Personhood and Potentiality

[Peter_Plato]

Also, ironically, the sinfulness in us would more fully correspond with the part of us that is human; the righteousness, that part of us which is oriented towards the divine (divine grace and the free will that assents to it).

This last part is mistaken. Sinfulness makes us less human because it takes away potential. The part of us that is truly human is the God-made part. It is our “lesser” or “false” self with which humans often identify that is the fallen self. Thus Thomas Merton could hold that becoming more truly your self is what sanctity is all about. The discernment, though, is in weeding out the false perceptions about ourselves that appear to be true, but are only so to our fallen “nature.”

 

[Sair]

Yet when an animal does something, its purely instinctual, at least we have no reason to think otherwise. There is no reason to think that animals actually have an abstract ideal of compassion in their minds. They sometimes act in a way that is analogous to compassion and empathy, but to think that they truly have a moral concern about other beings is just what you would like to believe. Humans often Humanize animals; Anthropomorphism.

In humans, we rationally acknowledge certain actions as reflecting “Humanity”, since we clearly distinguish certain actions as having qualities that are essentially more virtuous than other kinds of behavior. And we freely choose to act out these things. Whether or not these actions represent an objective moral law is besides the point.

The point of what i was saying is that people often speak of humanity as that which we potentially are. We are expressing are humanity when we behave a particular way, and yet when we don’t express such actions or empathy humans are considered as lacking something that ought to be there.

Of course we’re lacking something that we believe ought to be there - it’s there in other people, and in other animals, so we notice the difference and the negative results that arise from this difference.

It doesn’t matter that other animals don’t have an abstract ideal of compassion or empathy - they still act in ways that manifest these qualities. And it’s not as if the abstract ideals preceded the qualities in humans, I wouldn’t have thought…