An objection is a counterargument directed not against a single argument, but against a concept of person as a whole. It shows that the position is untenable in itself.
The three objections against the empirical-functionalist concept of person
In the debate over the concept of person, three independent objections are directed against the empirical-functionalist concept of person:
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Exclusion objection — The functionalist concept of person excludes newborns, coma patients, severely intellectually disabled people, and the advanced demented from personhood. Directed against Locke, Parfit, and Singer.
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Objection from diachronic identity — If personhood is constituted by actually exercised self-consciousness, the person disintegrates into a sequence of temporally bounded states of consciousness. Directed against Hume and Parfit.
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Performative contradiction — Whoever claims that not all human beings are persons presupposes, in the very claim, the personhood he denies to others. Directed against Singer. Bexten’s own further development (2026) in the wake of Apel’s transcendental pragmatics; it closes a systematic gap in Spaemann and, in this form, is not contained in the 2017 dissertation.
Dialectical asymmetry
Against the substance-ontological and the substance-ontological-relational concept of person there is not a single objection. The entire burden of objection falls on the empirical-functionalist side. See Argumentative-dialectical balance.
Objection to a practice
An objection in the sense determined here is directed against a concept of person, that is, against a thesis. To be distinguished from it is the objection to a practice: an objection directed against a practice, against an acting, and not against a claim about personhood. It is not a special case of the objection but a place of its own in the structure — it depends not on the concept of person but on the argument.
The objection to a practice divides completely and exclusively into two kinds. An act-based objection is directed against the action itself, independently of circumstances, care and consequences; a consequence-based objection is directed against effects, risks or attendant circumstances and lapses when these fall away. There is no third kind, and no objection can be both at once.
This division is not classificatory but practical: it decides whether an objection can be cleared away by an improvement of the procedure. The act-based objection is remediable by no procedure — it can only be contested or acknowledged. The consequence-based one is, and is therefore regularly answered by a governance framework. On this hangs an observation reaching beyond the doctrine of concepts: where an act-based objection stands against a practice and only a set of rules is offered, the question of that practice’s admissibility is not answered but passed over.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.