Discerning Persons: profound disability, the early church fathers and the concept of the person in bioethics.

Discerning Persons addresses the serious issue of disablism and discriminatory attitudes that fail to treat people with profound disabilities as persons. Disablism is explicit in bioethics where the stakes are high: life or death. Whereas views giving priority to humans are seen as speciesist and so discriminatory disablist bioethical approaches are rarely acknowledged as prejudiced. Indeed many bioethicists do not realize there is an issue. The book critiques current bioethical thinking for its serious theological misunderstandings, and for the uncritical unreflective way it accepts a Lockean separation of the human being from the person and downgrades certain humans who do not fulfill arbitrarily defined and insubstantial criteria for being persons. In contrast to current disability theology which is dominated by modern Protestant approaches, this book returns to the rich insights of the early church fathers. Using much neglected Patristic thinking and its analogies with the human person, abled and disabled, found in reflection on the image of God and in the Trinitarian and Christological disputes of the early centuries where person language originated the book makes patristic thinking do important work. It establishes that there are no early historical, philosophical or theological grounds for calling or treating humans as anything less than persons. Nor is there foundation for defining ‘person’ purely in terms of individuality, rationality, autonomy or self consciousness. Patristic insights conclusively call us to be discerning persons: to realize that persons are not so much defined as discerned and to discern that all human beings, whatever their situations or capacities, are unique and unrepeatable persons.