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The Wicked Dangers of Personhood Theory — A Conversation with Professor Carter Snead

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Albert Mohler:

This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

O. Carter Snead is the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Snead is one of the world’s leading experts on bioethics. His research explores the issues of neuroethics, human reproductive technologies, abortion, euthanasia, and many others. Professor Snead received his baccalaureate from St. John’s College and his law degree from Georgetown University. He’s the author of or contributor to 13 books. It’s his most recent book, What It Means To Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, that is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Snead, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Carter Snead:

It’s great to be with you.

Albert Mohler

Your book, What it Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics came out in 2020, and in one sense that’s yesterday. And another sense, it’s a generation ago.

Carter Snead:

Absolutely. An awful lot has happened since then. It came out in the midst of Covid, and it was a different world back then. The world was dramatically changed as a result, and I completely agree. It really does seem like an awful lot’s changed. It’s a different place.

Albert Mohler:

Well, I think that’s going to make this conversation all the more interesting because the book was written pre-Dobbs. And so we’ve learned a lot, frankly, upside and downside since the Dobbs decision in 2022. But let’s go backwards for a moment because I think your book is brilliant and quite honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the reality that in public bioethics, the body has not only been neglected, it’s been strategically, intentionally neglected. But that requires some background in the history of bioethics, which you lay out, I think just wonderfully in this book. So I think most people will be surprised to know that bioethics wasn’t a discipline, it wasn’t a thing, it wasn’t an ordered conversation until well into the second half of the 20th century.

Carter Snead:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, most folk in the United States at least, most people don’t think of the birth of bioethics until around the late 1960s, early 1970s. There were a lot of public events that corresponded with its rise both in the academic sphere, but also in the public sphere as well.

Albert Mohler:

And a part of that was that interestingly, the political game just isn’t the same as it was then. The landscape’s not the same because you had people like Senator Edward Kennedy, actually very involved in dealing with questions of bioethics in a way that you can’t imagine the same conversation taking place now.

Carter Snead:

No, there’s a complete polarization now that didn’t exist in the late sixties and early seventies with the narrow exception of possibly assisted suicide, where there’s still some interesting, unlikely coalitions of left and right. But no, as you say, in the late sixties and early seventies, it was in fact one of the signal events, was the Kennedy family, beginning with Eunice Kennedy Shriver, noticing that the NIH was funding research involving babies who had just been aborted but were imminently dying. And this troubled her so much as a pro-life woman, and her daughter Maria Shriver at the time, that they organized. And then they also, I’m sure were in conversation with Senator Kennedy who convened hearings. And nowadays that would be unimaginable. In fact, if you go back in time, not that long ago, in 2005 or 2004 when we were trying at the President’s Council on Bioethics, where I served as general counsel under Chairman Leon Cass, we were trying to convince liberals in Congress, including Ron Wyden, that it would make sense to change the regulatory framework for assisted reproductive technologies and IVF. Because they had passed a law in the early nineties – a consumer protection law – that was protective of patients and by extension unborn babies to a certain extent, not strong protections, but at least more than there is now. And the answer we got from Senate Democrats, almost uniformly, was we can’t do anything that would be seen as pro-life, because there’d be so much political blowback, even if it were nested in the principles of consumer protection that animated the statute in the first place.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, that just tells you a whole lot. Well, if the field of bioethics didn’t exist and then it did, if at one point it wasn’t imaginable, and then at the next point it became absolutely necessary, what was the catalyst for this? What happened?

Carter Snead:

Well, there was a series of events that I detail in the book. I focus on three particular events, scandals in bioethics as an intellectual field or discipline. I’m not really sure if it’s a discipline or a field. We can talk about that if you want to. It’s a field of inquiry that is at its best interdisciplinary rather than a specific discipline. But there were a series of scandals including a publication by a man named Henry Beecher, who was an anesthesiologist from Harvard, detailing 22 experiments undertaken at the most eminent institutes of research around the world, including the United States, the results of which been published in the most important journals, peer reviewed journals, detailing how horrific violations of human dignity and abuse occurred in the name of scientific research involving very vulnerable human subjects. The most shocking example – to me at least – were the intellectually disabled children of Willowbrook and Staten Island who were deliberately infected with hepatitis, so that they could study the progress of the disease untreated. And an argument that we recognize even now and the bioethical debates is the scientists who did this said, “Look, these kids already were in terrible circumstances, we didn’t make the situation worse, we just took advantage of the circumstances to try to bring something positive out of it.” And of course, that’s not a persuasive argument. They did more than just observe. They deceived, they acted, and infected these children’s hepatitis.

