ABSTRACT
Focusing on finding a core essence of what it is to be human to be accorded protection in human rights law has a tendency to reduce what it is to be a human. This essentialist or reductionist view of the human can stifle creativity and freedom. Yet moving towards a communitarian version of the person can be overly deterministic. It fails to adequately explain how and why we should be able to revise plans and change our lives and identities if we so wish. Recognition, existentialist and feminist theories offer a way forward to explain that personal identity is not something that we ‘just have’. This is especially evident in Honneth’s three components of identity formation: self-confidence, self-esteem and self-respect. We may have the potential for it to develop due to our capacity as humans to be aware that we have a past, present and a future. However, personal identity is something that comes into existence through our being in the world, including with, and through, other people. It comes into existence through recognition by other people including the legal and political system seeing and acknowledging us as being fully human. This way, identities can be enabled and empowered to exist for us to live lives of meaning to us.
