Philosophically, the human beings possess specific attributes that make them persons. Ideally, the concept of human mortality and rationality are two sided folds that perhaps strengthen the ideology behind trying to define the exact characteristics that help to define this status of a person into being a person. To elaborate this subject matter, various philosophical acknowledgements have been put forward to explain the essence of personhood within a person.
Philosophically, the answer allied to what makes a person a person is an essential precedent that brings out the concept of both life and death across a broad dimension of peoples understanding. This is because the subject matter of personhood brings entitlement to various civil rights protectionism. According to the advocates of maternal rights as well as those of the unborn babies, they advocate on the aspect of “function” as the main factor which makes a person a person. Implied here is that personhood is the ability by an individual of doing and functioning in a specific manner.
Therefore, an individual becomes a person because he or she can adequately respond to a specific case of stimuli, has ability of thinking and can elsewhere reason appropriately. Reasoning allied to a person occupies a special place in describing the personhood of an individual. The “function” aspect of an individual has been carried out to a logical view by Princeton University Professor Peter Singer. According to him, the rights of an infant are taken in precedence by her mother by the virtue of the fact that the infant is yet unborn and therefore has no the function ability.Accordingly, the mother is ethically right if she chose to take the infant life since it has not yet become a person.
This is because the infant is lacking the basic awareness of consciousness about its “self”. (http://www. bible. org/page. php? page_id=4687) The aspect of self-awareness allied to person is the basic parameter that differentiates personhood from the senses of other animals. Self-awareness is what legitimizes the functionality criterion alleged to the individual persons.
Topping on the concept of function to define personhood is thus an aspect of human existence.Here, the virtue of human existence adores human with basic rights that are absent in regard to other animals. Though the other animals have some rights, such rights are in no manner matching with what is presented across the board to the effect of individual mortality. Consequently, mortality gives us the response of being human beings. This is to imply that “a person is a person because he/she is” and therefore a human being. This is to imply that the person is what he/she is portrayed right from the zygote stage to what he/she could be.
Elsewhere, the view of existence of human being is a speculate and a special manner that helps to provide standards with which he bears God’s image. This endeavors the compatibility portfolio of image about human creation in the Genesis autography found in the Christian Bible. The essence of personhood brings forth the respectability virtue allied to humans. This is basically on the imaginary that human beings are created uniquely.
All the stages of human development provides ramifications that they posses a unique feature that provides them with the dimensions of functionality towards being persons. (http://www. bible. rg/page. php? page_id=4687)The relationship between God and man has a special credit compared to the other animals.
There is a close relation between the thinking imaginary portrayed between man and God. The two posses counteractive phenomena with which they have thoughts for each other. God constantly thinks about us as per the doctrine of S. Lewis. This is to imply that, God made us with a unique personhood potential compared to the other things. Accordingly, man was created uniquely to the image of God unlike the other animals.
This perhaps makes the most contagious point of concern about what makes a person a person.The state of personhood in a person is therefore made to constantly exist at any other period during one’s life. Despite sex, age and occupation, the human personality attached to him constantly makes him humanly functional across all the stages of his state of living. The basic conception of the creation nature of human beings accrue to the aspect of human beings as been mortal. Human kindness has the inbuilt capacity of being mortal.
Consequently, the nature of human mortality which is the foremost characteristic of human beings seeks to accrue them with the aspect of death.This is to imply that; the specific and unique nature of human beings cannot deny them from escaping death. For every mortal human being, death is the consequent aspect that withdraws him away from the bounds of the cosmos to the frontiers of other metaphysical environments. Therefore, though the personhood of a person gives him uniqueness from other animals, his personhood cannot escape death. (http://www. bible.
org/page. php? page_id=4687) Therefore, God created human beings in accordance to his image. Within there mortal body was the functionality aspect that made them different in the conception with the other animals.Ideally, the functionality concept is therefore the great characteristic domain that puts man different from the other animals. Man has the ability to reason appropriately.
He can distinguish between what could be good and elsewhere bad. However, the other animals cannot reason appropriately. This is the basic function (Reason), which is specifically reserved for the human beings. The function of reasoning ignites reservation of personhood. A person is a person because he is rational and mortal with the image of God making his nature.
He functions appropriately within the codes of either right or wrong guided by his rational thinking.
