10 novembre 2022
Legal Principles of Personhood
Posted by under: Non classé .
The appeal and some Amici argue that the fetus is a « person » within the meaning of the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. To support this, they describe in detail and in detail the known facts of fetal development. If this personality suggestion is established, the complainant`s case naturally collapses, since the right to life of the fetus would then be specifically guaranteed by the amendment. The appellant acknowledged this in the new arguments. On the other hand, in reiterating his argument, the complainant admitted that no case could be invoked to say that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.43 None of these beliefs constitute an « Archimedean point » or a fundamental belief that could not be challenged and re-evaluated. Even beliefs in (c) can be re-evaluated as long as one engages in a broad reflexive balance, as opposed to a narrow equilibrium that would preclude critical examination of (c). However, according to Daniels, basic theories should meet certain criteria. The need for independence is particularly relevant here. It requires that basic theories have value other than merely supporting the moral principles set out in paragraph (b) and that they « go beyond the realm of moral judgments considered to be used to `test` moral principles.52 Otherwise, the theory of context would be redundant (since the theory of background partially justifies the beliefs referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b)), But only these beliefs justify the basic theory). Socialism and communism are both based on a similar subjugation of the individual, but subject to the state as opposed to an upper class of people. In Marxist social structures, there is no notion of existential personality. There is no recognition of the existence and authority of God, nor of the imago Dei of persons.
As Marx put it, a « higher phase of communist society » would be « after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor and. After work became not only a means of life, but also the main need of life… (Marx 1875/2008). In warning the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn directly struck at the goals stemming from the relativistic origins of communism and its arbitrary class structures when he declared: « Communism regards morality as relative, as a class affair. Depending on the circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, can be good or bad. It all depends on class ideology » (Solzhenitsyn 1976).32 Compare these results with those of the existential personality. The part of the concept of existential personality manifested in an immortal soul was considered a virtue of the individual at the end of the Republic: it is not an exhaustive list of criteria for moral personality. In addition, these criteria can be combined in different ways. For example, it could be argued that only an intelligent, autonomous, language-using, self-aware being would be a complete legal person. 21Another important objection concerns the obvious danger of moral regression.
The equal recognition of all human beings as legal persons, regardless of their individual differences, is an important ethical achievement of modern legal culture. It is part of the conscious moral decision to assign to all people a fundamental legal status that prevents them from being considered mere objects, goods or things. Equal recognition is a consequence of many morally offensive social and legal practices in which certain categories of people have been denied recognition as equal to those who dominated and controlled their lives. One of these sad episodes in legal history was the eugenics of the 20th century. The essence of eugenics was a just deprivation of equal legal status and protection for those who were not considered to have full moral value due to biological defects (including those considered mentally retarded, physically crippled, etc.). The infamous « war against the weak » took many forms and degrees, culminating in the massive physical annihilation of tens of thousands of « unworthy » people under the Nazi regime in Germany.10 All these historical precedents must render the philosophy of law extremely cautious in its approach from any point of view that could lead to undermining the great moral achievement of the equal recognition of the moral status of all men. regardless of individual differences. 6Some philosophical legal assumptions concern the determination of which interests should play a role in the law and why. These assumptions guide and explain the rules of personality found in actual legal rules and decisions. In my opinion, one of the most important philosophical foundations of (at least) contemporary Western legal systems is the belief that law ultimately serves the interests of the people and that the legal community is in fact made up of the people of a particular society.2 This is a view I have elsewhere called « legal humanism. » 3 It is based on the widespread concept of inherent human dignity as the basis for the recognition of the personality of all, but especially of the human being.
The concept of human dignity reflects the unique human capacities for reason and moral action. 3. Total brain death, i.e. loss of function of the entire brain: The first clinical case of a brain-dead person whose heart and lungs were kept on a ventilator was reported by French doctors in 1959. In 1968, an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School, chaired by Henry Beecher, recommended that physicians declare death due to permanent loss of all brain function (Bernat, 1994; Pernick, 1999). Total brain death is now a sufficient condition for declaring a person legally dead in any U.S. state. This standard conveniently includes two reasonable aspects of a person`s death, « irreversible loss of consciousness and irreversible cessation of the integrated function of the organism as a whole » (McMahan 1998). Various specific debates deal with issues relating to the personality of different categories of entities. Relational construction found early expression in Aristotle`s views on slavery. Aristotle argued that some people possess certain natural traits – for example, childish behavior – that make them slaves by nature (Rist 1982). And he believed that other individuals are masters because they are a certain type of person by nature, not because of knowledge or skills (Schofield 1999).
Society in Aristotelian thought acts correctly and intuitively in establishing slavery on the basis of these differences. A more recent expression of this application of relational personality was found in the nineteenth-century U.S. Supreme Court judgment in Dred Scott v. Sanford explicitly affirmed the ability of a « dominant race » to grant rights to « a subordinate and inferior class of beings. » 31 Genocide originates in the relational personality, taking up class ideology and directing it towards entire populations. Hitler (1925/2010) declared that « in this world, everything that is not of a healthy race is like tares. » The National Socialist genocide found its initial expression in the sterilization law of 1933, which targeted the mentally and physically handicapped as an inferior population excluded from German society (Friedlander 1995).33 As soon as the walls of personality were broken, this one quickly followed.
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