Kathleen asked me a question that I'm having trouble seeing as important. Is a person prior to their own culture, to society? I think that this is not a simple yes/no question. The answer lies in the middle of both..
A person is surely a result in part of environment and genetics, perhaps the two most complex things we have yet to describe satisfactorily. This is the old nature versus nurture dispute. Fine. So we do not have a person without both elements. Without environment we have a wild child - a being genetically human without the skills or understandings of a member of human society. Without genetics we do not have a human, even if the culture is imbued into that other sort of creature similarly. Do my cats qualify as persons? No because they fail to have concern for a number of bare essentials, or so it is ethically convenient to decide.
A society is a collections of persons interacting, and includes the interactions. The question of "Whether a person can be or is prior to society?" amounts to asking whether ethics can allow the postulate that a person can be so without the environment's effects on the person being taken into account. In other words, a person cannot be regarded only as an individual if persons are not prior to society. Many thinkers have placed the person prior to society in order to construct an ethical system in which the person is responible for his or her actions - and the society is not responsible. If the society is not responsible then it makes sense to punish wrong-doers, and to look down on failures as failures in their own right, and to praise success intheir own right, etc.
However, if we look at a person as necessarily not prior to society, then the society must always bear some of the responsibility for the person's actions be they good or harmful. If a person kills another, it is at least in part a fault of the society. The society must be altered (punished) in response just as the person would be.
These two positions are not compatible since the weight of responsibilty differs on the person.
I regard non-priorism as leading to a feeling of a lack of responsibility in the person for their own actions. The person is more easily able to embrace a feelign thatthey are owed something from society equivilent to the rewardsthey would have received if they had taken it upon themself to do and get and be who they wanted to in the first place. I am not saying that a person is completely prior to society - for in that case, the person is only a wild child - having received to education or culture. The striving to be prior to society creates individuals though. And it is the true individual - a person striving to be responsible for his or her own life - who will rap the rewards truly available in society. And this regardless of their starting position.
Perhaps starting position also determines in a person what constitutes a reward. :) Making either position self-justifying! If I value a sense of community beyond all else, I will strive to let society be prior to me - less responsibility and more like minds. Conversely, if I value a sense of individualism, I am likely to strive for personal gain?