In her article “The Uniqueness of Persons”, Linda Zagzebski aims at showing that people are both infinitely valuable and irreplaceably valuable and at the same time at demonstrating that these two aspects of dignity cannot be grounded in a common definition of “person”. By relating her ideas to a personal story, I seek to prove empirically the value and importance of her findings while exploring the question of whether these two sides of human dignity are part of “human nature” and have always accompanied the life of human beings, or rather a cultural construction that depends closely on the level of development of civilization.
Zagzebski starts out by expressing her belief that “persons are different from non-persons and different in an important way” (p. 401). She holds this to be true due to the “special treatment” humans assume to deserve – morality. In fact, according to her, the idea of morality pre-exists even the concept of “person”. To me, this area of philosophical investigation is extremely important. The reason for this doesn’t stem merely from the fact that three years ago, I lost my best friend in a car accident, although this tragic event did shape my notion of human dignity, morality and justice. I will try to portray the circumstances as accurate as possible because I think it is vital to understand that any event in the physical world has a reflection upon our innermost beliefs. Not only that, but also that any occurrence on the physical surface operates like a rock, thrown in a pond – the water circles it inevitably produces represent the degree to which the event has bearing on our lives. It is my firm belief that although we may think that something does not have any bearing on our life because it is too distant from, or even unknown to, us its repercussions do influence our destiny, be it in ways that we are completely ignorant of. The most important form in which this influence expresses itself, I think, is precisely morality and justice – each event, no matter how insignificant it may appear to be at first, not just deserves, but calls for a moral judgment, our moral judgment, and to be sure from the very beginning of this essay, I am going to argue that even if we think we are neutral and do not take a side in a moral argument, this too is an ethical position that has its own consequences even if we refuse to acknowledge that.
At this point, perhaps it would be best if I just present the story and then proceed by asking what Zagzebski’s stand on the issue would be, given the clues to her ideas she provides in “The Uniqueness of Persons”.
The Story:
I went to a business high school in Bulgaria (NHSFB) – one that required its junior students to take a course called “Enterprise” – a simulation of a real company with all positions, functions, duties, rights and responsibilities a real business has with the exception of real money flow. Our class was split into two groups of roughly twelve students. The simulation of an advertising agency “Bulad” was assigned to my group and I was elected President. Each year, the students from these student companies across Europe gather in a particular city in Europe to host the annual fair of student companies. That year, our company was supposed to visit the annual fair in Prague. Because each company is urged to present itself with a stall with all the attributes of a real one – a product catalogue, marketing materials and any other paraphernalia that will make it stand out (there are contests for best looking stall or most interesting product catalogue for instance), I, as a President, was responsible for raising money in order to pay for such materials to be made for our company. However, Philip – a friend from childhood I went to elementary, middle and high school together, who was in the marketing section of Bulad, was lucky enough to stumble upon a NHSFB alumnus who had graduated from our school ten years before and who was now the owner of a real advertising agency. Philip contacted him via email and the person (let’s call him Nick) invited us to his office in order to discuss the possibility of getting marketing materials for the fair for free from him. We arranged a meeting and my best friend - Kristin, Philip and I went to his office and negotiated all the details. Nick promised to give us the materials as soon as possible. All we had to do was come back to his office and pick them up as once they were ready. On Wednesday, March 18, three days before the trip to Prague, I overslept and decided to go to work instead of school in order to finish up some last financial formalities (I was working as an assistant accountant at the time). At 9.00 am Philip called me and said that Nick has emailed him that the materials are ready. He asked me whether he could go take them. I said yes (although it was during classes, i.e. I did not have the right or authority to let him go). A minute later the head of Bulad’s marketing department, i.e. Philip’s “boss”, Angel, called me and asked if he could go with Philip. Once again, I said yes. Another minute later, Kristin, who was working in the “accounting department” of Bulad called me and asked for the same. I let her go too and returned to my activities in my real office. Twenty minutes later Philip called me and, sounding rather shocked and scared, said that there was a car accident and that I had to call Kristin’s mother immediately because she had injured her head. I couldn’t believe it – they were supposed to walk to the office or take the tram in the worst case, but I had no idea whatsoever that they were going to take a car. When I asked who was driving, Philip said it was Angel (who the day before that had said in front of the whole class that he had failed his road test, i.e. he didn’t have a driver’s license). It turned out that he had taken the car of another guy from our class who didn’t have a driver’s license either but was nevertheless driving to and from school every day. I said that it is Angel’s responsibility to call her mother and let her know what had happened: not only because I was scared to talk to her but also because I wouldn’t be able to give her any details – I didn’t know what had happened. I hung up the phone, called a taxi and got to the hospital they told me she had been taken to. There, I met them and her mother. She was in hysteria, crying and screaming that her little girl may die any second. This made me start crying too although deep inside I was convinced that this was a normal reaction of a worried parent and that she must be exaggerating. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel well at all and I accepted a valerian pill from Angel’s mother. She offered one to Kristin’s mother as well but she refused it angrily. The mother of another classmate of ours was working as a nurse in the hospital. She would, from time to time, come to the waiting room where we all were and report what was going on. She did not sound worried and would say things like: “Everything will be fine, just pray for her and she will be alright.” A few minutes after the valerian scene Angel and his mother left. An hour after that the nurse came out again and said to all of us, Kristin’s classmates, that she will be ok and that we’d better go home now and not disturb her mother. I didn’t want to leave and on my way out I was constantly turning around saying that there is something fishy about the whole situation. However, I returned to the office and tried to continue with my work. Angel called me and asked what the doctors had said. I told him about the nurse’s assurance that she’d be fine. Less than an hour later he called me back, crying. He said he was at the police station and the police officer that had been interrogating him had told him that she was dead. He asked me if I knew whether that’s true. I said I didn’t know and called a friend who was still at the hospital. She confirmed it.
