(Page 5 of 53) - "The Loss of the Person: The British Debates on the Legal Status of Groups and Individuals, 1880-1930" authored by Dow, Douglas.

personhood, driven by a fear that the theory of artificial personality implied
the State’s sovereign authority to give or deny life to any social entity other
than the State or the individual. But at the heart of the Realist’s argument is
the claim that the group is analogous to the human being, and cannot rightly
be denied personhood any more than a human can be. What then is the
source of human personhood? How might the Realist’s claim modify or
affect the status of the human being as Person antecedent to State
recognition?

Second, what is the relationship between the moral person and the

legal person? While we accept that the government can recognize a
corporation, few of us would think it inadmissible for the government to
restrict such recognition – or at least, few would call such restrictions
immoral rather than imprudent or impolitic. But would the same hold for a
human being? There are strong reasons why anti-abortion activists insist
that the fetus is not just human but a person, and animal rights advocates
such as Peter Singer have called animals “non human persons.”

To be a

person is to retain a status that is at once morally sanctified and legally
protected. But what if the recognition of our individual statuses as right and
duty bearing units is truly analogous to the group, that is, constituted and
conditioned by the sovereign authority of the State for administrative
purposes. Does the State create all persons, or do some persons exist
independent of the State? Does the sovereign create the status in
recognizing it, or is recognition of individual persons something the
government is compelled to do? Is there a chasm between the moral and the
legal person that is not the duty of the secular State to bridge?

Third, what has the outcome of the debate done to the Person as a

concept of social and legal status? Some would argue that the debate
became unfashionable and just died out. But the results were more than this,
for with the debate, so too died the term Person, at least as a keyword in
jurisprudential thought. By the 1930’s and 1940’s, the term was fast
disappearing from its once central place in jurisprudence. A number of
participants in the debate argue for segregated sets of definitions, one for the
legal realm and one for the ethical-theological realm. However, as I shall
argue, we misunderstand both the term and its value, if we only see the
Person as a legal or a moral category. The loss of this term has hampered the
understanding of legal relationships, and no place is that more forcefully felt

See, for example, Peter Singer. Practical Ethics. Second Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1993) pp. 110-117.