February 28, 2025 // Diocese

Bioethics Expert Discusses ‘What We Owe to Each Other’

Ken Hallenius

“Who are we, and what do we owe to one another?” asked O. Carter Snead, the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, in a lecture attended by 125 guests on Thursday, February 20.

Snead, one of the world’s leading experts on public bioethics, discussed the fundamental assumptions about human nature that provide the foundation for laws, policies, and institutions in our society.

Drawing on his award-winning book, “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics” (Harvard University Press, 2020), his talk explored some of the shortcomings of the dominant paradigm that guides American public bioethics, proposed an alternative approach that acknowledges the human body with its limitations and subsequent mutual dependence, and concluded with an analysis of recent news regarding assisted reproductive technologies.

The presentation was the inaugural Charles E. Rice Chair Lecture, established in honor of the longtime Notre Dame Law School professor, author, and Catholic apologist remembered as a titan of pro-life legal thought and scholarship throughout his decades of teaching and writing.

Snead began his lecture by defining the work of public bioethics. It is “the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods,” fundamentally concerned with human vulnerability, dependence, frailty, and finitude. In practical application, “Public bioethics is, most deeply, about the meaning and consequences of human embodiment: the fact that we experience ourselves, one another, and the world around us in and as living – and dying – bodies. We don’t ‘have’ bodies, we ‘are’ bodies.”

According to Snead, the field of American public bioethics took shape in the 1970s following a series of scandals in medical practice and policy, including revelation of a secretive 40-year research project in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which the U.S. Public Health Service declined to treat impoverished Black people suffering from the effects of syphilis in a misguided attempt to document the effects of the untreated malady. Another precursor was a 1973 debate, at the behest of Eunice and Maria Shriver, regarding NIH funding for research on aborted babies and live newborns, culminating in the passage of federal protections for human subjects of medical research and the establishment of the National Bioethics Commission.

“Public bioethics is a reactive form of policy, usually a reaction to scandals,” explained Snead. “American public bioethics is an incredibly complex, contested, and difficult area of the law, but it is a unique point of entry to explore how law and its presuppositions about the human person and human flourishing affect our understanding of what we owe to one another – and not just our understanding, but who’s protected and who’s not.”

Snead highlighted the deep integration of law, morality, ethics, and justice.

“You can say we keep these things separate, we should not legislate morality, but the truth is that the law both reflects the goods that a given people care about and therefore the harms that they seek to avoid,” Snead said.

Law shapes people’s understanding about what goods we should seek. In seeking to guide law and policy, public bioethics relies upon an understanding of who and what the human person is and how this understanding helps properly illuminate our relationships with one another, especially those who are most vulnerable among us, including the elderly, children, and those who suffer with disabilities.

“If you get the question of who we are wrong,” said Snead, “if you get the anthropological question wrong, you will miss large aspects of what we owe to each other.”

He continued: “When I talk about these visions of human identity and flourishing, it’s not what individual people think about themselves, or who they are, or what their identity is,” said Snead. “What I’m talking about is what the law thinks you are and the structures that are built upon those presuppositions.”

Describing the dominant anthropological vision of the human person that underlies American public bioethics as the paradigm of “expressive individualism,” Snead explained that this account falls short of a full understanding of human nature.

“It conceives of the person as an isolated, unencumbered, atomized, individual self,” Snead said. “That is, the fundamental unit of reality is the individual human being shorn of any attachments to family, or tradition, or religion, or civilization, or community.”

According to Snead, in the impoverished paradigm of expressive individualism, where the individual self is the center of human existence, “what composes the self – the most important thing that defines itself – is the will, is the mind. It is your cognitive capacity that is you. Everything else is instrumental. You are your will. Everything else – your body, your relationships, your attachments – that’s not you. Those are accidental things that you can use in service to your will.”

In the anthropology of expressive individualism, “You are defined by your capacity to choose things. This is a radical, reductive, abstracted vision of a particular kind of freedom, the freedom of an unencumbered will,” Snead said. The consequence is that every obligation and every relationship is treated as transactional, useful only as it accords with the individual’s will in pursuit of an atomized vision of human flourishing. This leads to strife between individuals, as their conflicting wills contend with one another in pursuit of the perceived highest good of radical autonomy.

This vision is inadequate, according to Snead, because it ignores the reality of our dependence on one another.

“If you take the arc of human life, we begin our lives even before we are born in a condition of utter and total dependence on others for our very survival,” Snead said. “And if everything goes well, in the very best case scenario, we begin a gentle arc upwards toward the height of our powers and independence, for a very brief moment in our lifespan. Then we turn back downwards again into a state of complete dependence once again, prior to our death. That is the best-case scenario. And expressive individualism gives an account of human identity and flourishing at the top of that arc, only for a brief moment in time, when the most privileged among us, the most powerful among us, have the agency and circumstances to actually assert our will.”