And it’s actually the same argument structurally that the Nazi doctors made. They said, “We didn’t, these people were going to die anyway in concentration camps, we merely took them and tried to bring something positive out of it.”

And that’s an argument you hear an awful lot in the public bio space. We’re sort of trying to take a tragic circumstance and bring something positive out of it, when in fact what’s going on is something much more active and concerning than that.

So you had the Beecher articles that came out, you had the Tuskegee experiments, which your listeners may have heard about, began in the early parts of the 20th century, where poor African-American sharecroppers in Macon County, AL – I’m from Alabama myself – in Macon County, Alabama, where there was a high rate of syphilis, these folks were systematically deceived about why the US Health Service or public health service was going in there to observe them, observe the progress of the disease untreated. They didn’t treat them. They didn’t tell them about what treatments were available, including when antibiotics became standard of care in the middle of the 1940s.

And this went on for decades and decades and decades. These poor people were systematically taken advantage of in a shocking way. And then the third example, I’ve already mentioned, the example of American researchers going to Scandinavia, possibly with federal funds, to find women who were getting abortions and then taking their newborn babies who had just been aborted, who were still alive outside their mother’s bodies and doing horrific experiments on them.

And so these three different kinds of examples of scandals provoked a public backlash that led to the creation of public bioethics, which is the governance of science, medicine and biotechnology. While at the same time there were academic conferences being convened to talk about the worry that doctors were being perceived, rightly or wrongly, as more humanly distant from their patients, as they became more technically proficient, they started to see their patients as something less than another person to really minister to, or even the whole family and a kind of holistic way to being a kind of technical problem to solve a reduction of the person to parts and holes. And so all of this together provoked a great array of really interesting people from a wide variety of backgrounds, including theology. Obviously the great Protestant theologian, Paul Ramsey was at the table, with an array of other really important thinkers, from different disciplines and backgrounds to talk about how to think about medicine, the ends of medicine, the ends of science and scientific research. And that’s really what gave rise to bioethics and public bioethics in this country.

Albert Mohler:

I guess a background question to me, you mentioned the Nazi doctors. So supposedly enlightened Westerners after the war were horrified by what they saw in terms of the death camps, but also the Nazi medical experiments and they blamed it on Nazism. I did a project a few years ago in which to my surprise, I discovered the roots of all of this in Weimar Germany, in the liberal German culture before the rise of Nazism. In other words, the Nazis took advantage of arguments that had already existed, including the statement that Lebensunwerten Lebens, “Life unworthy of life.” That is not a Nazi origin expression, that goes back to the Weimar Republic.

Carter Snead:

Hoche and Binding coined that phrase, as you say, long before the Nazis came into power. And it wasn’t Nazism that came up with those horrific ideas. It was, in fact, progressive ideology that was trying to think about social hygiene.

Albert Mohler:

It came from the left.

Carter Snead:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, in the progressive era in the United States, John Dewey and very famous progressives, Margaret Sanger and others thought about eugenics in a very positive light. They thought about eugenics. Now, in fact, it was a funny thing because – not funny, but it was peculiar – that the Holocaust and the terrible experience of the backlash to the Holocaust set back the progressive cause of eugenics, because it was associated with totalitarian regimes and the atrocities of World War II. But the fundamental principle that some people don’t deserve to live, or don’t deserve to be fed or cared for because their quality of life falls below a threshold, that the strong and privileged regard is not worthy of life – is a much older idea, and it’s an idea of the left.

Albert Mohler:

I think a lot of things get submerged in cultural discourse, but also in academic memory and in academic citation. And I think it’s the post-abortion experiments that are most likely to be missing from any history of bioethics. I really appreciate you making certain that’s well documented.

Carter Snead:

Well, I appreciate that very much. You’re exactly right. Everybody’s heard of Tuskegee, everybody heard of Beecher’s article, but not many people were familiar with the contemporaneous terrible events, which led the Washington Post for, It was on the front page three days in a row. And it’s in part because our sensibilities weren’t so coarsened yet, by an abortion culture that made it impossible for us to have a sort of cross ideological conversation about these things.

Albert Mohler:

Carter going back, just in terms of more recent memory, to make your point, a lot of the horror about the post-abortion live baby – I’ll just put it that way – experiments, it’s the horrible things are done to their bodies, including dismemberment. Horrible things were done to those tiny human bodies.

