Brains and Persons

Fr. John Kavanaugh has an excellent essay in the August 15-22 issue of America magazine.  A subscription is required to read the essay but, in a nutshell, Fr. Kavanaugh is responding to those who emphasize a purported distinction between "persons" and "human beings" (e.g., Peter Singer, Mary Ann Warren), and who claim that this distinction tracks, in some sense, a certain "set of cognitive achievements."  He writes:

A person is not a set of performances or activities, but a kind of being.  See if the definition offered by Boethius and affirmed by Thomas Aquinas makes sense to you:  an individual substance of a rational nature.  My nature is what I am, not what I do.  The things I do as a human person are possible only because I am the kind of being enowed with the inherent powers or endowments of intellect and will (a rational nature). . . .

The formation and health of a brain is, of course, required for the embodied expression of our personal endowments.  But you and I are not our brains.  Brains are part of us, part of our personal animality.  Our human personhood is not something that erupted from our brains the first time we started acting rationally.  Nor is it something that was soemehow stuck on to these bodies to which we are attached.  It is the gift of being the kind of beings we are, endowed not only with brains like other animals, but with powers of intellect, open to all the truth there is to be known, and of will, open to all the good there is to be loved.

Rick