Friday, May 20, 2011
"What is a Person?"
Here is a nice interview with my friend and colleague, Christian Smith, about his new book, What Is a Person? A bit:
What is a person? And why does it matter how we answer that question?
Every social science explanation has operating in the background some idea or other of what human persons are, what motivates them, what we can expect of them. Sometimes that is explicit, often it is implicit. And the different concepts of persons assumed by social scientists have important consequences in governing the questions asked, sensitizing concepts employed, evidence gathered, and explanations formulated. We cannot put the question of personhood in a “black box” and really get anywhere. Personhood always matters. By my account, a person is “a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who — as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions — exercises complex capacities for agency and inter-subjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the non-personal world.”
Persons are thus centers with purpose. If that is true, then it has consequences for the doing of sociology, and in other ways for the doing of science broadly. Different views of human personhood will provide us with different scientific interests, different professional moral and ethical sensibilities, different theoretical paradigms of explanation, and, ultimately, different visions of what comprises a good human existence which science ought to serve. In this sense, science is never autonomous or separable from basic questions of human personal being, existence, and interest. Therefore, if we get our view of personhood wrong, we run the risk of using science to achieve problematic, even destructively bad things. Good science must finally be built upon a good understanding of human personhood. . . .
Yup. As I put it, in this paper, "moral problems . . . are anthropological problems, because moral arguments are built, for the most part, on anthropological presuppositions. In other words, . . . our attempts at moral judgment tend to reflect our foundational assumptions about what it means to be human."
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/05/what-is-a-person.html
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This is rather difficult stuff to read for me, but I am wondering if Christian Smith is trying to come up with a definition of a "sociology person" or a "social science person," which might be different from, say, an "economics person"? If we don't feel we are bound by what the authors of the 14th Amendment allegedly intended by person, would we use this definition of person to interpret the Due Process clause? Would we use this definition to try to say where in evolution our ancestors didn't fit the description of person and when they became human? I am not going to bring up what I believe is the obvious question, but someone else can if they want to!
And perhaps most importantly, why is the Kindle Edition more expensive than the paperback by more than $5?