Carter Snead:

Decapitations.

Albert Mohler:

Yes, absolutely. And hard to even say. But then we get to, for instance, the Planned Parenthood controversy over the sale of fetal parts, and wow, the presses completely flipped on that issue, where you say The Washington Post thought it was a scandal, put it in three front page, three days in a row, back in terms of the European experiments. Now all of a sudden, this is just like a problem. What problem?

Carter Snead:

No, that’s right. And there’s a kind of euphemism, and there’s really a manipulation of language to try to obscure the horror of these. You talk about things like products of conception, as opposed to human bodies. And I actually was an expert witness in a case in Texas in 2017 or 2018, involving the state of Texas’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood, precisely because they had these videos of this incredibly coarse discussion of baby body parts and how much for this, how much for that, we manipulate the procedure to preserve this part of the body. And normal people, their conscience are shocked by these things. And I think those in the mainstream media who are so committed to abortion themselves, I mean, if it just takes a second to look and see the LinkedIn pages where people have worked or where their spouses worked, it’s like a complete and utter overlap between the abortion rights movement and the mainstream media. They were working overtime to try to keep from the American people the truth of the matter. I mean, you even had more recently than that, an effort to claim that there’s no such thing as a fetal heartbeat, that that’s not a real clinical reality, that you can’t talk that way.

Albert Mohler:

Pneumatic echo.

Carter Snead:

Yeah. Right, exactly. I mean, in the same way that you and I aren’t actually hearing each other’s voices right now, we’re hearing electronic translations of our voices. So it’s mind blowing how intellectually dishonest and what the consequences of that dishonesty are.

Albert Mohler:

So the next stage in the argument and the next stage in the historical progression is that all of a sudden something that didn’t exist now does, and that’s a field that you identify, or again, field, discipline – It’s an intellectual enterprise with moral and political import that you call bioethics. And that’s now a staple part of our vocabulary, but it wasn’t always so.

Carter Snead:

Oh, that’s exactly right. It is very much in the mainstream of public discourse and not just academics, but everybody. You can’t open a newspaper and turn a television on without some bioethical issue coming to the fore. And of course, the abortion issue is the most consistent and prominent over the past 50 or so years.

Albert Mohler:

And as it has developed, your main argument in the book is that what is most problematic is not what was there, but what isn’t. If something was absent from the beginning of this conversation, what was so tragically absent?

Carter Snead:

So it’s a fundamental confusion, or mistake, or misdirection perhaps depending on how you want to ascribe motive and intention about the fundamental identity of the human person. There is a sort of reduction of human identity to a part of who we are, that is humanity. And persons are described simply in terms of their capacity for intellectual or cognitive functioning. Human beings are fundamentally understood through the lens of will and desire. If you’re talking about – I’m a scholar of the law – all law is built on presuppositions about what human beings and what persons are. Even though those are contested questions, there’s no way around having to at least operate from a provisional sense of what a human being is, because the whole point of law is to protect persons and to promote the flourishing of persons.

So you have to have an operating principle as to what a person is, and in the context of public bioethics, where the question of the personhood and identity is right to the fore and essential for all these vital conflicts that I talk about in the book, the architects of American public bioethics have adopted a vision of the person that is so flattened and reduced that it describes you and I only in terms, as I said before, in terms of our will.

And everything else about our existence, in particular our bodies, our organic bodies, are reduced to an instrumentality. The idea of the body itself is simply an instrument or a tool to be harnessed and used by the real you, which is your mind in pursuit of those projects of your will. And one of the deep problems with that is that it leaves behind essential aspects of human identity. And then if you’re formulating policy and law, it leaves behind entire swaths of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development, who are not capable of the kind of cognitive or intellectual activity that is definitive for what a person is in this false and confused framework.

Albert Mohler:

When you take the self abstract from the body, you then have the question as to who is really a self and who’s not here of human beings.

Carter Snead:

Exactly.

Albert Mohler:

Carter, is this a form of modern gnosticism? Is it the old ancient heresy reborn in terms of the denial basically of the material and its meaning?

Carter Snead:

I think there’s a lot to that. Absolutely. I mean, a lot of folks have written about gnosticism and the connection, sort of the modern ideology, anthropology, if you will, in its original sense, an account of what it means to be and flourish as a human being. It is very close to gnosticism in that way.

