explic­itly regards a property that is still not possessed by a certain being, but that should be possessed by it at a later time under normal circumstances” (ibid.).

This leads to the logical conclusion that “man is a person in act that, in the dif­ferent stages of his development, is continually in potentia with respect to the full realization of his faculties and properties, including the conscience” (ibid.).

And this way, Agazzi can say:

The dissolution of the artificial separation of man and person forces us to relocate at the bases of bioethics the respect for the man, that is for all human individuals, simply because they are human beings, without the pretentious exception that some of them may not deserve this respect because they are not persons (ibid.).

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