Question has no point. "People" who look for deeper meaning where no deeper meaning belongs are wasting their time. Language was created as a tool by human beings to communicate with one another, and person was a word to describe a human being, a homo sapien, and then philosophy and theology etc. (which obviously came *after said languages before being *written) developed their own spin-offs of the word.
I would bet a stack...........no..........I'd bet my package, that if I was able to go into a time machine and visit the birthtime of the word person, it was just an empty, simple gesture creasted to say "human."
Thinking your assumptions through is hard work, sometimes not much fun. We get it.
If the term person means just the same as human does,
why then do we have
two different words, here?
A little reflection makes it clear, I think, that the term 'person' is a
moral category, and the term 'human' is a
biological one. We are interested in what is a person, because it is
persons that are the locus of our moral and ethical reflections, and legal stipulations.
A person is, essentially, a
rights-bearing entity, one who we would typically hold had the capacity to function as a self-conscious, rational-moral actor. This property of being a "rights bearer," is not an function of the material being
per se of the entity. So, you cannot open up a human being and point to where the "rights" are. Instead. rights, and the
persons which are their bearers, are nonempirical (which is not to say, immaterial) phenomena.
Because 'person,' in contrast to 'human,' is a nonempirical phenomenon, we will find that being human is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a person. It is not
sufficient, because in certain cases, a human can have lost all capacity to function as a rational-moral actor (in the case of severe brain trauma, let's say), and hence to have lost their personhood. It is not
necessary, because it is entirely possible that the state of being a rational-moral actor can be reached by entities that are
not homo sapiens sapiens.
The question of the OP is definitely a good one, and people here should take the time to think about it some more.