The concept that I use in my book is a concept borrowed from the romantic literary movement called expressive individualism, and the idea is that it’s a sort of account of the person that again, reduces the person exclusively to their mind. It’s dualistic, it distinguishes the mind and the body in this way, and it’s profoundly – to take sort of a technical phrase – anti teleological, in the sense that it doesn’t take the natural world our own natural configuration, our relationships to others, as constituent of our identity or even as a tool to understand what to do.

So I can’t know what to do by studying the natural configuration of the world. Everything is a blank slate. Everything is a sort of a canvas onto which I paint my own original authentic ideas. And as a result, every relationship is characterized strictly by consent. There’s no such thing as an unchosen obligation. There’s no such thing as an unearned privilege. No one has a claim on me except for those that I have built into my internal projects and I can form relationships or break relationships apart depending on how they affect my goals as I conceive them. And it really even dissolves familial relationships. The relationship between parent and child is strictly a creature of consent, a creature of the will.

Albert Mohler:

Well, that plays right into the abortion controversy in a way we can immediately understand. It’s underneath all of this. And you have figures like Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, and so many others. I thought of several that you cite in the book and others who have been very much a part – Alasdair MacIntyre – of course, very much a part of this conversation.

Carter Snead:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

What has been the interest of those prophets of, let’s say, expressive individualism? What has been their relative interest even in the field of bioethics?

Carter Snead:

It’s been very sparse. Charles Taylor doesn’t write about bioethics. Alasdair MacIntyre doesn’t really write about bioethics. Alasdair of course, is a colleague of mine at Notre Dame and is a fellow of The de Nicola Center, where I served as director and a mentor of mine. And the only person in the book that I talk about who is adjacent to these questions of expressive individualism was Michael Sandel.

Michael was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and wrote a short book about enhancement and the sort of ethic of giftedness, which was based on an article that he wrote, which was also based on a white paper that he did for the President’s Council on Bioethics. But for the most part, it’s been pretty – there’s not much of a connection between the critique of expressive individualism and bioethics. That was really – I think that was an original contribution of the book.

Albert Mohler:

And to underline that, that’s something I deeply appreciate. But let me just speak of personal frustration. I’ve been reading these guys for decades, and part of my frustration is: their very, I think, perceptive description of the cultural shift in terms of expressive individualism, It hasn’t led most of them – I’ll just put it that way – It hasn’t led most of them towards any actual proposals that would do anything to reverse this, other than some kind of vague humanitarianism. There’s nothing there’s in this, that would in itself lead them to say “no” to abortion right.

Carter Snead:

No, that’s frustrating. I find that I have the same frustration that you do. Now in the case of Michael Sandel, he, I think, is a self-consciously, self-conscious supporter of abortion rights. He said so as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, so he’s not cagey about that, but you’re right. What I would like to know, and this is true, a lot of thinkers, including a lot of very interesting feminist thinkers on the questions of disabilities, you have all these, you see so clearly the corrosive nature and the reductive nature of expressive individualism and what it means for out relationship to our less fortunate brothers and sisters. But somehow there’s just a block on seeing our brothers and sisters in the womb to understand how corrosive it is.

In the book, I try to make the case that there’s a way of thinking about the unborn child and her mother, a sort of dyadic fashion. You think about them in terms of their natural relationship. And so the solutions that you have to unplanned pregnancy, or crises, or installers, not simply to atomize them and figure out which one gets to kill the other one, but rather think about them as a unit. I mean, I say in the book, if someone were to say to us right now, there’s a mother and a child outside that need our help, we would stop what we’re doing and we’d go outside and try to help immediately. We wouldn’t ask, well, who is the property or the entitlement? We wouldn’t talk about them as who is a member of the moral community?

Albert Mohler:

Who is a person?

Carter Snead:

We certainly wouldn’t say, we wouldn’t treat the unborn child as a stranger to her mother.

Albert Mohler:

Right. Well, one of the examples I use in lecturing on moral theology is that if you take the left-right distinction, both, and I think this is by God’s grace, both if they’re confronted by a hungry child, know what to do, and that is feed the child.

Carter Snead:

Right, exactly.

Albert Mohler:

But their explanations of what the act is and who the child is are fundamentally different.

Carter Snead:

Or what a child is.

Albert Mohler:

The moment you get right. I was actually trying to avoid that, but I’m glad you said it. Yeah, what the child is? I mean, the moment you do that, you enter into two different moral universes.

