One must highly congratulate Mr Charles Messina, Malta’s Commissioner for Health, who objected to the discrimination being shown on the part of the Department of Health by refusing to finance treatment for a pregnant mother who needed care for her baby abroad, on the premise that the baby inside her, while being a human being, was not yet to be considered a human person as it was not yet born! A highly subjective decision.
In his correct deliberation, Mr Messina recalled that Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff had given a judgement contrary to that interpretation in our Courts! This is the second time that the Department of Health is appearing in the limelight for decisions of a strange nature. The previous one was the order to remove our crucifixes from our health centres! Not to sway from the main point of this article, I would like to take up the issue of why an unborn baby is both a human being and a human person and that trying to bring in a dichotomy between the two is very false and subjective.
That an embryo/foetus is a human being is certainly established by embryology and genetics to exist from fertilisation. A human embryo is a human being. Its intrinsic capacity to develop, irrespective of the mother and within the mother, shows that it acquired individual membership of the human species from the earliest moment of its conception as a single cell zygote. Because it is a human being, we should offer it the greatest protection at whatever stage of its life from conception to natural death.
I cannot understand, however, why the Health Department sought to discriminate between the human being and its personhood as the distinction is objectively non-existent. What is the objective meaning of ‘person’? Boethius stated that a person is “an individual substance of a rational nature” – rationalis naturae individua substantia. Essentially, this means that whereas ‘being’ defined our membership of an objective species (in this case human), personhood defined our subjective individuality within that species: a concrete individual and active subject, who is therefore a person to others – an individual subject who possesses a human nature. Each one of us is defined by our membership of the human species, but also by our human individuality and therefore a human person to others.
Thomas Aquinas, taking up where Aristotle left off, states that every human substance is composed of a form, an essence (matter and spirit – his nature) together with the act of being, which makes each one of us exist individually. The act of being together with the essence of spirit and nature, gives us our existance, our personhood, our 'I'.
I am a human being, as are several other billion human beings in the world, but I am the one and only person Michael Asciak born on such and such a date? We often get mixed up with these two concepts – not because there is in reality any contradiction where the human species is concerned but because, in reality, the word ‘person’ was originally brought in to describe discrepancies in our understanding of the supernatural.
We believe in one God, but a God made up of three individual persons, one individually recognisable from the other. We talk about a man – Jesus Christ – with a real human nature, who is a real human being, but who is not a human person, because his personhood is divine. The divine nature subsumes the human one! For creatures, this is not so confusing. Angels have angelic being and personhood: the archangel Michael is not the archangel Gabriel. So, likewise, human beings have both being and personhood: Michael Asciak is not any other human being but himself!
Rene Descartes came up with the dictum Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). In effect, in stating this he inverted the logic of objectivity and now redefined the person from a purely subjective viewpoint – the self-consciousness of the I, the capacity to relate to another. Man exists because he can think for himself, the I being now in the self-consciousness. Thinking becomes the nature or soul itself, not an expression of human nature.
In effect, the physical brain is the matter by which the soul expresses thought or the immaterial mind. Therefore, thinking is objectively an action of the spirit, not the basis of a rational nature. Objectively, the essence or soul is there even if the brain cannot be used to express it, but Descartes makes the mind, thinking, into the soul itself; he makes thinking the nature itself. He inverts the Sum ergo cogito into the Cogito ergo sum!
This subjectivist twist to philosophy – further contributed to by Rosmini and Kant – led to the present subjective mistake whereby society is proposing the concept of person as its spiritual acts of knowing or loving rather than these proceeding from the already constituted person itself. Self-consciousness and thinking becomes the new soul and personhood becomes what society recognises in your thinking and what society recognises in you that makes you a person! A veritable standing on its head of the original concepts of person.
Chapter IV, verse 32 of our Constitution speaks of ‘Every person in Malta is entitled to the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual’ amongst which is mentioned the right to life. The Maltese (extant) version here reads ‘ Billi kull persuna...’ Here, the constitution is talking about the right of individual human beings to life, which means human persons. As we have seen above, all human persons are, objectively, also human beings because of the nature of their essence. However, while the English version again uses the word “No person shall be deprived of life” in article 33, the Maltese version of the Constitution now changes tack and uses a different noun, it uses the word “Hadd ma jista' jigi pprivat mill-hajja tieghu”, which to my mind means that the legislator here legally equates objectively, as should be, ‘no one human being’ with ‘no person’, the word Hadd referring to nobody or no one, as Kulhadd means everybody, or every one!
Seeking to introduce a dichotomy between ‘human being’ and ‘human person’ is a sad perversion of reality and an ultimate travesty of human dignity.
Dr Michael Asciak MD. M.Phil. (European Studies and Genomics) PhD. (Bioethics).
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