And the same goes for children in general since it is possible to conclude that infants do not develop a sense of self-awareness until about one year of age. As the neo-natologist John Hyatt (2012) concludes in his book Matters of Life and Death, non-persons would include fetuses, newborn babies and infants who lack self-awareness, and a large group of children and adults with congenital brain abnormalities, severe brain injury, dementia and major psychiatric illnesses. Hyatt goes on to quote the Princeton Moral Philosopher Peter Singer: 'only a person can want to go on living, or have plans for the future, because only a person can understand the possibility of a future existence for herself or himself. This means that to end the lives of …show more content…
Otherwise it would be impossible or would just be the accompanying result of well-being, a nice digestion, comfortableness or self-satisfaction, nothing to do with real love. The latter resides on the will –no doubt with some physical frontal lobe correlate- and, as such, can be commanded. It follows intelligence, believing in and acknowledging the intrinsic value or dignity of each individual. Nevertheless, this belief can only be true if its reason is not in this world of things practical, calculable, replaceable, material or biological. Neither would it be in a different universe of a possible multiverse, still with some form of material energy at its bottom. The intrinsic dignity of any human being or person, no matter at which stage or condition in their life (i.e. an unborn or Down syndrome child, a paraplegic or an adult with Alzeimer’s disease) can only rest on the fact of having been created by God in his own image, on who one is, not on what one can autonomously do. If we do not think of persons as creatures with an inmortal spirit and wanted individually by God, not mere accidents of a biological chain, we may fall into an undesired dualism separating body (which may be there in its integrity) and conscious awareness which may be