Carter Snead:

It’s impossible to make sense of children as a category, if you operate from the ground of expressive individualism, because they don’t and can’t, or are incapable of the kind of cognitive actions that define flourishing within expressive individualism. So you end up treating them, either you ignore them or you treat them as little adults, and your only goal is to maximize their autonomy. And anybody who’s ever been around a child understands that’s the last thing you should ever do to a kid, is to maximize their autonomy. I mean, the word paternalism has become such a pejorative, in the world of bioethics. The sort of dichotomy is between, sort of autonomy on the one hand, and paternalism on the other. But children need parents, and there are a lot of people in our human community that need to be cared for and can’t care for themselves.

Albert Mohler:

By the way, reading a book such as yours, leads to some catalytic moments and also just some favorite things, you say, “Well, I’ve seen that, but I don’t think I’ve seen it that way before.” I think it’s Juvenile you quote – you’re saying that certain things are only possible because of moral assumptions made by a man who doesn’t have children and has forgotten what it was to be a child. That’s a brilliant line.

Carter Snead:

Yeah, it’s an amazing line, and I was glad to be able to remind readers of that extraordinary passage from Juvenile.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, and it’s so true. I mean, the difference in a man’s life about having a child or not having a child. Having a child, you are reminded constantly of the absolute dependency of that child. That child is not capable of expressive individualism as an autonomous individual.

Carter Snead:

No, that’s exactly right. And it changes the way you see everyone. Since becoming a father has been more transformative of my way of seeing the world and other people and my obligations chosen and unchosen transformative. And that’s why it’s such a tragedy to see the declining in the birth rate, and the people waiting to have children. I don’t want to speak for other people, but if I didn’t have children, I would be a terrible person if I didn’t have children.

Albert Mohler:

Most men would be, and I think it’s men and women. But in particular, I think somebody like Pitirim Sorokin, I tend to quote him a lot because he’s so blunt on these issues, Pitirim Sorokin says a society that does not produce fathers produces Hellions.

Carter Snead:

No, it’s bad. And it seems to me that expressive individualism, blinds, and the thing that’s so frustrating is that the claims of progressive left to try to make arguments for why we should care for one another, you drill down the argument, you never get to a foundation that actually is persuasive of a natural obligation that we have to one another. There’s no such thing as a natural obligation in that framework.

Albert Mohler:

Let’s talk about abortion for a moment, and I really appreciate the way you deal with all the different major issues in the book, but abortion has been frontline in the American conversation for all of my adult life. And I was 13 years old when Roe v. Wade was handed down.

And my mother was an early voice for the pro-life argument and was involved in early organizing. And I look at that, and it was unthinkable to a 13-year-old boy that this could be possible. Partly because at 13, and with little brothers and sister, I was aware of the reality of the child. I was one myself, although at 13, and even in my 13-year-old logic, Carter, I could just hear the arguments that pro-abortion side was making, and I thought, “Well, birth is an arbitrary moment in all of this.” I mean, even at 13, I’m thinking, well, if that’s not a human being until that baby is born, then it’s not much of one after it’s born by your logic.

Carter Snead:

No, it sure. And in fact, the most consistent philosophers, pro-abortion philosophers bite the bullet on that. And they say absolutely, like Peter Singer, and Michael Tooley, and David Boin and, Mary Anne Warren, and all of them, say infanticide obviously is justified because those aren’t persons yet. If your account what a person is, is cognitive capacity presently active then, yeah, absolutely. But this is another problem. People that don’t have siblings, people that aren’t around pregnant women, and you understand immediately that we’re talking about another life, another human being, a separate and distinct human being, albeit one that is a deep relationship with that mother and those siblings, you lose that. Everything’s an abstraction. Everything is a kind of intellectual problem to solve on the way to some kind of results oriented outcome that you want. In fact, if you look at the scholarship around personhood theory, which is a very pernicious thing in public bioethics, it’s always about constricting the circle of humanity. It’s always about creating – this is going to sound very blunt, but I mean for it too – It’s about a permission structure about who you can kill is what personhood theory is about.

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Carter Snead

And it all arose in the early 1970s, in response to the abortion question. It was an effort at reverse engineering their arguments to get to the conclusion, to gerrymander the boundaries of humanity, to try to exclude those people that were an obstacle to what they wanted to do.

And for those who have studied the question, who are I think, clear-eyed about it, you say, well, anytime you have the strong and privilege dividing the world up into who counts and who doesn’t count according to their own principles and to own their own benefits, that’s a corrupt endeavor from the very beginning.

Albert Mohler:

I think your background in ethics and your background in law, kind of equip you to write this kind of book in a way that slices and dices – there’s not a better way of putting it – in a way that others do not. So for example, the pro-abortion side, you have only two positions, either the baby is a person or the baby is not. And the pro-abortion movement included people making both arguments, but both of them still supported abortion.

