Persons, Humanity, and the Definition of Death

5. The Constitutive View of Persons

The Constitutive View of Persons chapter five In an earlier work (Lizza 1991), I argued that the relation between the person and the human organism should be understood as one of constitution.1 Following Tyler Burge’s discussion (1975) of how the notion of constitution captures the relation between ordinary objects, such as balls and tables, and the kind of stuff they are made of, such as gold or wood, I suggested that constitution should not be restricted to the relation between the references of count nouns and mass terms. The notion of constitution is also helpful in other contexts to understand the relation between two kinds of things that we commonly admit into our ontology but that coincide in their spatiotemporal location. I also argued that subjectivity is essential to persons and that persons and personal identity are determined, in part, by moral and cultural factors. More recently, Lynne Rudder Baker (2000) developed much more fully the view that persons are constituted by human beings.2 She, too, treats subjectivity as essential to persons and has shown how relational factors play a role in their constitution. Like Joseph Margolis (1984), Baker points out that some relational properties of persons and other objects, such as works of art, are intentional: they have essential properties that require propositional attitudes. Thus, Michelangelo’s David could not exist except in relation to an art world. Similarly, persons cannot exist independent of their having and being related to beings with propositional attitudes. While not all constituted things have intentional properties—for example, genes are constituted by DNA molecules but existed before there were propositional attitudes—others, such as persons and works of art, are dependent on their relation to beings with intentionality (Baker 2000, ch. 2). This last factor provides the conceptual space to do justice to the role of social and cultural factors in fixing the boundaries of our concept of person, factors that theorists such as Mead, Sartre, Geertz, and Harré have emphasized in their work. In this chapter, I begin by showing how the constitutive interpretation can be used to respond to the threat of relative identity posed by cases of total amnesia, dissociative personality disorder, and permanent vegetative state (PermVS). The constitutive interpretation allows, in principle, for the possibility that total amnesia and dissociative personality disorder may involve two or more persons being constituted by the same human organism during its life history. It also allows for the possibility that, with PermVS, a human organism can constitute a person at one time in its life history but not at another. In short, this interpretation allows for the conditions for the individuation and identity of persons to diverge from those of the human organism without violating the absoluteness of identity. The constitutive interpretation, however, does not necessitate our interpreting these cases in the way described. In fact, some further considerations about how persons are constituted by human bodies should lead us to reject the possibility of a human organism constituting more than one person during its life history. These same considerations support the interpretation that human persons who have lost the brain functions necessary for consciousness have died, even if the human organism continues to exist. Another problem addressed here is whether the constitutive interpretation allows for the possibility that a person constituted by a human organism at one time could be constituted at some later time by a different organism (human or of another species) or by artificial, bionic matter. This problem is particularly interesting in the context of determining death. For if it were possible to gradually replace human organic parts with bionic ones without destroying subjectivity and psychological continuity, we might have a new way to beat the reaper and achieve immortality . But, as I argue in this chapter, the same considerations that lead us to reject the possibility that more than one substantive person can be constituted by a single human organism during its life history should lead us to reject this possibility as well. the constitutive view In Sameness and Substance, David Wiggins (1980) critiques the continuity criterion of personal identity. He introduces the idea that the is in statements such as “Caesar is that human being or that human body” should be understood not as the is of identity but as the is of constitution. He claims, “A person is material in the sense of being essentially constituted by matter; but in some strict and different sense of ‘material,’ viz. being definable or...