From The Wall Street Journal:
Bioethics has always been enmeshed in controversy. Arising out of gross abuses of the rights of human subjects in mid-20th-century scientific research, the field has grown to take on a variety of thorny challenges at the intersection of morality and biomedicine—from embryo research and organ markets to artificial reproduction and physician-assisted suicide.
But the most profound bioethical disputes actually lie beneath these headline-grabbing controversies, deep in the soil of moral philosophy and anthropology. To think clearly about how to protect the human person, we need an idea of what the human person is and why that matters. Our society often takes for granted a set of answers to questions about the meaning of personhood, and those answers tend to emphasize choice and independence as measures of human dignity and worth. The bias toward autonomy goes well beyond academic bioethics and, indeed, prevails throughout our culture. A critical examination of the moral suppositions underlying contemporary bioethics might shed light on much more of our common life than our engagement with biology and medicine.
Such an ambitious examination has now been taken up by O. Carter Snead in “What It Means to Be Human.” The result is a rare achievement: a rigorous academic book that is also accessible, engaging and wise.
. . . .
Mr. Snead’s subject is “public bioethics,” by which he means not the work of advising particular patients or clients facing difficult decisions but the work of setting out laws, rules and policies regarding the uses of biotechnology and medicine. He begins by drawing out the often unstated assumptions beneath such frameworks. “American law and policy concerning bioethical matters,” Mr. Snead writes, “are currently animated by a vision of the person as atomized, solitary, and defined essentially by his capacity to formulate and pursue future plans of his own invention.”
By putting decision making at the center of its understanding of the moral life, this view treats cognition and rational will as the essence of our humanity and radically plays down unchosen obligations. More important, it implicitly treats those who depend most heavily on others because they are unable to make choices—the mentally impaired, dementia patients, those suffering extreme pain, children in the womb, and others—as diminished in worth. Even when bioethics does try to protect such people, it struggles to understand just how their lives are worth living.
What this view misses, Mr. Snead argues, is the significance of our embodiment. “Human beings do not live as mere atomized wills,” he writes, “and there is more to life than self-invention and the unencumbered pursuit of destinies of our own devising. The truth is that persons are embodied beings, with all the natural limits and great gifts this entails.”
This simple fact has far-reaching implications. “Our embodiment situates us in a particular relationship to one another, from which emerge obligations to come to the aid of vulnerable others, including especially the disabled, the elderly, and children.” Our power to choose recedes into the background when our lives are viewed this way, and our embeddedness in webs of mutual regard come to the fore. Properly understood, bioethics should seek to emphasize not ways of breaking relations of dependence but ways of helping us see what our common humanity requires of us.
. . . .
Mr. Snead doesn’t emphasize the religious foundations of this truth, and he maintains a welcoming and inviting, even conciliatory, tone toward the progressive bioethicists whom he is criticizing. He knows they mean well but thinks they are caught up in the expressive individualism of our culture in ways that keep them from grappling with the full meaning of the questions their field sets out to address. The book speaks their language: It is technical at times, especially when considering in detail the law surrounding abortion, assisted reproduction and end-of-life care. But in the end, it addresses far more than professional controversies.
“What It Means to Be Human” may have its greatest impact outside public bioethics. That field is now intensely politicized, and stubbornly resistant to criticism. It is likely to remain in the business of constructing sophistic permission structures justifying a dehumanizing but convenient disregard for the weak and vulnerable in the all-atoning name of choice. Dissenters from this orthodoxy, like Mr. Snead, often defy easy political and professional classification. Their work is rooted in deeper philosophical soil and therefore tends to grow beyond the bounds of bioethics.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)
PG wishes the Harvard University Press had not overpriced the ebook.