The contemporary debate about the place and role of women in the Church is proving to be a painful and difficult business. Language itself contributes to the problems in the sense that certain tacit assumptions —overwhelmingly negative about women—are embedded deep in our talk about human persons. The answer is not to be found simply in tinkering with non-sexist language. The practical difficulties facing women are compounded by the fact that the language in which the discussion is conducted depends for its meaning on gender images that are implicitly discriminatory. The clue to this problem is to be found in certain key assumptions about the nature of human persons.
The experience of intra-human discrimination has certain common elements. Those discriminated against are in one way or another denied rights accorded to other human beings, their needs are subordinated to those of others, and their behaviour tends to be interpreted in causal rather than psychological terms. What is characteristic about this experience is that it involves a refusal to treat those discriminated against as persons in the full sense of that term, for to recognize someone as a person is precisely to accord them certain rights, to take note of their needs, and to see them as subjects whose experience can only be adequately explained in terms of psychology. In this essay we shall attempt to uncover those features of our talk about persons that give rise to the possibility of discrimination and following this we shall consider the particular difficulties facing women.
It has been customary for philosophers when analysing the concept of a person to begin by listing the kinds of things we say about persons.