2a: Defining person

Regarding Premise 2a, that to be a human organism is sufficient for personhood¹, a dictionary definition should suffice. We’ve looked in lots of dictionaries, and the first entry under person is invariably a “human being,” a “human individual,” a “living human being,” or some identical variant. Nothing more.

Note what we mean by definition here. In one sense, the definition of person is “an entity possessing intrinsic value.” To be intrinsically valuable means to have inherent dignity and associated inviolable rights which are (or ought to be) recognized socially. In fact, this idea is exactly what we defended as Premise 1. In the present section, by contrast, we are interested in another sense of the definition of person. Specifically, we are interested in learning the minimum set of characteristics that one must have in order to be an entity possessing intrinsic value. Like the common understanding reflected in the dictionaries, pro-lifers hold that there are two: human and organism.