Ethics & Kenotics
Vol. 153 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal’s latest edition included a lengthy interview with O. Carter Snead, who lectures in both law and and ethics at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana (not to be confused with the University of Notre Dame Australia, of which I am an affiliate). In that interview, Snead spoke of how matters of medical law have built within them, certain presumptions that do not make sense outside a theological frame of reference, and that, outside of that frame of reference, we do not arrive at a “neutral” or “objective” account of medicine or the human person that medicine treats. Rather, what we have instead is a hodgepodge of presumptions, now thinned out because of their being stricken of their theological moorings, and presumptions that come out of other philosophical or theological standpoints.
Chief among these presumptions is an anthropology, or account of the person, that is the object of medicine’s attention. Mars Hill’s host, Ken Myers, made a keen observation that, contrary to popular assumptions, the person presumed by modern medicine is not a person at all, but a disembodied will. Picking up on this observation, Snead made the point that the field of bioethics needs to recover an account of the person that is not only will, but a body as well.
If you acknowledge that an account of the human person presumes a body from the outset, there are a number of important corollaries that follow. While this post would not be able to go through all of them, one corollary that Snead did pick up on was an account of the person that was, from its inception, dependent upon others. A person depends on another in order to be conceived, to be raised in such a way as to develop one’s own will, and to live, move and have being in the world.
The reason I found this anthropology of original dependence significant is because what it dovetails with a particular stance towards the world and those in it, which I raised in a previous post (and published article in Religions). This was a posture encapsulated by the greek term Kenosis or self-emptying. If you are dependent from the outset, the only way that one can be in the world is through a divestment of self, which is most tangibly expressed in the act of submission to another. What this creates, as indicated by Julian Carron in his The Radiance in Your Eyes, is a set of belongings that are not the result of social contract: belonging to another and to God. These forms of belonging, says Carron, are not impositions and limitations on my desire and will. Instead, Carron indicates, a recognition of our original dependence, and kenotically submitting ourselves to it, is the key to their very fulfilment (144).
The reason why I found this significant is because, as Snead pointed out in his interview with Myers, the idea of a disembodied will has baked into it, a particular stance on the world in which the will is imposed upon the world and others within it. If one begins from this premise, every act of belonging to another can only be seen as an imposition and curtailment of one’s own desires and will. Society and ethics in this vein, then is more a management of competing sets of wills, rather than the joint working towards a flourishing society.
