Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: An Interview With Carter Snead On The Body And Bioethics
Author: Carter Snead

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An Interview With Carter Snead On The Body And Bioethics

Carter Snead

Carter Snead is Director of de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, Professor of Law, and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

1. What Led You To Write A Book Focusing On The “Case For The Body” As A Distinct Mode Of Argument?

I began my career in public bioethics as General Counsel to President Bush’s Council on Bioethics in 2002, under the directorship of the extraordinary Dr. Leon R. Kass. From the beginning I was struck by how the law so frequently fails to protect the weakest and most vulnerable. After studying the matter closely, I came to the view that the problem was at the root of the law’s assumptions about human identity and flourishing. All law exists to protect and promote the flourishing of persons. Accordingly, it must be grounded in baseline assumptions about who and what persons are that are true to lived reality. If it gets that essential question wrong, then the entire edifice of the law will be fatally flawed. In my book I examine these underlying “anthropological” assumptions in the law of abortion, assisted reproduction, and end of life decision-making, and find that the law and policy in this domain fail to take seriously our individual and shared lives as

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embodied beings, with all the challenges and gifts that entails. The legal landscape is, to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrase, “forgetful of the body.” To repair the law, we must remember the body, and what it means for our identity and our obligations to one another.

2. Your Arguments Against Expressive Individualism Were Powerful. But That Raises The Question Of A Viable Alternative. What Do You See As The Pathway For Alternative Public Bioethics?

I argue that we should build a public bioethics that is genuinely responsive to the needs of embodied human life. As fragile, corruptible bodies in time, human beings are vulnerable, dependent, and subject to natural limits. Thus, to survive and flourish we need what MacIntyre calls “networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving” composed of people willing to make the good of others their own good, without seeking anything in return. In other words, by virtue of our embodiment, we are made for love and friendship. To build and sustain these networks we must practice the virtues of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving, namely, just generosity, hospitality, misericordia (accompanying others in their suffering), gratitude, humility, openness to the unbidden, solidarity, respect for intrinsic equal dignity of all human beings, and truthfulness. We should make law and policy designed to support and strengthen these networks, ...