Victims of a Disease-free World with O. Carter Snead - BreakPoint Podcast
Breakpoint
Colson Center
4.8 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2020
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week's BreakPoint Podcast highlights how expressive individualism is prominent inside bioethics. There is a rewriting of parenthood and end of life care. John Stonestreet invites O. Carter Snead to discuss Snead's new book What it Means to Be Human.
O. Carter Snead is the William P. and Hazel B. White Director of the Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. He is a law professor and concurrent professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
Snead and John start by discussing anthropology as an account of what it means to be human and enable human flourishing. Snead addresses building a renewed vision of human progress apart from expressive individualism. He touches on the idea of building public policies that engage and protect humans who may be on life sustaining measures and has lost legal competence.
Snead reads a segment from his book where he quotes Dr. Gerald Schatten. "Reproductive medicine is helping prospective parents to realize their own dreams for a disease-free legacy." Snead highlights how expressive individualism is overriding the case for the body in bioethics.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Well, welcome to the Breakpoint podcast. Every once in a while you come across a book and you think, man, I wish this would have been written 10 years ago. I'm privileged today to have a conversation with the author of one of those books. The book is called What It Means to Be Human, the Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. And it was both the title and especially that subtitle that just drew me in. |
| 0:23.6 | I mean, listen to this, the case for the body in public bioethics. |
| 0:28.4 | If you followed Breakpoint at any point, you know that we talk an awful lot about bioethics. |
| 0:33.9 | Chuck Colson talked a lot about bioethical issues. |
| 0:36.6 | But we're at a point now where things that were far off in the future are very much in the present. |
| 0:41.4 | Things that were the debates in maybe college classrooms, maybe among intellectual elites are now technologies that we have access to. |
| 0:51.2 | And it's no longer a hypothetical ethical conversation that we need to have. |
| 0:56.4 | It's very much a very front and center conversation we need to have. And that's why I am |
| 1:02.3 | very honored and privileged to have Professor Carter Sneed from Notre Dame. He's a professor |
| 1:08.0 | of law, as well as a professor of political science and the |
| 1:10.9 | director of the, and I really should have asked you how to pronounce this going in. The Nicola. |
| 1:15.8 | DeNicola. The Nicola, of course. The Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Professor Schneid, |
| 1:22.7 | it's an honor to have you here on the Breakpoint podcast. It's an honor to be with you. And |
| 1:27.1 | let me just tell you, |
| 1:28.0 | Chuck Colson was a hero in so many different ways, but especially on matters relating to bioethics. |
| 1:33.5 | And when I was general counsel to President Bush's counsel on bioethics back in the early 2000s, |
| 1:38.7 | he loomed very large. And your organization loomed very large on the front lines of the battle for human dignity. |
| 1:44.9 | And it's a great honor to be on your show. |
| 1:47.4 | Well, I appreciate you saying that. |
| 1:49.0 | We've certainly had a strong interest in these issues because it hits so much to core worldview issues, |
| 1:55.8 | core issues, obviously about right and wrong. |
| 1:57.8 | But as you point out in the title of your book, what we're really |
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