The funtional concept of person on secular bioethics

Abstract

To argue that in bioethical dilemmas the bottom line is decided within the ontological. It is essential to respond to systematic questions such as: what is a person? Who is the person? These issues are two opposite trends: responses of a reductionist tendency, in the context of a secular bioethics debtor of the primacy of action, which argues in favor of separability between person, human being and human life; and another trend, in the context of a metaphysics bioethics, which holds an intrinsic identity between person, human being and human life. The first does coincide the being of person with the pursuit of a given capacity, a function is not an abstract hypostatization, but is inseparable from the ontological subject that is its condition of possibility. The second reference is made to the substancialism and to the hylemorphism as explanations of the actual and real human being to justify the presence in man of the specific ontological principle of unification of this properties and permanence of functions and acts, present irrespective of their current outer manifestation, and recognize the person’s current status in humans even in conditions of deprivation or potentiality.