Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Unlike the previously examined argument, these two are quite beautiful. The point of the first one is that people are not things; people are present to you in the way that things are not. “Persons are ‘here’; things are ‘there’.” What Kreeft means by presence, I take it, is a kind of special way of attracting attention to oneself, a power to command being noticed, which are absent in a thing or a non-human animal. One cannot use people the way he uses things without paying attention to the person’s well-being or desires. One of the things that made me into a political libertarian was an awful realization that taxation and redistribution of wealth entailed using and exploiting people for someone’s benefit as though they were mere things, pawns in the state’s game, used without any concern for or consideration given to their happiness or rights. (I would get literally sick and feverish just contemplating such a horror. It struck me as profoundly evil.) At any rate, people are present to each other in the sense that there is a communion of charity between them when they are aware of each other, a union of minds and hearts, or, at the very least, acknowledgement of each other’s humanity, rationality, specialness, a unique kind of mutual usefulness perhaps, possibility of friendship, and suchlike.

Since the presence of a person to a person, I to Thou, is not identical with the presence of an object to a subject, therefore that presence need not be removed when the presence of the objective physical body is removed by death. In other words, the I detects the presence of a Thou not subject to the death of an It. (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 251)

The argument from love picks up on similar ideas. The beloved has intrinsic not merely instrumental value. As such, “the one thing no one else can ever do is be you. I value that, and see your indispensability, only if I love you for your own sake, not for my sake or for your function’s sake. If I do not love you, I see you as a mere object in the world; if I love you, I see you as the center of a world — your world — as indispensable as I see myself.” And “it is morally intolerable that the indispensable be dispensed with, the irreplaceable replaced.” Hence since morality is real, as most sane people hold, then “persons are not dispensed with, but live forever.” (252) As a corollary, Kreeft points out, the more you love with the love of charity, the more certain the reality of God and of the immortality of the soul will be to you.