Christian Erk

The answer to the question of how to deal with the widening gap between the growing costs of health (care) and necessarily limited health (care) resources in a just fashion, heavily depends on what we take the term ‘just', to signify. This article is meant to offer a perspective on the topic of just health (care) which takes the idea of justice as virtue seriously by embedding it in the context of its original explication, namely an onto-teleological philosophy which takes (social) justice to be about claim-rights (as well as their corresponding duties) and the common good. This article is, however, not meant to provide ready-made answers or a discussion of the arguments featuring in the contemporary debate about health (care) prioritisation and/or rationing. It rather takes up the cudgels on behalf of the concept of the common good and reminds us of the fact that if we want to talk about (social) justice and just health (care) we cannot do so without also talking about the common good.

An article published in an earlier issue of this journal advanced the thesis that "the embryo is a potential person, because it will develop into a person if nothing prevents it" (1; p. 79). The interesting thing about this claim is not the statement itself but the author's attempt to support his claim by reference to a tradition which he traces back to Thomas Aquinas. However, the idea of potential personhood is incommensurate with Thomas Aquinas' understanding of personhood. For a Thomistic thinker the phrase ‘potential person' is a ‘contradictio in adjecto', a contradiction in terms. Showing why is what this essay is devoted to. It defends the thesis that there is no such thing as a potential person if we assume (with Thomas Aquinas) that a person is an individual substance who possesses a rational nature. By doing so, this article is not only meant to render more precise the way we think about persons but also to refocus the content of our disputes about the problem of personhood. When we think about personhood it is not the dispute between the doctrines Baertschi (1; p. 77) has suggested to name actualism, dispositionalism and capabilitism which we should devote our attention to but a more fundamental question, namely whether personhood can and should be reduced to a mere property (or a set of mere properties) or has rather to do with ontology and substantial being.