Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · _intake0.924

   > But human birth is the thing that is always regarded as most fortunate because you can be tied to the wheel not only by chains of iron, that is to say, by

   _intake/claims-allbranch/curated-low/iron/005-but-human-birth-is-the-thing-that-is-always-regarded-as-most.md

2. 02 · blog0.707

   While most ancient philosophers hold that happiness is the proper goal or end of human life, the notion is both simple and complicated, as Aristotle points out. It seems simple to say everyone wants to be happy; it is complicated to say what happiness is. We can approach the problem by discussing, first, the relation of happiness to human excellence and, then, the relation of human excellence to the moral virtues. It is significant that synonyms for eudaimonia are living well and doing well. These phrases imply certain activities associated with human living. Ancient philosophers argued that w…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/ancient-ethical-theory.md

3. 03 · blog0.706

   According to Wiredu, this dual meaning reflects an important conceptual distinction between a human —a biological entity—and a person —an entity with special moral and metaphysical qualities. Status as a human is not susceptible to degrees, nor is such status conferred on an individual as a ‘reward’ for her efforts. One is either a human or one is not—there is no such thing as becoming a human. In contrast, personhood is something for a human to become to different degrees through individual achievement. An individual’s human status, then, is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for pers…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/akan-philosophy-of-the-person.md

4. 04 · blog0.698

   Conceptions of human excellence include such disparate figures as the Homeric warrior chieftain and the Athenian statesman of the period of its imperial expansion. Plato’s character Meno sums up one important strain of thought when he says that excellence for a man is managing the business of the city so that he benefits his friends, harms his enemies, and comes to no harm himself ( Meno 71e). From this description we can see that some versions of human excellence have a problematic relation to the moral virtues. In the ancient world, courage, moderation, justice and piety were leading instanc…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/ancient-ethical-theory.md

5. 05 · blog0.697

   Personalists emphasize the inherent value of every human person, regardless of their cognitive capacity, age, or condition (e.g., unborn, elderly, disabled). While personalists do acknowledge aspects like relationality, moral agency, and self-awareness as important features of personhood, these are not preconditions for being a person. Instead, the human being is seen as a person by virtue of their being, not by what they can do or demonstrate cognitively. In the context of abortion, personalist bioethics argues that the embryo should be considered a person from the moment of conception. Perso…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/bioethics-in-latin-america.md

6. 06 · blog0.694

   Yet the infant (or onipa ) is also accorded a baseline level of respect by virtue of her possessing the okra . In that respect, an infant is entitled to the respect due to any other human, regardless of age, or capability. (Wiredu & Gyekye 1992) As interpreted by Wiredu, these conventions clearly indicate that certain kinds of achievements—be they moral, intellectual, or social—are, for the Akan, constitutive of personhood, not merely indicators of such status. But at the same time, Wiredu takes those conventions to indicate the importance of the infant’s status as a human, since it entitles t…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/akan-philosophy-of-the-person.md

7. 07 · yt0.694

   Uh which is a kind of breeding and creating of better human beings, which we are doing and will continue to do from his point of view. This is deeply important because from Darwinian from a Darwinian perspective, if there's nothing special about man, there's no reason to we think man has much dignity. And so we see, uh for those of you who's going to study human rights in part, one of the things you'll you'll be confronted with is that human rights uh thinkers have given up the ability to justify why humans have rights. And uh the reason they have given that up is because they no longer believ…

   yt/OxavWGRTDtM-roger-berkowitz-exploring-the-human-condition/transcript.txt

8. 08 · blog0.693

   Every individual is capable of becoming a person inasmuch as he has capacity for virtue—for performing morally right actions—and should be treated (at least potentially) as a morally responsible agent. In this connection, let us pay some attention to the Akan belief embedded in a maxim that says, “God created every human being (to be) good” ( Onyame boo obiara yie ). The view expressed in this proverb seems to be at variance with the notion of the moral-neutrality of the human being discussed earlier in connection with character (section 3). The meaning of the maxim “God created every human (t…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/african-ethics.md

9. 09 · blog0.693

   Think again, for example, about the concept of a human being. As explicated by Wiredu, what makes an entity a human being is simply his or her possession of the okra . This can be translated into Gyekye’s Kantian parlance as the claim that one’s status as not just a human being but as a moral agent rests solely on one’s capacity for reason. The normative implication of possession of the okra or the capacity for rationality is that the entity is entitled to an irreducible respect matched by irreducible rights—like the negative right not to be killed unjustly, or the positive right to be given w…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/akan-philosophy-of-the-person.md

10. 10 · blog0.693

    Gyekye rejects this explanation, along with Wiredu’s analysis of Akan personhood. He argues instead that any such explanation of Akan social and linguistic conventions must presume the personhood of even the youngest human: [A] human person is a person whatever his age or social status. Personhood may reach its full realization in community, but it is not acquired or yet to be achieved as one goes along in society. What a person acquires are status, habits, and personality or character traits: he, qua person, thus becomes the subject of acquisition, and being thus prior to the acquisition, he …

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/akan-philosophy-of-the-person.md