What Does It Mean to be Human?

MUSIC Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Despite the noble beginnings in the field of bioethics, one of the world's leading experts says America's bioethics overwhelmingly disregards our human reality and results in consistently putting vulnerable, human lives in peril. Well, we're joined by that expert, Dr. Carter Sneed, director of the Danicola Center for Ethics and Culture. He's professor of law and concurrent professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. And he's going to discuss his book, What It Means to be Human, the Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. Dr. Carter Sneed, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thanks for having me on.

It's a pleasure to be with you. It's interesting, I did see that your book was declared one of the top 10 books of 2020. What was it about the book that created such a stir? So what was so unusual about the stance that you took in your book and the law and policy concerning end to life decision making and assisted suicide. But the best way to understand all of those areas of the law and complex involving science and morality and justice and all the related issues that are implicated in those areas, is through the lens of what I describe as as anthropology. And I don't mean by that the sort of modern academic discipline of anthropology, people going to faraway countries and studying the habits and practices of people that they're unfamiliar with. What I mean is simply anthropology in its original sense, which is to say what it means to be and flourish as a human being. I argue in the book that all law is aimed at protecting or promoting the flourishing of human persons. And as a result, the law has to operate from prior assumptions about what a human person is, and what a human person's flourishing is, what constitutes his or her thriving. And as a result, the richest way to understand these areas that implicate our ourselves and our relationships to one another so dramatically, as bioethics does, the where we should start with is the question of what it means to be human, according to the legal principles. And when if you drill down into the laws of these three vital conflicts that I've already mentioned, what I found was the vision of the human person and human identity and human flourishing was woefully inadequate, false and impoverished and had a vision of what a person is that doesn't come close to capturing our lived experience, and in particular, our experience as human beings that live in the world as bodies that is as fragile bodies in time, we are vulnerable, we're dependent upon one another, and we are subject to natural limits. And that situates us in a kind of relationship to one another where we have to take care of each other. But the vision of personhood at the core of the law of abortion in America, the law relating to assisted reproduction, and the law connected to end of life decision making misses that and simply describes and identifies human beings as coextensive with their wills, you and I are defined by our desires by our mind by our capacity to generate future directed plans and to pursue them.

And there is something true about that that is that is a feature of some aspects of life. But that doesn't come close to describing the entirety of what we are, do we are, and by missing our embodiment by missing the fact that we are vulnerable and dependent upon one another, etc. The law in these areas leave behind the weak and the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled children, both born and unborn, and other key members of the human family, that the the anthropology of expressive individualism, which is the name of the vision of the human personhood that is assumed by those three legal areas, fails to capture and fails to understand, make the link, take us all the way around, then. So if we have this, this basis in our law, that basically emphasizes the individual, I guess you could say, then how would that then have an effect on, say, an attack on an unborn child? We're on the cusp, I hope, of the Supreme Court making a serious change in the American law of abortion. But as it stands right now, if you look at the precedents of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey, which are the two Supreme Court precedents that essentially define almost the entirety of the law of abortion in America, if you look at the way Justice Blackmun and Roe v. Wade defined the human context of abortion and discovered or let's say, invented a right to abortion, the way he invented that right to abortion was by describing the human scenario in which the question of abortion arises, as a conflict between strangers, between a woman and this strange invading being that is something less than a person, namely her unborn child, describes the context of abortion as a conflict among strangers, isolated strangers, fighting over the bodily resources and the human future of the woman.

That's how he describes it. He says, the burdens of an unwanted pregnancy are such that there must be a right to abortion in the Constitution, even though it's not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, even though, even if you admit that there's a concept of privacy that's operative in the Constitution, the context of abortion is a stretch even from that perspective. He says, no, it's so important that women be able to defend themselves against this intruding stranger that's dependent upon them that wants to make a claim on their body, and will frustrate their future directed plans. The only thing that we can do is to read into the Constitution a right for the woman to use lethal violence to fend off this, this aggressor, this this unborn stranger. And right there, you see immediately the anthropology of expressive individualism, animating Justice Blackmun's reasoning he does, he doesn't see the world as interconnected beings, he doesn't see the human category of parent and child, mother and child, what he sees are isolated strangers, isolated individuals who have no natural connection to one another, one is trying to threaten the interest of the other.

And therefore, it's important to give the the threatened party the license to use private violence. And that is the root of the right to abortion, the conceptual roots of the right to abortion in American law. And if we describe if Justice Blackmun instead had taken seriously the embodied relational nature of mother and child and said, Oh, well, this is not a conflict among strangers fighting over scarce resources that belong to one of the two of them. Instead, what this is, is a crisis involving a mother and her child. And if you describe it that way, you don't get a right of one party to kill the other, what you get is a mobilization, or at least to allow for the political branches to mobilize to come to the aid of that mother and child and to provide for the care of both. How do we move forward then, I guess, affecting the hearts and minds of people is a good start.

