et alteri incommunicabilis. So sayeth Roman law.
One might translate this as: "Persons belong to themselves & cannot share themselves with another."
Why does this matter? Mostly because my Philosophy of the Human Person mid-term is on Monday & I better know this stuff!
My Franciscan U. professor, Dr. Crosby, opens the course by to appealing to common moral intuitions that most of us have, such as that it is wrong always & everywhere to frame the innocent even for some societal good, it is wrong to own another human being as property, it is wrong to breed human beings as one breeds animals.
We are called to consider, What, then, is revealed about human persons if these things are universally wrong?
He concludes the introduction to his book by formulating these statements about what human persons are:
A person belongs to himself & not to any other.
A person is an end in himself & never an instrumental means.
A person is a whole of his own & never a mere part of something.
A person is uniquely (incommunicably) his own & never a mere specimen.
I wrote about it a few posts ago, but I'd like to know what you, the man on the virtual street, think about these things. How do they ring in your ears? How do they hold true or not in your experience? Can you point to concrete examples of these things going right or wrong in our society or world today?
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