The only points in her post were the missing academic achievement points, as in the English language "person" and "human" are synonymous --a thing quickly revealed by checking the dictionary.
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As we see, "human" and "person" are synonymous. She might as well be saying "red is not a color" or "the house sounds blue".
NB: All my definitions here are coming from the Shorter OED.
What do I mean when I say "person"? Well, first of all, let's notice that the definition of "person" takes up a whole column of a page of my dictionary. That's approximately eight column inches. "Human" only had about one and a half column inches of definition. So it's clear that "person" is a far more complex term than "human", and it's also clear that the words do not have identical meanings.
Now, under "person", but conspicuously not under "human", are the following:
"4. The actual self or being of an individual." This is what I'm thinking of when I say that to be human is not necessarily to be a person, and vice versa. When people have arguments about whether or not a foetus is a person, they are usually not debating whether or not it is
human. They are interested in whether or not it is a
self, an
I. Do you need to be human to be a self? I don't think so. I think if a pig, or an alien, had all the abilities of an average human adult to communicate, reason, feel emotions, and so on, you would be right to call it a person. Do you disagree? And are you necessarily a self by virtue of being a human? I'm not sure. I don't think a human corpse is a person, even though it is undeniably (a) human. I don't think a brain-dead human, in fact, is correctly called a person either. So it seems as if it's possible to be human without being a person, also.
"5. An individual or group of individuals as a corporation regarded as having rights and duties recognised by the law." That's right: a corporation, though not human, is legally considered a person in most Western countries. So my dictionary is telling me directly here that not all persons are humans.
How is "human" defined then, in my dictionary?
"of or belonging to the species Homo sapiens." Note the difference: it's a
biological name for a particular creature, like "echidna" or "elephant shrew". Now, under "human", we find this definition also:
"Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of humankind or people." (My italics.) The word "person" does not appear at all in my dictionary's definition of "human", and "people" appears only once in the context cited above. So the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary clearly disagrees with you that humans and people are necessarily the same thing, and it makes no claim that you are automatically a person if you are a human.
"Person" is a philosophical and sociological term. "Human" is a biological one. They have different meanings, and they are not synonymous. Therefore while you might want to make a case that in practice they mean the same thing, or perhaps that every human being is also a person, the answer is by no means as obvious as you would like to claim.
