Book Review: What it Means to Be Human by O. Carter Snead
Photo by David Matos from Unsplash
If there are any professions today that still enjoy great respect by the public in our scandal-ridden societies, it would be that of scientist or medical doctor. Indeed, in our increasingly secular North American culture, scientists and doctors have emerged as the new high priests whose authority is vast, and in the eyes of some, virtually unquestioned. But is such unquestioning trust warranted? Some people, for example, are so bedazzled by the high ideals of the disciplines of science and medicine that they forget that these disciplines are practiced by real, flesh and blood human beings who have all of the flaws of the general population. Putting on a white coat doesn’t magically make flaws all go away.
Dr. Henry K. Knowles clearly saw the darker side of medical research during his career as an anesthesiologist and medical ethicist. Disturbed by the clear moral failure in some research practices, Dr. Knowles wrote a whistle-blowing article that chronicled a number of abuses that had occurred in medical research in the United States during the twentieth century. One of the more prominent of these cases exposed the work of Dr. Saul Krugman of New York University, who in 1955 (and over a twenty-year period) infected a mentally challenged population at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York, with the pathogen that causes hepatitis. “Let’s see how this disease runs its course” was the whole point of the study. Human beings, unfortunately, were the guinea pigs. Other abuses included the denial of treatment, again for research purposes, of a black male population that had contracted syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama, during the 1930’s. The disease was allowed to continue unchecked to the concluding phases of damage to the vital organs such as the brain, heart and liver. Some of the unwitting participants in this study died from the untreated disease. Beyond this medical malpractice and horrific misconduct, in 1973 the Washington Post published three articles, as O. Carter Snead points out, “regarding a proposal to fund research involving the use of ‘newly-delivered human fetuses—products of abortion—before they die’” (What It Means To Be Human, p. 24). Knowledge of these considerable abuses, together with Dr. Knowles’s clarion-call article, eventually led to Congressional hearings that helped to lay the very foundations of American bioethics. Finally the need to rein in some researchers who had lost their way was abundantly clear to an increasing number of Americans.
Though the discipline of bioethics was long overdue, it nevertheless was not without its problems. That’s the burden of Snead’s new book that has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top ten of the year 2020. The accolade is well deserved. In an artfully drawn and extended essay, Snead argues that the discipline of bioethics, as well as the laws that inform it, are grounded in a deeply flawed “anthropological point of departure” (p. 64), a “false vision of human identity and flourishing” (pp. 2-3). What’s the consequence of this false vision, this anthropological error? It entails focusing on the “atomized and solitary will” (pp. 2-3), making it the center of all reflections and judgments, regardless of other considerations, even if that means repudiating the networks, connections and relationships, through which human beings thrive.
Snead develops his argument as he considers three controversial and religiously significant areas in which a problematic understanding of a human being comes into play, namely, a) abortion, b) assisted reproduction technology, and c) end-of-life matters, especially in the form of last-stage decision making. The practices in these areas are informed by a legal system that is also reflected in the current shape of American bioethics. Indeed, each of these disciplines, the legal and the ethical, presupposes a flawed vision of a human being at its very foundation by leaving out something significant. To challenge this foundation, this anthropological vision, is to get at the very heart of the legal and moral waywardness that has spawned so many troubling examples today, ranging from the pronouncements of municipal courts to the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court.
What makes Snead’s handling of the argument distinct, and therefore all the more powerful, is that he does not focus on the political, ethical, and religious differences of Americans as they debate these three controversial issues throughout social media and in the press. Instead, his focus is not on the debatable, but on the common and unquestioned reality of human existence itself. In other words, he focuses on what pertains to all human beings regardless of their various views, political, religious or otherwise. And just what is that common and unquestioned ground? It’s not the soul or the spirit or even the image of God. All of these things are currently disputed by both atheists and agnostics alike. Rather, it is that all human beings, regardless of their views, have bodies. This is the grand and grounding truth of the essay; it’s the throne room of the castle, so to speak. To be sure, taking human embodiment into account, and the considerable implications of this reality, will result in a much different anthropological vision, one that will unavoidably have consequences for the reigning questions of the day. More importantly, taking human embodiment into account will have a substantial impact on both law and bioethics—as it should have done all along.
