NEUROETHICS AND THE PERSON: SHOULD NEUROLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE CRITERIA BE USED TO DEFINE HUMAN VALUE?
Within neuroethics, functionalism attempts to define personhood by equating the concept with a set of functional, neurological and/or cognitive criteria. While this approach is often fueled by a desire to identify those traits that are distinctly human, by necessity it often removes the label of “person” from human beings at early stages of development, the developmentally disabled or those who have suffered neurological insults. This approach is contradictory to the older notion of affirming the person as a living member of the human species. Within Aristotelian and Thomist approaches to personhood, the human central nervous system can be addressed within the context of the potentialities of the human being, not as a system that needs to reach a stage (or actualization) of development in order to make an organism distinctly human. Functionalist approaches to human cognition, behavior, and neuropsychology are less ethically problematic if they affirm the existence of human nature and i
