On being a person

Hands in Cont(r)act: The Resiliency of Business Handshakes in Pandemic Culture

“…The contracting subject—the highest form of legal person (see Naffine 2003)—is thus always abstracted from embodiment and thus pretends at sex neutrality. “The concept of personhood invites us to abstract our identity from those very narrative resources—birth, growth and development, sexuality, procreation, friendship, decay, death—which we require to make sense of our lives” (Poole 1996, 50). Yet bodies matter in sensual encounters, and the legal person is a deeply gendered figure.…”

Legal personhood and the firm: avoiding anthropomorphism and equivocation

“…The term ‘person’ derives from the Latin persona meaning ‘actor's mask’. This is why the Roman lawyer found it suitable to denote the subject of civil rights and duties (Derham, 1958; Duff, 1938; Fuller, 1967; Hollis, 1985; Poole, 1996; Stoljar, 1973). A person, as Hallis (1930: xix) explained, ‘was one who could be a party in a legal dispute, one who could, so to speak, act in a legal drama’.…”

“…Although Locke also argued that 'person … is a forensic term appropriating actions and their merit' that 'belongs only to intelligent agents capable of a law' (Locke, 1975(Locke, [1690: 346), he was less concerned with the legal practices of ascribing actions and their merit to specific individuals than with the conditions under which these practices would make sense at all (Poole, 1996).…”

The Roots of Respect : A Historic-Philosophical Itinerary

“…ForHegel, it is not merely a historical construction, therei saspeculative justification for it.  Hegel1977, §480;quoted in Poole 1996.Poole (1996) also notes "that aderogatory sense of the French 'personne' is alive and well is indicated by Simone Weil'sd iscussion in 'Human Personality' in Weil 1986. That on its own does not yetsuffice. The second aspect of freewill is the capacity to set apositive end to oneself.…”

“…Personhood does not provide as tory at all, let alone as tory which is mine. (Poole 1996,p .5 0)¹⁰ In Honneth's( 2014)v iew,there are real pathologies,which consist in people relating to each other and to themselvesi nt hese formal and abstract terms as "persons" when they should regarde ach other as suffering beingsa nd cooperators in concrete roles.O verlegalization of other social spheres bringsw ith it such pathological relations to others as "mere" persons with claims to privacy, and ar elated empty relation to self. Regarding others as "black boxes" whose intentions and motivesd on ot matter for their rightfulc laims is an appropriate relationship in abstract and contractual relations,but it would be avery pathological relation to take to oneself: that my motivesa nd intentions do not matter to me,b ecause Ic an always set myself different ones.¹¹ It is good to value the capacity to set oneself ends, but it is also good to see that the ends that one has set to oneself indeed matter.…”