After the initial shock many things started to become clear. For instance, it turned out that Philip who was extremely afraid of Angel (he used to bully him) didn’t want to go to Nick’s office alone with him, that’s why he asked Kristin to come with them, for protection. It also turned out that Angel was speeding on a busy street, in a rush hour, failed to see two pedestrians trying to cross the street on time, abruptly hit the brakes, which had caused the car to start turning and hit a telegraphy post on Kristin’s side of the car. That is why the two boys did not receive any injuries – she had taken the full blow. It also turned out that Philip and Kristin had wanted to walk to the office but Angel had insisted that they drive there and finally they agreed to take a car. Angel’s words right before the crash, according to Philip, were: “I’ll show you who Mr. Speed is.” And Kristin’s: “Slow down!”
The Trial:
Angel had always bragged about the money of his family. He was an only child, extremely spoiled, with parents always traveling to some remote places (his father was a car dealer, his mother – a stewardess) and leaving him to the cares of their neighbors. After the accident, his parents hired the most famous /and expensive/ lawyer in Bulgaria, Y. Notev. A quick side-note: Bulgaria is the poorest member of the EU and the one that is best known and most frequently reproached for its crime, corruption, bribery and venal system of justice. Kristin’s mother hired an already retired lawyer that had no chance against Notev. Right after the accident Angel left the school and moved from Sofia, the capital, to Varna, on the other end of the country. After two years of perpetual legal battles, last year Angel was sentenced to 1.5 years of probation and a 100 000 leva (~ $65 000) compensation to be paid to Kristin’s mother. As of today, he is reported “missing” by the Bulgarian police – he does not visit the local police station to prove he is doing the social work he was sentenced to and his parents cannot be found to be served his summons. A good friend of mine who studies in the Netherlands has sufficient evidence to prove that Angel studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. But considering the high level of corruption in the police system, we are currently reluctant to share this information with a police officer, lest they let Angel know we are aware of his location. As of right now, there is nothing we can do to him. The killer is untouchable and the mother of the victim – devastated.
My Moral Casus:
As I started to gradually recover from Kristin’s loss, I began to analyze the situation and its moral and ethical aspects in particular. Kristin’s mother wants retribution – she wants Angel to pay for what he did. The problem is that after he caused the accident, instead of repenting, he continued to err and wrong – he did not take the moral responsibility for what he did but chose to hide from the justice system and run away instead. He took one human life de facto and many human lives (of her mother, her relatives and friends) de jure. How can his due tribute be measured? Who should measure it and with what measures? According to the precepts of human society, this has to be the court – the embodiment of the country’s legal system. The first laws, according to Freud, have arisen in the time after the tribal sons killed their father and established certain rules against the killing of each other to make sure that their father’s destiny will not become theirs as well. If we agree with the Freudian interpretation, it follows that the first laws were meant to restrict people from doing certain things that may endanger the established social order. Later, with the rise of Socratic philosophy, the sanction of jail was rethought and instead of raw punishment, its role was taken to be the perpetrator’s reformation. I think that what has taken place between the establishment of these two functions of the institution of prison is the evolution of the understanding of “person”. The punitive aspect of imprisonment reflects the idea that the imprisoned person represents a danger to society so the society is better off if the prisoner is isolated from it and does not have a chance to continue menacing its order. Rehabilitation on the other hand underlies the idea that human beings are prone to change, change for the better, improve themselves (either on their own or with the help of institutions such as prisons or hospitals) and re-enter society as adequate individuals that can bring good to it. I believe that this concept illustrates Kant’s idea of a person as infinitely valuable and irreplaceably valuable – we refuse to exterminate a person (unless we are sure that there is absolutely no further way to rehabilitate them, in the case of capital punishment) because we agree that he or she is an individual – one of a kind, with uniqueness that cannot replicate itself and cannot be replaced.