In contrast to this radical view of human nature, Snead countered that “usually, human life is characterized by vulnerability, subjection to natural limits, fragility, finitude, and therefore reciprocal dependence upon one another. Expressive individualism can’t make sense of that. But as my colleague, and the inspiration for much of my work, Alasdair MacIntyre, writes, ‘All human beings exist on a scale of disability.’”

Concluding that the paradigm of expressive individualism is an incomplete account of human nature and human flourishing, Snead proposed: “The whole truth is that human beings, fragile, living beings in time, live as bodies, and don’t need just freedom. What they need are what MacIntyre calls ‘networks of unconditional and uncalculated giving and graceful receiving,’ precisely because we are vulnerable, and therefore reciprocally dependent.”

“For human flourishing itself, to become the thing we are meant to be, we have to learn by living and participating in these networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving, how to make the good of the other our own good, without counting the cost.” This teaches us the lesson, Snead said, that “we are most human and most flourishing when we’re caring for other people.” He concluded, “To put it more succinctly, by virtue of our embodiment, human beings are made for love and friendship, not for the radical imposition of our will.”

It is through practicing the virtues of “acknowledged dependence” that we build and sustain these networks. The works associated with uncalculated giving include acting with just generosity toward others, showing hospitality, and practicing misericordia, defined as making the suffering of others our own. The virtues of graceful receiving are gratitude, humility, “openness to the unbidden,” solidarity, dignity, truthfulness, and friendship. These are “practices that take you outside of yourself and draw your gaze up toward others.”

According to Snead, the most paradigmatic expression of these virtues is found in the practice of parenthood.

In the final part of his lecture, Snead applied his framework of anthropological analysis to current discussions surrounding artificial reproductive technologies (ART), referencing a recent presidential executive order about public funding for in vitro fertilization (IVF). The field is currently generally regulated as a medical practice, subject only to licensure and medical standard of care guidelines, primarily enforced by the mechanism of malpractice litigation. A single law at the federal level, the Fertility Success Rate Certification Act (1992), primarily applies consumer protections to patients at IVF clinics, and the industry is generally unregulated at the state level.

Accordingly, many clinics offer sex selection, genetic testing, and trait selection, including eye color and IQ screening, and the unregulated purchasing and selling of human gametes, eggs, and sperm.

“It is what commentators on both the left and the right describe as ‘the Wild West,’” Snead said. “It is a circumstance of almost no regulation in a meaningfully robust way, which is strange, because there is no other branch of medicine in which the treatment is the creation of another human being.”

Snead reemphasized that he was not addressing the dreams of individual persons and couples pursuing IVF but rather exploring what the laws and policies hold as normative goods.

Exploring the anthropological foundations of the practice of ART, Snead quoted John Robertson, longtime chair of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, who posited that the choice to pursue or avoid procreation is “essential to patients’ self-definition, pursuit of desires, and self-expression.” At a hearing of the President’s Council on Bioethics discussing ART, Dr. Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh claimed that the goal of genetic screening in assisted reproduction clinics is “to help parents realize their dream of a disease-free legacy.”

“What is missing from these quotes?” Snead asked. “Any reference to children. In the account of the normative goods advanced by IVF and ART, the good is self-realization, pursuing one’s dreams, self-expression, pursuit of desire – that’s what makes it important.”

The ART industry proposes self-expression and self-realization as the goals of their work, but “that’s not what people who seek fertility treatment want or think about themselves or what they’re doing. They don’t go to doctors to assert their unencumbered will or engage in self-expression. They don’t go to doctors because they want to realize their dream of a disease-free legacy. They go to doctors because they want to be parents and they desperately want to have a child of their own, and they feel betrayed by their bodies and frustrated in the process of doing the thing that they most want to do.”

“The law assumes an atomized will, seeking to assert its unencumbered self, but the reality is that a patient desperately wants to be a parent, to be embedded in a relationship of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving,” said Snead. “There is no parent without a child. There is no separating or abstracting from that relationship what ‘self’ is. Parents are a relational concept. Parents and children are related to each other conceptually.”

He continued: “So the fundamental question that we should ask ourselves always in public bioethics, especially in relation to IVF, is how do our laws and policies create and sustain networks of giving and receiving on which embodied human life depends?” concluded Snead. “Who are we leaving behind? How do the most vulnerable fare under our framework? And do these policies enlarge or shrink the boundaries of the human community and concern?”

Ken Hallenius is the communications specialist for the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.