Casey Chalk, contributor: In a misguided attempt to offer a new pro-life argument, a 10 January article on The Federalist, ridiculously claims that personhood “is a manufactured, self-referential term that serves no purpose other than an exclusionary one.” It goes on: “While there is a concrete and external definition of what it means to be a human, there is no such understanding of ‘“personhood.’…Personhood is nothing but a sequence of letters whose meaning can be conveniently rented out from one dehumanization campaign to the next.” Two-thousand years’ worth of dead philosophers and theologians are collectively rolling over in their graves, aghast at the suggestion that because a term is abused it should be jettisoned.

Included in the list would be Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, one of the last century’s greatest defenders of life in the womb. His classic text Love and Responsibility is an articulation of Catholic personalism, an intellectual movement which promoted personhood as essential to understanding sexuality and crafting a coherent definition of the human person. Written in 1960 when the Polish philosopher-theologian was bishop in Krakow, it cites the ancient definition of person offered by sixth-century philosopher Boethius: individua substantia rationalis naturae — the individual substance of a rational nature. The theological use of “person” is even older — the fifth century ecumenical council of Chalcedon, consolidating theological reflections going back to Origen and the Cappadocian Fathers, referred to the Trinity as three persons (hypostases), one nature (ousia). This understanding of person was confirmed and further expanded in the Medieval period, especially by Thomas Aquinas, who endorses Boethius’ definition.

Wojtyla offers many important implications of recognizing human beings as persons possessing cognition and will. As an “objective entity” with “an interior life,” persons have both bodies and souls, and are capable of being ends in themselves. This is essential for a coherent framework of love and sexuality: persons are not “merely means to an end for another person.” To treat others as means to our own selfish end — as is the case with pornography, the “hook-up” culture, and much “sexual therapy” — is to do violence to another, a person with a supernatural end. Instead, the sexual act should be one in which two persons cooperate in seeking the same unitive and procreative good. This places them “on a footing of equality.” When this is done, man demonstrates his capacity for love, a quality specific to the human species.

Personalism is a hearty rebuke of utilitarian conceptions of human relationships. Given the tremendous damage and confusion wrought by the sexual revolution, Wojtyla’s personalistic account demonstrates why relationships focused on the well-being and self-realization of the other foster human flourishing. Utilitarianism, in contrast, encourages divorce, contraception, and adultery, all of which have proven to be dead ends for man. Moreover, personalism extends beyond sexuality — it rejects any social, political, or economic account of the human person that elevates his rights over his good, conceives of him as an amalgamation of data to be manipulated or sold to the highest bidder, or reduces him to an autonomous, atomized individual with no responsibilities to his neighbor or community. Rather than dispense with personhood, we need a revival of its study. Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility is a good place to start.