But what do we do when we see that the court vested with the power previously associated solely with God – the power to determine what punishment a perpetrator deserves – is corrupt and does not base its judgment on objective evidence but rather on bribes and political and social connections? This issue is quite interesting because on the surface it looks like the situation urges to a return to the old Hebrew retributive principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. I mentioned in above that the power and authority of the court have previously been associated with the figure of God. This is a controversial statement because how can we possibly argue in its favor in the presence of “the tooth” principle, i.e. can we really say that people took this power to be solely in the realm of God when even the Bible provides enough examples of persons taking this power in their own hands and killing or otherwise punishing their foes in revenge? In “Civilization and Its Discontents” Freud states that some form of a belief in G/god(s) has existed ever since people began to fear the arbitrary atrocities of nature and sought to explain them, and that this belief has evolved over time to reach the level on which we see it today – the monotheistic God of Christians, Jews and Muslims. The retributive system of justice has surely evolved as well although I believe this process has been a much slower one than the one of the belief in God. Evidence for this is the presence of retributive thoughts in today’s society – Kristin’s mother is an example of that. Can it be inferred then that the wish for retribution is an “instinct” that religion, modern religion, mainstream religion and not its most extreme branches, try to mild and renounce?
I think that Kant’s concept of dignity and the consequent definitions of “person”, as discussed by Zagzebski, can provide an answer to that question. Kristin’s mother’s wish for retribution springs from the idea of the uniqueness of a person – this was her child, and although she has a son as well, this was the child that she named “Kristin”, that she brought up and educated, that looked and talked and thought and acted in this particular way that no other person can recreate, no matter how similar they may appear to be. She may have many more children, but each of them will have his/her own personality, be they identical twins.
Boethius’ definition of person – “a person is an individual substance of a rational nature” – presents an ethically interesting question – I found out from Kristin’s mother that even if she had survived the accident, she would have been blind and severely physically and mentally impaired due to the damages of the crash. She would have needed constant assistance and would not have been able to perform the daily activities of a normal human being. The main argument of Zagzebski against Boethius is precisely the fact that his definition includes such cases and excludes the possibility of something non-human they may be perfectly rational. She, like Hegel, maintains that consciousness is a matter of degree and according to that degree, Kristin wouldn’t have qualified as a person (which corresponds to the second definition of “person” Zagzebski analyzes – the one of Locke, according to whom, self-consciousness is “preserved in memory” (p. 407) – Kristin, in the physical and mental state that was described, would not have been able to say whether she remembers anything from her past or not - most likely she really wouldn’t have been able to think at all. Neither would she have been able “to act for ends”, which is Kant’s proposal for a definition of “person”, let alone to act in the name and for the sake of others, i.e. to be altruistic. The only definition that seems to be able to include her in its realm is Wojtyla’s “a person is an incommunicably unique subject” although it too poses many problems, the major one being “subject” – a “self-experiencing” individual. We couldn’t be sure to what extent she would have been able to experience herself. However, I think that all of these definitions, even the fourth one that appears to be the most altruistic one, fail to reflect the fact that personhood is formed not just on the basis of the subject themselves but also with regards to their surroundings and most importantly – the people around them. What I mean is that although none of these definitions seems to accept that Kristin, had she survived the accident, would be considered a person, she really would have been one. To me, besides upon one’s own self and experiences, personhood is formed on the basis of the experiences of others of them and the marks the person has left in their environment in the form of events, deeds and the memories thereof. Thus, even though according to all the previous definitions, Kristin would have ceased to be a person after the accident, I would like to argue that there is no such thing as “ceasing to be a person” – this is not a title that one can acquire and lose in the course of time but an inherent quality, the quality of infinite and irreplaceable value, that does not stop to exist even when we die. Thus, even though Kristin is dead, she is still a person – had the law not believed that, there wouldn’t have been a compensation for her death. And this very compensation is the evidence that even when we die, we still retain certain rights (the right of compensation) and responsibilities (for example the debts we owe get transferred to our inheritors).
Zagzebski argues that both infinite value and irreplaceability are needed to form a person but at the same time that they are incompatible and “cannot attach (directly) to the same object” because they are fundamentally different - “what has infinite value… comes from our nature” and irreplaceability arises from personhood; infinite value is qualitative and irreplaceability – nonqualitative. She cannot provide an answer as to how it is possible for these two incompatible aspects to join in the formation of persons and concludes the article by saying that perhaps we will never be able to answer this question. I don’t seem to have been able to prove an explanation either but I think I added an important supplement to her concept of personhood – namely, that it cannot be taken away from us, even after we die, or, to put it in other words – we are persons as long as the memory about us is alive and has real implications in the life of the future generations (by this token, for instance, George Washington of MLK are still persons because they still shape the identity of every American citizen).
