The Origin of Human Life: Does the Human Zygote Have the Status of a Person?
Abstract
The above question can be answered briefly: the human zygote is a person, for man is a person. Thus formulated question is not a question that is asked by the biologist who does research on the origins of human life. Its answer is involved in the philosophical debate on the very concept of person. Here we deal with two separate scientific disciplines: philosophy (philosophical anthropology, to be precise) and biology (especially embryology). The discussion on the status of the human zygote demands respect for the competencies of either science. Otherwise, we might neutralize the concept of person, or demand of the biologist (as a biologist) to transcend the empirical character of his discipline towards philosophical abstraction. Let us add that the concept of person functions also in theology and law.
Therefore the question about the personal status of the human zygote transcends the competencies of biology. The biologist, precisely speaking embryologist, will not dwell on the anthropological disputes about the concept of the human person. Rather, he will ask whether the human zygote is a man, that is a representative of the homo sapiens species, according to generic category. Respectively, we have two questions referring to the same zygote, or the primary stadium of our human existence: the questions about its human and personal status. Do they in fact concern the same, or we are dealing here with two, equal dimensions of human existence? The large number of answers given today to the question about the status of the zygote and successive developmental stages of man arouse doubts as to the unambiguous status of the zygote. One thing is certain in this discussion: we were all zygotes in the beginning. The way to answer them is, as it seems, first to make the concept of person more accurate, and then to answer how for we can refer this concept to the human zygote.
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