Equal Persons

Several years ago, James Mumford brought to my attention a passage from an essay by George Orwell. I was struck by it then and am struck by it still. The essay is titled simply, “A Hanging.” Orwell had served in a British police force in Burma at a time when Britain was still a colonial power. In the essay, he describes an occasion when he witnessed the hanging of a prisoner. The essay is most often read as an illustration of how the use of capital punishment may be dehumanizing, but it is also something more.

Orwell notes that, as the prisoner was being taken to the gallows, he very carefully stepped around a puddle. And in that seemingly minor observation, Orwell finds something worth our pondering.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.

One world less. Each person is a world. Not just a specimen of human nature, aninstance of a more general, natural kind called humanity. Were the man who was hanged simply a specimen of humanity he might be replaceable by another who shared the same nature. But that is not what it means, Orwell suggests, for a person to die.

Borrowing language from Robert Spaemann, we might say that a person is a someone, not a something. That is, a person is not just one who shares our nature, with its distinctively human qualities. That would be more like a something—one more specimen of humanity characterized by the traits and capacities that mark human nature. Those capacities are important, of course. But a person is something different—an unrepeatable someone. One like no other. One who cannot be replaced or compared. A mysterious inwardness for whom the body is the place of personal presence.

It is no accident that Orwell makes his point with reference to a person dying. For in death more than anywhere else a kind of “on the whole” sense of a person’s significance strikes us. In that moment, the many ways in which we differ, however important in much of life, seem to fall away. The most important thing to say then is simply “one world less.” For in death someone who cannot be replaced by any other is no more. A world has disappeared, not just some traits or capacities. And all the ordinary distinctions in merit, excellence, and ability pale beside the loss of that unrepeatable someone.

Nevertheless, quite often we do not really seem to think this way. Today we are less likely to talk about persons than about human beings who do or do not have the abilities and capacities that make for “personhood.” We focus on capacities that living human beings sometimes, but not always, possess. What sorts of capacities? Self-consciousness, awareness of one’s surroundings, the ability to reason, the ability to envision a future for oneself. And, of course, there are many circumstances in which a human being might lack or lose such abilities: dementia, intellectual disability, permanent loss of consciousness, being a fetus in utero.

On this view, then, a view that is now quite common among us, there may be living human beings who no longer are or never were persons. The class of persons is smaller—perhaps quite a bit smaller—than the class of human beings. Why should that matter? If we say that it is persons who have rights and that living human beings are not persons when they lack certain capacities (lack personhood), then it seems to follow that the lives of those human beings who are not persons may legitimately be taken if they conflict in important ways with the desires or needs of those who are.

This way of thinking—focusing on the presence or absence of personhood—became especially significant around the time (1973) when Roe v. Wade was decided. If the needs and lives of human beings were in conflict, the presence or absence of personhood seemed to offer a criterion for determining which were of greater value and entitled to greater protection. And it did not take very long for this way of thinking to gravitate from the beginning to the end of life. After all, it is sad but true that as we move toward the end of life we may lose many of the capacities that we especially value and that we mark with the language of personhood. If the decline is especially steep, we may well feel that the life that remains is, as we are often inclined to say, “not much of a life.” We can understand why any of us might be tempted to feel that way, but if and when we do, something important has been lost. For “person” is the language of equality.

In a characteristically witty passage, G. K. Chesterton once observed that, faced with the possibility of a woman’s drowning, we would say simply, “A woman has fallen into the water.” We would not say, “A highly educated woman has fallen into the water.” Or, again, we would not say, “Unless you hurry up and stop him, a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped off that cliff.” Desirable as education or a fine ear for music may be, their significance seems to recede in the face of death. For if that woman drowns or that man falls off the cliff, a world, a person—and not just a bearer of some traits or capacities—will have disappeared. Person is the language of equality, of equal dignity.

I do not want to overstate the case. There are times when comparative judgments are appropriate. Equal treatment does not necessarily mean identical treatment, as every parent of more than one child realizes. Academic institutions, for example, are meritocratic, and a class in which every student gets an A—even if welcomed for various reasons by some students and some instructors—is understood to subvert the very nature of the undertaking. Likewise, the worlds of sport and musical performance—to take two quite different aspects of life—are arenas in which we strive for excellence and seek to discern whose performance is especially accomplished. We might say that some people display human capacities at their fullest and best (Chesterton’s man with a very fine ear for music). Others may fall well short of such excellence. And we know, of course, that some of us may so lack or so lose some of the most characteristic human capacities as to seem to have lost almost entirely what our society calls personhood.

This comparative way of thinking about human beings is for certain purposes necessary and important. But determining what those purposes should be will always take some thought, and we may not agree. A case in point: Discussing the morality of capital punishment, Walter Berns, a distinguished constitutional scholar, once quoted Supreme Court Justice William Brennan’s statement, “even the vilest criminal remains a human being possessed of human dignity.” And having quoted Brennan, Berns then disagreed in a way that it is, I think, fair to describe as emphatic:

What sort of humanism is it that respects equally the life of Thomas Jefferson and Charles Manson, Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Eichmann, Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray? To say that these men, some great and some unspeakably vile, equally possess human dignity is to demonstrate an inability to make a moral judgment based on the idea of human dignity.

Surely we understand what Berns means, and in certain moods we may well be inclined to agree. But those moods should be resisted. For in such moods our thought is being governed entirely by the category of “something,” rather than “someone.” We forget that a person is a someone who not only may share in the value of the human species with its distinctive characteristics but also occupies a distinctive position all his own, a position that transcends species membership. He is a world, not just a specimen of humanity. He has equal dignity, not just comparative worth or value.

This way of thinking and speaking about human persons lies at the very heart of Christian faith and should have special appeal for Christians. The first followers of Jesus found themselves worshipping him while simultaneously confessing, as Israel had been commanded, “the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” But how could they do both? Puzzling over that strange conjunction set them on a path of painstaking reflection that eventually resulted in the characterization of God as triune: three persons (Father, Son, and Spirit), yet one God.

In this triune God, the three persons, though numerically distinct, cannot be distinguished from each other by any properties or qualities they individually possess. If we say that the Father is eternal, almighty, merciful, or faithful, we must say the same of the Son and the Spirit. For they are coequal and coeternal, as the Athanasian Creed puts it. How then, if at all, can these three, equal persons be distinguished, if not by any traits they individually possess? They are distinguished only in the manner by which they exist in relation to each other. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds—as Christians have said now for centuries. Each is an equal “someone,” who exists in relation to the others. Thus, “person” is the language of equality.

Thinking of persons in this way is by no means simply abstract dogmatic language about God. It invites us to think in a certain way about ourselves, as the late Ralph McInerny made clear in a lovely passage:

The point of a proper name is that it [is] not common to many, and yet many people do bear identical names. . . . But even when two persons have the same proper name it does not become a common noun, like “man.” All the John Smiths that have been, are, and will be have nothing in common but the name; it does not name something common to them all. There is an inescapable nominalism here. God calls us all by our proper name, and He is unlikely to confuse one John Smith with another.

If we take McInerny’s point seriously, it must inevitably shape the way we think about life’s beginning and life’s ending. We must try as best we can to honor from first to last the world—the equal world—that each human person is.

Gilbert Meilaender is senior research professor of theology at Valparaiso University.