Language, Community, Senses, Sight/Vision, Touch Voice, Taste, Hear, Listen, are all very personal characteristics, which help make up a person.
So what does it mean to be a person?
As we are filming this video, which both Rob and I enjoy doing, we are out in nature, enjoying the sun, on a Saturday morning with people moving about living their lives.
Why would we measure the level of enjoyment, the unspoken benefits of community, the pleasure of discussion with an old friend?
These are things that help make up a Person and Personhood, if we measure it we devalue it. We ruin it. We wreck it.
I commonly ask clients about their children, if they love them. The answer is always a resounding Yes.
Never ‘7’.
Never a numeric.
And if I ask them if they love them equally, most say ‘Yes’. But they don’t.
They love their children as they need it. Some days more effort and attention is required for one child over another. We give the person what they need, not ‘equality’.
To not do this would deny a Person of Personhood.
So given all this, I enjoy the sun differently than Rob, but we still both enjoy the sun, we just don’t express it in semantics or numerics, it is an embodied feeling.
What is your Organisations’ moral framework for recognising Person and Personhood?
Definitions
Poetics of Risk: All that cannot be measured.
Risk: The faith and trust required to suspend uncertainty to act.
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Matt Thorne
Latest posts by Matt Thorne (see all)
- Poetics and Risk Part IX: Poetics and the Unconscious - October 13, 2025
- Poetics and Risk Part VIII: Mimesis and Mimetics - October 10, 2025
- Poetics and Risk Part VII – Poetics and Personhood - October 8, 2025
- Poetics and Risk Part VI; Freedom and Play - October 6, 2025
- Poetics and Risk Part V; What is Poesis? - October 3, 2025
Rob Long says
It’s telling that you won’t find much on ethics in the safety industry and if you do, it will say nothing on personhood, power or moral meaning. What it will say is lots on systems, performance, systems, performance and yes systems performance.