I have argued that, broadly speaking, there are in our contemporary Western society two very different accounts of ‘persons’: one Catholic Christian and comparatively stable and straightforward, though still incomplete; the other secularist and flexible in that it is given to fixing some arbitrary criterion of personhood and hence allows some apparent persons to be disqualified on grounds which vary according to the ideological assumptions or desires of the evaluators. Thus, as we have seen, the unborn, the senile, very young children, Jews and other such ‘undesirables’ may be excluded, and so deprived of those ‘rights’ which ‘persons’ are assumed to enjoy even in accounts outside that Mainline Tradition from which they originate.