The question is old enough to be embarrassing: what is a person? Two answers have done most of the work in modern political thought. According to the first, persons are substances: bearers of properties, of rights, of intrinsic worth, and the state’s task is to recognize and protect what is already there. On the second, persons are constructions assembled by language, history, and power, and the state is one site of that production among others. Both answers locate dignity in the wrong place. The first treats it as cargo the person carries through the world. The second dissolves it into the conditions that produced the person and leaves no purchase for refusal.
There is a third position, and it is the one my work has been moving toward without yet stating in this form.
A person is a being whose existence is the ongoing performance of self-individuation and self-appropriation in relation to others, institutions, and the material world. The performance is not metaphorical and not Goffman’s dramaturgical figure. The claim is literal: personhood is an activity sustained moment by moment, in which a being takes itself up as itself, distinguishes itself from what it is not, recognizes itself across time, gathers its becoming into something answerable. Merleau-Ponty saw this in the body’s continual self-positing; Murdoch saw it in the patient attention by which the unreal layers of the self are made to fall away; Weil saw it in the discipline of consenting to the conditions of one’s own existence. The vocabularies differ but the structure does not.
The point is not the disappearance of the self but rather the transparency of its making.
From this ontology, a political claim follows that cannot be deduced from any view of persons as substances. Persons are not substances with intrinsic dignity that the state must respect; persons are performances of self-individuation and self-appropriation that institutions can either encourage or systematically prevent. Dignity, on this account, is not a property the person carries; it is a condition the world either affords or denies.
The Dutch childcare benefits scandal, the Toeslagenaffaire, is the case in which this becomes legible without obstruction. Tens of thousands of parents, many of them dual nationals, were flagged by an automated risk system, stripped of benefits, billed for sums that could not be paid, and processed through a state apparatus that no longer admitted appeal as a meaningful category. The standard reading calls this administrative failure. That standard reading is too small: the system did not fail to see who these parents were. It converted them into data-objects at the precise moment their self-constituting activity depended on being heard as parents answering for their children. When the channel through which that hearing was supposed to happen returned only verdicts produced by proxy, the activity in which one is a person was foreclosed.
The objection says that this is vague phenomenological personhood talk without ground. But the ground is here. The person is the performance. The performance requires conditions. The conditions are not metaphysically optional; they are what personhood is made of. To strip them is not to insult an essence but to dismantle an activity. The Toeslagenaffaire parents did not lose dignity because their feelings were hurt or their reputations damaged. They lost the institutional platform on which the activity of being a person could continue.
There is a discipline behind this seeing, and it is not native to political philosophy. It is closer to what contemplative practice calls the cessation of being taken in by the appearance of self-independence. The illusion that a person is a finished thing, sealed and self-supplying, is what permits institutions to be designed as though they merely registered persons rather than sustained them. Such an illusion is comfortable; it lets the state imagine itself as a referee among pre-formed agents. Drop it and the picture changes. The state is one of the conditions of personhood. So is the school, the hospital, the algorithm that decides whether your name is flagged. Each is a partial answer to the question of whether you can continue to be the one taking yourself up as yourself.
What institutions owe us, then, is not respect for an essence already there. It is the maintenance of conditions in which the activity of being a person can keep going. This is a higher demand than rights-talk usually makes, because it cannot be discharged by a list of permissions or protections. It requires institutions to be designed for the kind of being a person actually is: a being whose existence is sustained only in the activity that institutions either enable or interrupt. To be replaced by a proxy is, in that interval, to cease being a person.
Alexander Wright is a mastering engineer and writer based in Seattle. His forthcoming book, The Dignity Margin: A Philosophy of the Good for a Technically Mediated World, examines what institutions owe persons in an age of algorithmic judgment.