THE HUMAN PERSON

TRINITARIAN=BEING RELATIONAL

The Trinitarian vision of God in its implications for humanity underscores very clearly the relational dimension of being human.

IMAGE OF GOD IS COMMUNAL

The image of the human being in the creation story is a communal one: “And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and will resemble us…male and female, God created them..(Gen. 1:26-27)

I.TO BE HUMAN=TO BE COMMUNAL

Human existence does not precede relationship, but is born of relationship and nurtured by it. To be a human person is to be essentially directed towards others. We are communal at core.

PERSONAL EXISTENCE IS AN I AND YOU

Personal existence then, can never be seen as an “I” in isolation, but always as “I” and “you” in relationship.

IMPLICATIONS

An awareness of justice shows us that personal existence is a shared existence. Through interdependence we discover that we bear mutual responsibilities. Our pursuit of individual ends can be justified only to the extent that we respect the patterns of inter-dependence which make up our relational selves.

TRUE COMMUNITY=PROMOTE THE WELL-BEING OF LIFE TOGETER

From the point of view of justice, then, we need to ask whether our moral choices and actions detract from the value of true community or promote the kind of self-giving which sustains the well-being of life together.

TO BE RELATIONAL=UPHOLDING THE LAW AND THE COMMON GOOD

As relational, social beings, human persons need to “Live in social groups with appropriate structures which sustain human dignity and the common good.” The moral significance of this aspect of being human is that we must respect the laws and institutions of society which promote communal living and uphold the common good.

HIGHEST POINT OF BEING RELATIONAL IS IN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

The relational aspect of being human reaches its high point in our relationship to God in faith, hope and love. Each person has eternal significance and worth. The moral import of this aspect of the person is that all relationships must find their source and fulfillment in God. After all, the fundamental conviction of our faith, is that human life is fulfilled in knowing, loving God in communion with others.

II.MAN AS AN EMBODIED SUBJECT

To speak of the human person as a subject is to say that the person is in charge of his or her own life. That is, the person is a moral agent with a certain degree of autonomy and self-determination empowered to act according to his or her conscience, in freedom and with knowledge.

A.HUMANS ARE NOT OBJECTS

The great moral implication of the person as subject is that no one may ever use a human person as an object or as a means to an end the way we do of the other things of the world.

C.RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Every right entails a duty and the rights that belong to the person as subject entail the duty of demanding respect for them. And so we must respect the other as an autonomous agent capable of acting with the freedom of an informed conscience.

Exploitation of human persons for one’s advantage is never allowed.

D.WE ARE INTEGRATED PERSONS

To speak of the human person as an embodied subject is to use a more unitive expression than the familiar one of “body and soul”. Embodied subject implies that our bodies are not accessories. They are not merely something that we house our subjectivity, but are essential to our being integrated persons.

E.OUR BODIES ARE ESSENTIAL IN BEING HUMAN

We express ourselves as the image of God through our bodies. What concerns the body inevitably concerns the whole person, for our bodies are essential to being human and to relating in human ways. The fact that we have bodies and cannot enter into relationships apart from them entails a number of moral demands. Since our bodies are symbols of interiority, bodily expressions of love in a relationship ought to be proportionate to the nature of the commitment between persons.

F.TO RELATE WELL WITH OTHERS, WE MUST TAKE CARE OF OUR BODIES

Also bodily existence means that we must take seriously the limits and potential of the biological order. Since the body is subject to the laws of the material world, we must take these laws into account in the way we treat our bodies.

We are not free to intervene in the body in any way we want. For example, to flood the blood system with toxic drugs means to so damage the body as to kill ourselves.

To relate well with others, we must take care of our bodily health and respect bodily integrity.

Bodily existence also means that we must accept our genetic endowment which sets the baseline for certain possibilities and limitations to our physical, intellectual and psychological capacities.

We have the moral responsibility to live well within these limits and not to push ourselves to become or to do what our genotypes, taken together with our environment would not support.

As body persons we are a part of the material world. To be part of the material world holds both great potential and serious limitations. The potential is that, created in God’s image with the mandate to bring the earth under human control, we can act as co-agents with God to make the world a continuously livable space.

The developments of science are certainly helping us to do that. But human creations are sometimes ambiguous. Herein lies the serious limitations.

The very products which help us to improve communications, production and prosperity can be detrimental to our corporeality and communality

Likewise, the very techniques which are being developed in the life sciences to benefit the human community, such as developments in reproductive technology and genetic engineering can easily be extended to producing disturbing results for the wholeness of society and common good.

Being part of the material world requires moral agents to consider the negative effects necessary entailed in the positive discoveries of technology and to weigh their moral importance.

III.AN HISTORICAL SUBJECT

An embodied subject is necessarily an historical subject. While the spirit enables us to become more than ourselves, our bodies anchor us in the here and now. To be an historical subject, then, means to be relentlessly temporal, seizing each opportunity of the present moment as part of the progressive movement toward our full human development.

When we integrate our past into the person we are becoming we move into the future not only with a sense of integrity but also with a coherent sense of direction.

A.AS HISTORICAL SUBJECTS, WE MUST GROW

The moral imperative of being an historical subject is to integrate the past into the person we are becoming so as to shape a future rather than to settle into a static condition.

The moral significance of the personal historical process is that one’s moral responsibility is proportionate to his or her capacities at each stage of development.

IV.FUNDAMENTALLY EQUAL BUT UNIQUEThere is a fundamental equality among human persons by virtue of our common dignity as persons.

Equality allows us to take an interest in everything that is human and to understand the moral obligations which inform our common humanity.

However, human persons are sufficiently diverse so that we must also take into account the originality and uniqueness of each person. This means that while everyone shares certain common features of humanity, each one does so differently and to different degrees.