Individual

The Locus of Responsibility

As individuals, we assume people are capable of and responsible for their own thoughts and actions. Throughout written history, philosophers and scientists have attempted to answer the question of what an individual is and how one perceives oneself. Metaphysical, ethical, social, psychological and religious questions abound when discussing the individual and how and why one becomes separate and different from others. In the West, responsibility ultimately rests in one pivotal location—the human agent, as well as our philosophical vocabulary, has termed this agent individual. The individual becomes the focal point of responsibility, the ultimate decision-making realm within the West.

There are and have been for centuries, arguments and discussions within the sciences, religion, and society as to when an individual begins. Aristotle wrote about the formation of life as a scientist and a philosopher. He explained his determination of when an organism becomes an individual, but Aristotle based his account on his limited notions of the male and female anatomies. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on his Catholicism and foundation in Aristotelian philosophy, considered the individual as one who can accept knowledge based on intelligent reasoning and learning from the world affecting the senses. This religious identity, then, is an individual which houses a soul that leaves the individual upon death. In the early 17th century, René Descartes's famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” suggested that if one questions one's self then he or she must be. Thus, thinking and intuition separate the individual from the animal species. An individual, as John Locke first described in the later part of the 17th century, is one person in a particular place in a particular time that has a consciousness about himself or herself. An individual's being is contrasted and evaluated based on how one views and defines oneself as compared to others within a certain group. It is the individual that begins to take shape as a person who has rights within a larger citizenry, not the larger society dictating what that person ought to be. An understanding of individual rights within a larger community was born out of this thinking, which led into the late 18th century and the French Revolution. Once again, the focal point of responsibility, accountability, and human freedom was centered in the idea of the individual.

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