But how does this start to make its way into law? So the good news is, in the areas in the vital conflicts of assisted reproductive technology, law and policy, and the issue of end of life decision making and assisted suicide, we are in this country at the moment, still free to govern ourselves, we can have these conversations in the deliberative branches of government, we can have conversations about, and when we debate different propositions, should should the, you know, assisted suicide be legal, or should it not be, we can talk about it through the lens of an anthropology of embodiment, we can talk about it and see the connections to the weak and the vulnerable and to not simply assume this is just about us. And another negative unfortunate example of this is when California legalized assisted suicide a few years ago, Jerry Brown, the governor of California issued a statement when he signed the bill into law, that was entirely self regarding, he said, I'm very excited, I'm paraphrasing, he said something like, I'm very excited to sign this bill to give me the freedom to make an existential decision at the end of my life so that I can, so that I could choose a pathway to end my own life with my judgment.

That's what I need. And that's what the end of my story should be. Well, that's an entirely isolated, individuated view of what life is, he didn't think to consider the weak and the vulnerable poor, the disabled, the elderly members of, you know, racial minorities, who are threatened already by aspects of our healthcare system, and that didn't think about the dangers that would come to them in terms of fraud and abuse and coercion and duress. When you introduce into that system, the option of assisted suicide, where insurance companies won't pay for chemo, but they'll pay for drugs for you to take your own life or when the sort of epidemic of elder abuse that we're experiencing right now in this country includes this other mode of exploitation and harm for our elders. So what we need to survive are networks of people who are willing to make the good of others their own good.

And there are certain kinds of virtues that we, in practices, we have to embrace in order to shore up and sustain those networks. We don't need the freedom to kill ourselves. What we need is the thicker understanding of our relationships to one another, where we can ask for things from other people, and we can understand that other people have claims on us that we don't choose. When you talk about assisted suicide, I think a lot of times people say, well, I don't want to put my kids through that, or I don't want to put my family through that. Do you make the case that actually that's a good thing for the children to do is to be required to take care of someone who's dying? Parents and children exist in a kind of relationship to one another where they are obliged by virtue of the natural relationship to care for one another, and they have claims on one another that they don't have to earn.

So let's take the other end of life. For example, a baby doesn't have to earn the right to be cared for by his or her parents, and parents at the end of their lives don't have to earn the right to be cared for by their children. It's what it means to stand in that kind of natural relationship of parent and child.

And you said something very important a moment ago. You said some people want to end their own lives so that they're not a burden to their children. Well, one of the principal arguments for assisted suicide is the principle of autonomy and saying, well, freedom is the most important thing.

We can't stand in the way. But a person who feels like a burden to another person is not operating at the height of their freedom. They are operating under some kind of internal duress, imagining that they're a burden to someone else. And studies have shown that most people who feel like they're a burden to their children, in fact, their children don't feel that way at all.

And so it seems to me that it's not actually a free choice. And it's also not an isolated choice because a person who's taking their own life doesn't merely affect them. It affects their family. It affects their entire community. And can you imagine for a moment if you've learned after the fact that your mother or father took his or her own life because they were worried about being a burden to you?

That would be an indelible wound in the psyche of a child. So we've talked about abortion. We've talked about end of life, assisted suicide. But you also concentrate in your book on artificial reproduction.

Now why do you include that? So we have a kind of wildly unregulated world of assisted reproduction, which in some ways is the opposite of the circumstances we have in the context of abortion, where the Supreme Court has said, basically, the political branches, you guys can't do anything in this space, because we've decided that we're the body that regulates abortion, through a specious interpretation of the Constitution. It's the opposite effect, and that we have nothing but lawlessness in the context of assisted reproductive technology, where there's essentially no limits on what people can do in order to have a child that they want. And the argument in the book is this state of lawlessness also rests upon a kind of false vision of what persons want, but what patients want, people who are suffering from infertility, what they want. The law were to take seriously what people need, what patients need in this context. It wouldn't look like the current landscape that it looks like right now.

It would look like something quite different. What a person who's suffering from infertility wants is to be a parent, not to impose their will, they want to be a parent. And it seems to me that we should be paying closer attention and practicing medicine in a different way, with the idea that is consistent with what the parents want, namely to be parents. So when you when this person wants to be a parent, every single step you take in that process should be mindful of the consequences for the child who will be born as well as for the mother who is being intervened in using these techniques.

But that's not how the law is configured right now, because the law operates according to the assumption that what people want and need is simply unbridled freedom without any interference from the law at all. And I think that's not an accurate picture of what IVF patients want or what they need. We are just about out of time for this week, though. But before we go, Dr. Sneed, where can our listeners go if they just need to learn more about your work? The book itself, What It Means to be Human, the Case for the Body, and public bio, this can be found wherever people like to buy their books, Amazon or you can go to the Harvard University Press website. And in my own work also, people can just Google me Carter Sneed at Notre Dame and see other things that I've written in this space. And if they want to, they can send me an email. Dr. Carter Sneed, thank you so much for being with us on Family Policy Matters. You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to the show online and to learn more about NC Family's work to inform, encourage and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family.