Towards an alternative approach to personhood in the end of life questions

Within the Western bioethical framework, we make a distinction between two dominant interpretations of the meaning of moral personhood: the naturalist and the humanist one. While both interpretations of moral personhood claim to promote individual autonomy and rights, they end up with very different normative views on the practical and legal measures needed to realize these values in every day life. Particularly when we talk about the end of life issues it appears that in general the arguments for euthanasia are drawn from the naturalist interpretation of moral personhood while the arguments against euthanasia, for their part, are derived from the idealist and/or humanist understanding of the same concept. This article focuses on examining the metaphysical assumptions and internal contradiction found behind the opposing arguments presented by two prominent philosophers of these two traditions: Peter Singer and Ludger Honnefelder. The author claims that neither side of the debate succeeds in defending its normative position without reconsidering how to take the social aspects of moral personhood into account. The author holds that, despite our need to set individual's decision making into social context, the current communitarian narrative concept of personhood fails to offer a convincing alternative. Instead of merely trying to replace psychological and atomistic view of personhood with a collective understanding of an individual's moral identity, we need to discuss the normative relation between the concept of 'moral personhood' and the demand for respect of individual autonomy in Western bioethics within a wider philosophical perspective.(2)