What We Owe to Each Other: Embodiment, Flourishing, and Public Bioethics
Hosted by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture
In this inaugural Charles E. Rice Chair lecture, O. Carter Snead, the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law, will explore how presuppositions about human identity and flourishing affect the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology. He will make the case that the American law of public bioethics often fails to extend its full protections to the weakest and most vulnerable (such as children, the elderly, and the disabled) precisely because it operates from an incomplete and inadequate “anthropology” that fails to account for the inexorable reality of human embodiment. That is, the law in this domain is anchored in a model of the person that is “forgetful of the body” (to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre), ignoring that we experience ourselves, one another, and the world around us as living and dying bodies. As a corrective, Snead will propose a vision of human identity, flourishing, and mutual obligation that “remembers the body” as an essential feature of human nature. Taking the body seriously illuminates not only who we are, but also how we stand in relation to one another.
The lecture will draw upon Snead’s book, What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press), named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2020,” and described in its review as “among the most important works of moral philosophy produced so far in this century.”
The lecture will draw upon Snead’s book, What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press), named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2020,” and described in its review as “among the most important works of moral philosophy produced so far in this century.”
The lecture will be followed by a public reception at the Eck Visitors Center. No RSVP required.
Originally published at forum2024.nd.edu.