Transcript

My judgment and what I've observed both working in government and here as a professor at Notre Dame is that the fundamental disagreement in bioethics and social ethics and individual ethics and just general disputes about the good that we have in our society in both the abstract context and in a very concrete way in the bioethical questions that I mentioned before is fundamentally a disagreement about what a person is.

What a person is, what human flourishing is, What is the nature of human identity?

What is human nature?

Is there such a thing as human nature?

And I think that it divides along broadly two polarities that you see play out in our public conversation and our private conversations.

You have one point of view, which is a modern point of view, emerging from the Enlightenment, that human beings are, and it's before that, but really became amplified and took root in our modern culture after the Enlightenment, that human beings at bottom, what defines you as a human being, is the fact that you have will and desire.

That really what matters, what makes you a person, is the fact that you want things, you desire things, and you can formulate plans to pursue them.

You're an individual, first and foremost.

Your relationships are instrumental to pursuing the goods that you yourself invent.

The highest form of human flourishing in this kind of radical individualistic moral anthropology is to construct your own future and to pursue it unencumbered by by social relationships, certainly by tradition, by religion, by government in most circumstances, and even by nature.

I mean, the use of technology, starting with Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the idea that the purpose of technology is to relieve man's estate, to bend nature to our will.

Again, you have the concept of will coming back.

What am I? I'm a will.

My body itself is an instrument to the realization and pursuit of the projects of my will.

My relationships with other people, To the extent that they're beneficial to my projects, I can pursue them.

I can engage in these relationships.

I can meet and marry someone if that makes sense in light of my larger life plans.

But the moment that that becomes not beneficial, the moment that becomes a kind of obstacle to my desires and my own self-constructed human concept of flourishing, then we can terminate that relationship and move on to other things.

Wills encounter each other, come together, collaboration when it's mutually beneficial, but mostly wills encounter each other as adversaries in this worldview.

It's a very dark vision, I think, of human life.

It's flattened.

It doesn't have a good account of the attachments that we have, of the relationships that we have.

And it, when operationalized, leads to policies such as abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, assisted suicide, euthanasia, including non-voluntary and even involuntary euthanasia.

vast forms of embryo destructive research, human cloning, enhancement technologies, every social pathology that I've encountered as an advocate in the public square when I worked in the government, and that I teach about now as a scholar, and that I work on in my capacity as the director of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, I think is infected by this flattened and inhuman worldview of what we are and who we are.

And the counterpoint to that, which has been Historically, most clearly articulated and defended by the Catholic Church is a completely different vision of what human beings are and what human flourishing is.

What makes a person valuable in this anthropological view is not that you're a will or that you're powerful or that you can pursue the projects of your own devising, but rather because you are made in the image and likeness of God and you have obligations to God, of course, and to your fellow man because you come into this world profoundly vulnerable and situated in relationships of what Alastair MacIntyre refers to as reciprocal indebtedness.

We have obligations to one another.

We're in this together.

I come into the world not as a radical, isolated will that can pursue his own projects, but as a baby.

I mean, there's something about the anthropological realities of newborns that teach us something really important about who we are fundamentally.

You come in profoundly vulnerable, more vulnerable than virtually any mammal.

You have to be attached to a family.

In order to survive, you have obligations to the youngest among us, the weakest, the oldest, who need our help.

And it all, again, is reciprocal.

And at the end of the day, my life is not defined by my project.

It's not even defined by my will.

I'm an embodied will.

My body means something.

Nature gives me information about who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing.

And this is another profound disagreement that we have between the sort of Catholic anthropology, which, by the way, isn't limited to Catholics, but I think the Catholic Church has been the most consistent and most articulate defender of it, as well, you know, against the kind of radical individualistic worldview of modernity, is this view that, you know, that nature, even makes sense or coherence to talk about ends in nature.

Nature exists as a tool to realize our wills in the individualistic worldview.

Nature has some normative significance.

There are ends in nature.

ends in nature that we recognize as Catholics and as folks who have, in my judgment, a richer anthropological set of commitments.