Your answers are revealed in the comments from the previous post.
The question arises for me out of two incidents. Philocrites lands on one with Bill Schulz’s Berry Street Essay this past June. His struggle with the first principle seems to center on the quesiton of inherency, but I’m left to wonder if that’s truly the problem.
Sitting with a group of ministers on retreat last month, the topic of covenants came up, specifically the relation of the individual and the community. The idea of the individual seems to bring up strong emotions in folks. Some decried the idea of the individual, some spoke in its defense. I realized after a while that the advocates of the pro and the con were really speaking about two different ideas.
The pros were speaking in favor of the idea of the individual or individuality (or, the being and the self-differentiation thereof). The cons were speaking against the idea of individualism (the idea that the individual is placed at the center of their own little ptolemaic universe).
I thought back to my trouble with Schulz, and realized that the problem with the first principle is not the question of inherency, but that we do not have a concrete definition of “person.” Thus, the first principle is the most abused of the seven. I have heard it used to defend positions of both altruism and narrow self-interest, all because “person” is such a vague concept.
As we begin a reassessment of the Principles, it is perhaps time to ask the question: “What, essentially, is the person?” or “What is the essential person?”
What is the quality that elevates one from “lump of plasma” to “person?” Is it contained only within the individual, or is it connected to something larger? If so, is it eternal or ephemeral?
I think the answer lies beyond biology and legalism. I think the answer may be tied up somewhere in the idea of “inherent worth and dignity” (or inviolalbe, as Philocrites puts it, another word that I myself haven’t been able to shake since I started digging into this), although this is also to vague a notion. I also think it requires the relationship to community, as Ron Robinson describes.
I think if we can start to answer these questions, we can move from a religion with a few neat “bullet points” to a religion with the beginnings of it’s own unique theology (non-hyphenated Unitarian Universalist theolgy!)
Continue discussing.
More to come.
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Why essential person, and not just person?
A good question none the less, and I ask myself how does the mother in the parable of the good soccer mom get it wrong?
She [the soccer mom] summed up her findings: A human embryo is a whole member of the human species. Each human being entered life as an embryo. And all human beings are subjects of profound, inherent, intrinsic worth in virtue of what they are, not what they can do. And if they are subjects of worth in virtue of what they are, then they bear this worth from the moment that they first come into existence.
Or does she?
Why essential person, and not just person?
A good clarifying question, which I will now give a muddy answer to.
Going back to the idea of individuality versus individualism (and, I know, I’m going to have to work overtime to clarify those terms eventually — bear with me), the essential person is that part of personhood that is not self-constructed — i.e. personality traits that are inherited, not adopted for the purposes of socialization, self-defense, etc. The real person and not the facade, so to say.
At the same time, it’s not merely a question of personality, but I hope this points somewhat in the direction of why “essential” is an important word in this question.
As to the “soccer mom” question, I don’t think this question is really about membership in the species, either. This is something that goes beyond biology.
I think awareness has something to do with it.
In my spirituality, I put a lot of emphasis on my Jillness. My Jillness makes me aware of my place in the human community, and it is the voice of my individualness as well.
I feels like this is a major part of my humanity and my personhood.
Great topic.
We should never qualify a person as to their self-constructed or inherited aspects; or to whether their self-aware or not (an unintended affront really to any of us who’ve had disabled friends or family).
A person has a clear beginning and end. It wasn’t always this clear but science has clarified much this century.
To somehow qualify a person beyond our simple biological starts and finishes leads to some potentially nasty value judgements as to worth and justice… sometimes we have no choice but to make those judgements when confronted with decisions of life and death; but nasty and ugley none the less they are.
American Civil Religion delares a self-evident truth: …that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
A few years later American’s found themselves tinkering with what exactly was a man and ended up counting “others” as only three-fifths a person. It’s interesting to note the language,
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
It took a long time to get beyond this and given the outburst from the guy from Seinfield’s, we still haven’t overcome. My druthers are to leave the qualifications on personhood aside. Much like our rights, our natures too are self-evident.