"We can't go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a café.  I've no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can't be done."  --  Colonel Plum, in Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

Professor:

In my graduate program in theology we studied Boethius.  I really dislike his definition of "person" as a rational being ("an individual substance of a rational nature").  God isn't rational either, in the sense that He or angels use logic.  Yet He is personal.  My friend’s son, who is severely disabled, isn't rational.  So why is he a person?  I know he is.  What is meant by the "metaphysics of the person" anyway?

Reply:

I think you are imagining a rational being as someone who sits around proving theorems.  Expunge that image from your imagination!  Rationality means being oriented toward truth as such; humans are rational because they want to know what reality means.  You probably also think Boethius’ definition is cold, because it says nothing about love.  But it does, because only rational beings love.  By putting us in connection with what is true and good and beautiful, rationality puts us in touch with the truth and good and beauty of the other person:  It makes it possible to say, “It is true and good and lovely that you exist!”

Brute animals don’t care about what is true as such.  A dog may be interested in where he can get some food, but he doesn’t ask “What does all this mean?”  A brute animal can love in the analogical sense of experiencing affection, but only a rational being can love in the true sense of entering into personal communion, willing all possible truth and goodness and beauty for the other, caring for the other because of what he really is rather than what he gets from him.

Of course God and the angels are rational.  God, a unity of three persons in one substance, simply is love; and the minds of God and the angels, like ours, are concerned with truth as such.  You point out that God and the angels don’t use logic to know things, but being rational is not the same thing.  Thomas Aquinas thought that rational minds of the angelic sort know certain kinds of things by direct insight without having to engage in that sort of inquiry.  And the mind of God doesn’t inquire into truth and meaning; it creates truth and meaning. 

Yes, your friend’s disabled son is a person!  He possesses the same essence you and I do:  He is, in his very essence, in the kind of reality that he has, a rational being, not a sub-rational being.  This does not mean that the rational powers that he possesses in potentiality will be actualized; something is impeding their development.  But whatever impedes them is an impediment – it is alien to what he is by nature.

Functionalists, like Peter Singer, can’t recognize the personhood of people like your friend’s son because they don’t believe in essences, and they don’t distinguish essences from impediments.  They think someone is a person only if he isperforming the rational functions.  In their view he has to be actually doing things like making plans, carrying them out, and communicating complex messages, or he isn’t a person.  So an unborn child, an infant, a toddler, a deaf-mute who has not learned sign language, and a person in a coma are not persons in their view.  To be consistent with their premises, they should also say we aren’t persons when we are asleep or knocked out.  And they should say that personhood is a matter of degree -- that people who are better at such things as making plans also possess greater degrees of personhood.

By contrast, essentialists, like us, and like Boethius, think someone is a person not because of what he can do but because of what kind of being he is.  Humans are beings of a natural kind that possesses rational powers in potentialityeven if these powers are impaired or remain undeveloped.  So all human beings are persons, and personhood is not a matter of degree.

To answer your final question:  Metaphysics asks “What is there?”  Of course geology also asks that question:  What kinds of rocks are there?  And grocery clerks ask it when they take inventory of their stock:  What kinds of items are on the shelves?  But metaphysics is different because it asks what sorts of beings there are in general.  For example, is matter all there is?  What are thoughts and meanings?  Are there essences?  Does God exist?  What kind of thing is beauty – is it a property of things, or is it only a feature of our perceptions?

The metaphysics of persons asks whether there are such beings as persons, and what kinds of beings they are.  An individual person is a complete individual reality, existing in itself, different from all other somethings, made for rationality, the ultimate possessor under God of all it is and does.  A person is not just a piece or part of something, it is not just an instance or process of something, it is not just a clump of different somethings.  Nor is it merely a thing to be owned, a thing to be used, or a thing of any sort at all.  It is not just a what, but a who.  All of that is implicit in Boethius’ definition.

“It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge of a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without being in danger of throwing themselves down; not we presume from a principle of self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea having taken possession of their mind, from which it cannot well escape, which absorbs every other consideration, and confounds and overrules all self-regards.  The impulse cannot in this case be resolved into a desire to remove the uneasiness of fear, for the only danger arises from the fear.  We have been told by a person, not at all given to exaggeration, that he once felt a strong propensity to throw himself into a cauldron of boiling lead, into which he was looking.  These are what Shakespear[e] calls 'the toys of desperation.'  People sometimes marry, and even fall in love on this principle -- that is, through mere apprehension, or what is called a fatality.  In like manner, we find instances of persons who are as it were naturally delighted with whatever is disagreeable, -- who catch all sorts of unbecoming tones and gestures, -- who always say what they should not, and what they do not mean to say, -- in whom intemperance of imagination and incontinence of tongue are a disease, and who are governed by an almost infallible instinct of absurdity …. Nothing can be more untrue, than that the whole course of our ideas, passions, and pursuits, is regulated by a regard to self-interest.  Our attachment to certain objects is much oftener in proportion to the strength of the impression they make on us, to their power of rivetting and fixing the attention, than to the gratification we derive from them.”  --  William Hazlitt (1778–1830), Mind and Motive

Professor:

You affirm free will, but as a Christian, you also accept Scripture as a teacher.  What then do you make of Romans 9:19-21, which is often viewed as denying free will?  St. Paul says, “You will say to me then, ‘Why does [God] still find fault?  For who can resist his will?’  But who are you, a man, to answer back to God?  Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me thus?’  Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for menial use?”

Reply:

The theology of free will and divine sovereignty is not my area, but I will answer according to my ability.  I think it is a mistake to view St. Paul’s remarks about the potter and the clay as denying free will.  After all, he is alluding to Jeremiah 18:1-10, in the Old Testament, which uses similar words but plainly affirms free will:

“The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord:  "Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words."  So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel.  And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.  Then the word of the Lord came to me:  "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the Lord.  Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.  If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will repent of the evil that I intended to do to it.  And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will repent of the good which I had intended to do to it.”  (Emphasis added.)

Because of the Jeremiah passage, and because of all the other passages affirming personal responsibility for our choices, I don’t think the challenger is asking “Why did you make me sin?”  God does not make anyone sin.  No, the challenger is making excuses for himself; he is using God’s foreknowledge to rationalize his free choice to do evil.  He is really asking a different question:  “Foreknowing that I would freely choose to sin, why did you make me at all?”  To this question, God answers in the same way He answers Job’s question about why he has been allowed to suffer:   Who are you to challenge what is so far beyond you?

In the end, Job is satisfied, not because God presents him with a philosophical solution to the puzzle, but because God visits him; all he wanted in his suffering was for God to hear his cry.  And so God has visited us; indeed He has died for us.  But the challenger in St. Paul’s remarks is not satisfied by anything that God has done, because he does not want to turn away from the evil he has chosen.

“With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes.”  -- Paul Johnson, Intellectuals