When the Supreme Court discerned a liberty interest in the Fourteenth Amendment that included a right to abortion in January, 1973, Justice Blackmun, who wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, operated out of a limited understanding of human beings, especially in terms of their embodiment and its many salient consequences. Dependent on the prior work of Robert Bellah, sociologist and Christian theist, and of Charles Taylor, renowned philosopher, Snead contends that the anthropology, the vision of a human being, that informed Blackmun’s decision was quite frankly “simplistic” (p. 140) and could suitably be described as “expressive individualism,” that is, the perspective of an atomized individual who is unbounded by “unchosen obligations and relationships, [and even] natural limits'' (p.137). Subsequent legal decisions at the level of the lower courts would make the woman’s individual will, her desire, the center of all judgement in which the father was not recognized at all and the child was relegated to simply being a stranger (p. 147).
In order to dispel this distorted environment in which legal and moral decisions will continue to be made, Snead appeals to the very helpful reflections of Alasdair MacIntyre, who contended that the framework of expressive individualism, the atomized self, fails simply because it is “forgetful of the body” (p. 87). Just how is this so? Remembering that human existence is bodily existence, that all human beings are embodied, opens up the moral and legal environments to the recognition of the kind of beings that humans actually are in terms of their histories from conception, to birth, to maturation and on to death, in which all people will manifest “vulnerability, dependence, and natural limits” (p. 171). Think of the vulnerability and the utter dependence of a newborn, whose body is at a very early stage of development, or consider the vulnerability and the degrees of dependence of an aging grandparent or great grandparent who at one point made a will but who is no longer able to carry it out.
Such vulnerability, dependence, as well as the natural limits of embodied existence are undoubtedly universal facts of life. No one escapes this reality. Indeed, it’s an illusion to think otherwise. Moreover, as Snead maintains, “The anthropology of expressive individualism alone cannot make sense of our fragility, neediness, and natural limits. Worse still, it cannot offer a coherent, internally consistent account of our obligations to vulnerable others, including children, the disabled, and the elderly” (p. 7). Put another way, forgetfulness of the body, which is actually a well-worked abstraction, can only result in individualism, a fictive autonomy, and a self-grounding run amok, one that runs roughshod over every other consideration.
Indeed, it is the reality of our embodied existence, with its unavoidable fragility and dependence, that opens up all human lives to others, to the human community of familial and neighborly networks that offer what MacIntyre has called “the virtues of acknowledged dependence” (p. 9) that would include such things as “just generosity, hospitality, misericordia (accompaniment of others in their suffering) [and] gratitude…” (p. 9). Again, it’s a consideration of human embodiment, with its recognized dependence and it’s openness to the virtues of networks of relations, that together reveal a broader context in which all human life can be more accurately understood. By way of contrast, expressive individualism, or what Michael Sandel, for his part, has called the “unencumbered self,” that is, one “for whom no external purposes or relationships can be constitutive of identity” (p. 79), in the end offers a contrived, artificial and very unrealistic understanding of a human being. Such a conception has been deeply embedded in the legal systems and in the ethical judgments of many modern democracies ever since the time of the Enlightenment.
At times this legal encoding has resulted in some very crude results. In the area of artificial reproductive technology (ART), for example, Snead observes, “The law is designed to serve the desires of those seeking to reproduce, despite the risks to the health of the child-to-be…. It likewise fails to adequately protect the health and well-being of the genetic or gestational mothers” (p. 221). With an unencumbered self at the center of all reflection, the legal and ethical judgments with respect to ART are in effect reduced to a commercial market in which “the preferences and desires of the ‘customer’ who paid for it” (p. 221) rule the day. Discovering what’s wrong with this particular picture, as well as with other legal and ethical counsels, can emerge simply out of a reflection on the reality of human embodiment. That’s the strength and genius of this carefully argued book.
Imagine, however, what Snead might have discovered if he had considered human beings not simply in terms of their bodies (in fact he never addresses the question, “just what is embodied?”) but also in terms of their souls. If the recognition of human embodiment topples many of the popular erroneous legal and moral judgments of our day, revealing them to be very short-sighted, then what might the acknowledgement of the image and likeness of God bring? That’s a book that not only should be written, in the wake of Snead’s helpful effort, but it should also be awarded broad recognition, for it will likely lead to an engaging vision of a more humane society in which the very least of all will be so richly valued.
Dr. Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and is a member of Firebrand’s Editorial Board.