ABSTRACT
Preliminary Remarks Regarding How Personhood is Fundamentally an Ethical Concept
In general terms, ethics is the field of inquiry that deals with issues pertaining to how persons ought to act (towards themselves, other persons, non-human animals, ecosystems, property, and so on). Ethics, in other words, primarily deals with issues concerning the appropriate or good manner of operating in the world - of acting in the world. It is only natural, then, to consider - as it has been considered by the tradition, by Plato and Aristotle particularly - that ethics in its most all-encompassing sense is the study of how one in general ought to live. For this reason it is not surprising that ethics and social/political theory are so closely linked, since social/political theory primarily concerns itself with the principles involved in regulating the actions of individuals living amongst others in social groups at large. Indeed, for Plato and Aristotle, social/political theory is just one branch of a more general ethical project, and so it should be, as we shall see as this investigation unfolds.
