¹ The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships, CUP, 1990, passim.Google Scholar

² Making the Difference: Gender, Personhood and Theology, London: Mowbray, 1995, p. 223.Google Scholar

³ The Model of Love: A study in philosophical theology, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, p. 235.Google Scholar

⁴ Christoph Schwöbel draws our attention to the bewildering variety of concepts of personhood today. See his ‘Introduction’, in Schwöbel, Christoph and Gunton, Colin E. eds Persons, Divine and Human: King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.Google Scholar

⁵ See Shoemaker, Sydney and Swinburne, Richard, Personal Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984Google Scholar. Swinburne advances a dualist account of personal identity and so of a person as a soul to whom bodily continuity is not essential.

⁶ Cf. Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986, pp. 201–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multicultwalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ ed. by Gutmann, Amy, Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 25.Google Scholar

⁸ Brümmer, pp. 164–65; cf. Lucas, J.R., Freedom and Grace, London: SPCK, 1976, pp. 60–62.Google Scholar

⁹ Brümmer, p. 172.

¹⁰ See Model of Love, pp. 4–10, 232–36.

¹¹ Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971): 5–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² Cf. Parfit p. 202. Parfit comes to argue that what matters is not personal identity but rather psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity (Reasons and Persons, Part Three). While his thesis may sound more radical than do relational accounts of personal identity, Parfit does intend to preserve both the unity of consciousness and the unity of a whole life. He explains these unities in terms of relations between experiences. A relational account of personal identity which depicts personal identity as the latest product of a history of relatedness jeopardises both one-one identity and psychological continuity or connectedness. This is because the latest product of a history of relations must be different at each new moment of time. In order to affirm psychological continuity or connectedness with previous products, some further notion must be employed, such as that of a ‘deep self’ which is ‘removed from particular relations’ (McFadyen, p. 102). For similar anxieties over relational accounts of personal identity see White, Vernon, Paying Attention to People: An Essay on Individualism and Christian Belief (SPCK, 1996), pp. 102–105.Google Scholar

¹³ ‘Conditions of personal identity’, in Ruddock ed. pp. 93–125, p. 104. Ruddock writes: ‘The assertion that we change ourselves as we change our roles is unlikely to meet with general assent. Most of us feel ourselves to be somewhat different in different roles, but not absolutely. There is a central sense in which we feel ourselves to be more than a thread of memory on which roles are strung. Objectively, we observe behaviour changes in others as they move from role to role, but not to the extent that we think of them as different people. Indeed, if a person presents himself as differently as that, we have a sense of discomfort’ (p. 104).

¹⁴ For example, throughout his study McFadyen draws on Rom Harré's social constructionist view that an infant becomes a person through being treated as a person. (See Harré, Rom, Personal Being, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984Google Scholar.) From this view one can draw important theological, moral and pastoral implications for our responsibility towards one another. However, one cannot base either a normative or an ontological account of personhood on social constructionism. Harré's view is that people rely upon one another for acquiring abilities essential to being a person (notably, self-referential abilities). He regards this sort of claim as different in kind from but compatible with Strawson's philosophical account of persons as basic beings, publicly identified by a cluster of bodily, behavioral and mentalistic attributes. (See Harré, Rom and Shorter, J.M., ‘person: concept of’, in Harré, Rom and Lamb, Roger eds, The Dictionary of Personality and Social Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 239–240Google Scholar.) An ontological account which stresses our relational nature, ‘as persons through our relation with God’ (McFadyen, p. 206), is not more obviously in accord with social constructionism than is Strawson's account, and does not bridge the gap between ontology and social psychology.

¹⁵ Ruddock, p. 5.

¹⁶ Persom in Relation, London: Faber and Faber, 1961, esp. pp. 60–61.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Graham, Elaine L. ‘Gender, Personhood and Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 48/3 (1995):341–358, quotation p. 358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Held, Virginia, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 19.Google Scholar

¹⁹ ‘Gender, Personhood and Theology’, pp. 354–55.

²⁰ Making the Difference, pp. 222–23.

²¹ Parsons, Susan Frank, Feminism and Christian Ethics, CUP, 1996, pp. 180–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² ‘Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings’, in Nussbaum, Martha C. and Glover, Jonathan eds, Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 61–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ Virginia Held writes, ‘the activity of creating new social persons and new kinds of persons is potentially the most transformative human activity of all. And it suggests that morality ought to concern itself first of all with this activity, with what its norms and practices ought to be, and with how the institutions and arrangements through society and the world ought to be structured to facilitate the right kinds of development of the best kinds of persons. The flourishing of children ought to be at the very centre of moral and social and political and economic and legal thought, rather than, as at present, at the periphery if attended to at all’ (p. 56).

²⁴ Baier, Annette, ‘Trust and Anti-Trust’, Ethics 96 (January 1986):231–260, pp. 247–8 [reprinted in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Harvard University Press, 1994). See Held, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar

²⁵ Graham, ‘Gender, Personhood and Theology’, p. 358.

²⁶ ‘Trust and Anti-Trust’, pp. 247–8.

²⁷ Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books, 1989Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Justice For Women!’, New York Review, October 8, 1992:43–47Google Scholar, and ‘The Feminist Critique of Liberalism’, Amnesty lecture, partially reprinted in The Times Higher, February 2, 1996:17–18; Held, pp. 44–45.

²⁸ Marilyn Friedman distinguishes between conceding and endorsing the influence of one's communities on one's development, and sees the process of questioning their influence as a journey of ‘personal redefinition’. ‘Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community’, Ethics 99/2 (1989): 275–90, quotation p. 290.

²⁹ Similar criticisms are made of communitarian ethics where they do not enable adequate responses to non-ideal communities. For a succinct discussion see Will Kymlicka's response to Daniel Bell in Bell's Communitarianism and its Critics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, pp. 208ff.Google Scholar

³⁰ ‘More than 100 Million Women Are Missing’, The New York Review, December 20, 1990, pp. 61–66. The women are ‘missing’ in that the basic medical, nutritional and social requirements for their survival have not been met. Sen attributes this partly to the deprived status of women in families, and consequently their low standing in the wider culture, particularly when women do not work outside the home (and so, we might say, have no extra-familial social standing). Sen focuses on Asia and North Africa. For instances in US law where the label person has been arbitrarily withheld from women see Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabilities’, pp. 75–76 n. 42.