Abstract
[Autom. eng. transl.] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 of the UN has placed in political, and not only philosophical or religious terms, at the very center of the logic of citizenship the affirmation of human dignity and freedom as innate and not acquired qualities. To affirm that all men are born free and equal in dignity means to affirm in fact that dignity is an ontological attribute, an intrinsic (and therefore inalienable) quality of the human being, beyond differences of sex, health, social status . The use of the notion of the person as a synonym of the qualities of the adult, according to a prevalent meaning in the bioethical debate, risks shattering this gain in politics. Liberal biopolitics risks being a source of discrimination among men when it adopts a concept of a person distinct from that of a human being. In it revives the anthropological dualism typical of Platonism and taken up with psychological meanings in modernity. The theses of Hannah Arendt, Eva Kittay and Martha Nussabaum allow us to highlight the characters of the human person both as a psychic subject and as a becoming bodily being in time, according to that intuition that was proper to Thomas Aquinas. If we go back to thinking about the human person as a becoming human being in time, it is possible to safeguard the rights of all and in particular defend those phases of human life in which the human person is exposed, for the stages of development or for illness, to addiction. Only in this way can we think of a justice that includes all and all the phases of existence, even those marked by disability. The essay therefore proposes to develop an articulated examination of the use of the notion of person in the relationship that links bioethics to biopolitics.
Translated title of the contribution | [Autom. eng. transl.] Biopolitics and person |
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Original language | Italian |
Pages (from-to) | 239-253 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Medicina e Morale |
Publication status | Published - 2009 |
Keywords
- Antropologia
- Bioetica
- Biopolitica