Health Sciences 2610F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Fetus, Bipedalism, Ensoulment
10 Mar 2020
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The concept of personhood and its relationship with abortion. If we had an answer to what personhood is it would make decisions much clearer. For abortion: the status of the fetus is critical. For our treatment of other creatures - are higher order mammals people . Is the biological category from which personhood is derived. Is a legal status, not a biological one. A person has rights and responsibilities, endowed with dignity, deserving respect. Use the term human and person interchangeably but they are different. Aristotle thought that there was four varieties of soul and that only humans had all four, but lesser creatures (intelligent mammals) had three, but plants had only one. John locke (1632-1704) suggested that a person was a being capable of following laws, and feel both happiness and misery humans have a range of emotions, animals have contentment and fear.
