By JUDE DOUGHERTY
O. Carter Snead. What It Means To Be Human: The Case For The Body In Public Bioethics. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; 2020.
O. Carter Snead is director of the Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, a professor of law, and concurrent professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
The subject is public bioethics which Snead defines as the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods. Public ethics is about procreation, pregnancy, babies, wasting illnesses, devastating injury, desperate enrollees in clinical trials, fearful patients, the disabled, the dying and the dead. Public ethics is the realm of often bitter disagreement.
Snead finds that in public discourse, contending sides frequently invoke irrelevant or abstract principles, or too quickly embrace premises that do not support their contentions, or reflect the full complexity of lived reality.
The remedy?
Discussion must begin, Snead insists, on what it means to be human. We must recognize incomplete versions of what it means to be human, notably, those that define a human being as an atomized and solitary will, i.e., those that identify human flourishing with the capacity to formulate and pursue future plans of one’s own invention. There is more to life than self-invention or the unencumbered pursuit of a destiny of one’s own making.
“We are embodied. . . . We experience our world, our selves, and one another as living bodies in a communal world. Because we are bodies, vulnerability, mutual dependence, and natural limits are inextricable features of our lived human reality.”
This has implications for law. Law and government exist chiefly to create conditions of freedom to pursue one’s intended future, unmolested by others and perhaps even impeded by natural limits. Human beings by virtue of their embodiment are made for one another, made for love and friendship. We are not mere wills inhabiting instrumental bodies. “We can only govern ourselves wisely, humanely, and justly if we become the kind of people who make each other’s goods our own.”
Snead devotes separate chapters to law related to “Abortion,” “Assisted Reproduction,” “Death and Dying,” and “Human Dignity and Human Flourishing.” He finds that within each sector, law reflects the goods that people hold dear or the evils they seek to avoid. But not every vision of human identity and flourishing equally anchors relevant law.
For example, in broad strokes, a legal regime rooted in the “anthropology of embodiment” would extend legal protections to unborn children from the moment they are conceived, forbidding others from intentionally harming them, and providing for their care. A contrary vision, as we know, prevailed in Roe v. Wade, insofar as that court found a right to abort, not in the moral order but in the U.S. Constitution.
It is evident that an authoritative code of morals has force and effect when it expresses the settled will or customs of a society. “The acids of modernity,” writes Snead, “are dissolving the usages and sanctions to which men once habitually conformed.” Gerald Ford was the last president of the United States to declare, “This is a Christian country.” He was immediately castigated by the media and the academic sector. When did a nation that was formerly considered a part of “Christendom” cease to be Christian?
Walter Lippmann offered the opinion that between 1920 and 1990 the empiricist philosophies emanating from Europe captured the soul of the American academy. Snead is likely to agree with that assessment. John Dewey in 1929 wrote a book called A Common Creed in which he attempted to set forth, on a purely materialistic foundation, a secular code of morality. Widely used in academic circles, the implications for sexual public bioethics were soon apparent.
We did not need Nietzsche to proclaim, If “God is dead, everything is permitted.” Without the recognition of a divinely created world, there is no natural order against which action may be measured — no telos to direct action to its proper end.
Snead boldly proclaims, “A first step to recovery must be the recognition of embodiment, the fact that we are made for one another.” But how convey this truism to the wider public? Snead seems to place its promulgation in the hands of the statesman [to jurists generally] who is charged with explaining the common purpose of law.
Given Snead’s standing or provenance within his profession, he may succeed in capturing the attention of many who take it for granted that man is a purely material entity, ignoring the testimony of millennia. The greatest achievement of What It Means To Be Human lies in showing how complex the forming of law governing sexual morality can become even in the hands of the most informed and noble-intentioned of its practitioners.
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