“The Thinking and Choosing Atomized Self”: A Review of What It Means to Be Human
Though more concerned with political persuasion and the present state of affairs than it is with philosophical proofs, Snead’s book nonetheless offers a valuable contribution to the discussion of American bioethics today.
Review by Robert Smith
Carter Snead is troubled by our national forgetfulness. His worry is not altogether new, for from one vantage point, America has always been forgetful—a “propositional nation” throwing off the shackles of history in search of universal values. Tocqueville warned that the individualism engendered by democracy made man not only “forget his ancestors” but his “descendants” as well. A rootless, atomized America, he thought, could quickly become a despotic America.
But Snead is less concerned with a certain idea of the nation than with a certain idea of ourselves. In What It Means to Be Human, he explains that we have adopted “expressive individualism” as the “regnant anthropology of American public bioethics.” As a result, “American public bioethics as currently constituted is incapable of responding fully and coherently to the experience of vulnerability, dependence, and natural limits.” The solution, Snead argues, is to recover a proper understanding of what it means to be human, one that recognizes the body as a constitutive aspect of the person. In other words, we need a “remembering” and a “re-membering.”
In decrying “expressive individualism” as the source of our ills, Snead echoes the critique of his Notre Dame colleague Patrick Deneen. But his focus—American public bioethics—is narrower, and he smartly avoids taking sides in the libertarian-communitarian debate. Former general counsel to the President’s Council on Bioethics, Snead analyzes his subject inductively through the topics of abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, and end-of-life decision-making.
The dominant anthropology of American public bioethics is individual because it emphasizes “the thinking and choosing atomized self.”
Snead argues that three research scandals laid the framework for American public bioethics: Henry K. Beecher’s 1966 article “Ethics and Clinical Research” in the New England Journal of Medicine, the 1972 publication of the details of the infamous Tuskegee Study, and Victor Cohn’s April 1973 article in the Washington Post on the use of newly delivered, live fetuses for medical research. Due to the lack of consent in each instance, policymakers “looked primarily to the ethical goods of autonomy and self-determination as the key safeguards against future abuses.” The resulting legal mechanisms were “designed primarily to secure the informed exercise of free will by rational, able-minded persons.”
Accordingly, the dominant anthropology of American public bioethics is individual because it emphasizes “the thinking and choosing atomized self” and expressive because it defines human flourishing not in reference to “natural givens” but by a person’s ability to “freely create and pursue” projects reflecting “deeply held values and self-understanding.” This led lawmakers to forget embodiment, Snead writes—especially the fact that we are all born, and will likely die, dependent on others.
Snead’s treatment of abortion illustrates this point. Among other examples, he points to Anthony Kennedy’s often maligned “mystery of life” passage from Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The late justice described the abortion right as stemming from the freedom to “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This is expressive individualism par excellence. Snead does not merely propose a more bounded view of human freedom, however. He argues that the Court’s impoverished anthropology obscures the “primary relationship” of any pregnancy: “that of parents and children.” While the “Court conceives of pregnancy and parenthood as a clash of strangers, ‘clad in the armor of their rights,’” the abortion question is better understood as a “matter involving a mother and her child.” A public bioethics grounded in a more complete notion of human personhood would not frame the abortion issue based on competing interests in bodily autonomy. Rather, it would ask what society can reasonably expect of parents.
Likewise, while the law of assisted suicide prioritizes the freedom of the atomized will, a bioethics grounded in the anthropology of embodiment would “encourage and reward the practice of just generosity, hospitality, and accompaniment in suffering.” Expressive individualism offers “the freedom to choose self-annihilation as a mechanism to control the conclusion of life’s narrative.” A bioethics of the body encourages the dying to “see their own intrinsic and equal dignity despite suffering from a diminished and dependent condition.”
As a “proposal offered in the spirit of friendship,” What It Means to Be Human has much to recommend it.
Readers who do not view the body teleologically will find it harder to embrace Snead’s argument. He admits as much when he criticizes our public bioethics as “strongly anti-teleological.” If the fact of embodiment tells us nothing about moral obligation, if our natural limitations and dependence do not suggest that “all living members of the human family are worthy of care and protection” or that “biological progenitors” are, normatively speaking, parents, the argument falls flat. Snead’s “body” is, in many respects, a profoundly Catholic one. Whether one accepts his prescriptions—including in the mostly unregulated field of assisted reproductive technologies—depends on whether one accepts his premises. One also wishes Snead had explored how “expressive individualism” relates to other regnant philosophies, such as critical theory. Insofar as the book’s methodology is inductive, it is constrained by the debates of the last several decades. Still, Snead has written a book about existent law, not philosophy, and his “aim is political persuasion rather than apodictic philosophical proof.”
The book’s limited scope and admitted premises should not detract from what is otherwise a creative and substantive work—one that ought to be read across the ideological spectrum. Snead has, at the very least, drawn our attention to the way in which American public bioethics fails by ignoring a vital aspect of who we are. As a “proposal offered in the spirit of friendship,” What It Means to Be Human has much to recommend it.
Robert Smith is an attorney in Washington, DC.
What It Means to Be Human was published by Harvard University Press on October 13, 2020. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy of the book on their website here.