Carter Snead:

Right.

Albert Mohler:

That’s pretty astounding. I think the average American has no clue of that.

Carter Snead:

No, that’s right. I mean, there are two principal arguments for abortion. One is called the sort of, and they’re always made, frequently made in combination with each other, they kind of depend on each other, if you think about the terms of the arguments themselves. But Judith Jarvis Thompson, the most famous, modern, philosophical, ethical argument of all time arguing that even if you grant that the unborn child is a person, she actually doesn’t grant in the piece, but we don’t need to get into that. She says that a mother has the right to reject the maternal relationship, if it’s not part of her life plan, because she’s not bound or obliged to make sacrifices. And in fact, she goes as far as to say that of a mother or a husband and a wife – If a mother and a father do everything they can to avoid conception, and they don’t have to even take the baby home from the hospital, the relationship doesn’t begin because it’s strictly a creature of consent, and that’s the sort of bodily dependence argument. Then you have the personhood argument, which reduces human persons to cognition, which ends up, sort of inconveniently for those making the argument, to exclude disabled people, newborns, the elderly, those suffering from dementia. It turns out there are an awful lot of human beings that aren’t people. If you adopt that framework.

Albert Mohler:

How convenient. Let’s put Peter Singer, Michael Tooley to the side for a moment.

Carter Snead:

Sure.

Albert Mohler:

Most of these people are not brazen enough to come out and say they believe there could be an ethical argument for killing three-year olds.

Carter Snead:

No, they don’t. They don’t.

Albert Mohler:

But the argument you laid out there, if the mother rejects the relationship, that’s the term you used, the mother rejects the relationship, Why is it different at three or 13 than three months of pregnancy?

Carter Snead:

No. And Mary Anne Warren saw the political downside of making the pro-nfanticide argument. She says, yeah, it’s not infanticide. So she goes along with the Singer’s of the world and the Tooley’s of the world, but she is careful to say, but that baby might have value for somebody else, and it might create all these downstream other sort of prudential concerns. So we probably shouldn’t do it. But it’s not murder, which is a very kind of a weasily way to get out of the problem.

Albert Mohler:

Why is it not, forgive my interruption, but why is it not murder?

Carter Snead:

She claims it’s not murder for the very same reason that Tooley and Singer say it’s not, because she doesn’t recognize the personhood of the newborn.

Albert Mohler:

What about a 10-year-old?

Carter Snead:

Well, so I suppose you would argue that, the short version of the argument they make is, in order to be a person, you have to have the cognitive architecture and function to be able to formulate desires for human rights. If you can’t desire to be protected or to be benefited by some kind of rights based framework, then you’re not a person, which requires you have memory, a self-understanding. So they would argue, and this is also silly if you’ve ever met a five or 6-year-old, but they have a kind of coherent sense of their own identity within a narrative that has before and an after. So it’s all hand waving. I mean, at the end, you kind of drive yourself crazy, if you try to respond to these arguments as if they’re made in good faith, to be perfectly honest with you. Because, and I’m not trying to be charitable, but if you see the twisting and turning, it’s clearly a political exercise. It’s clearly just, all they’re trying to do is to get onto paper an argument that is just good enough to give you a sort of level of permission to do the thing you want to do.

Albert Mohler:

Conversation along these lines I had in private, that I wish had been in public, so I could respond in a public way, was with someone who made the argument very much like Peter Singer. And Singer actually, at one point says, that one of the criteria to be applied here is the ability to conceive of the future and the future of the self. And I said, so when does that happen? Because that’s going to be different ages for different people.

Carter Snead:

Yep, Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

You even mentioned some of the famous ice cream studies. At what point does a child say, “Okay, I’ll forgo ice cream today for two scoops tomorrow.”

That comes later than people think and more erratically than people think. And so the child has some idea, okay, I will grow up one day, but that’s not very operational in an ice cream store. So is the child a person or not?

Carter Snead:

No, you’re exactly right. I mean, it’s silly. All these are abstractions, all of these. And the other thing to notice about it, it’s, it’s not an accident that these are professional philosophers who are privileging cognition of a particular kind as the marker of personhood, right? These aren’t athletes, these aren’t blacksmiths, these aren’t people who live a much more embodied life. These are people who prioritize certain kinds, I mean, you even have Peter Singer talking about appreciating Woody Allen movies. They are using incredibly bourgeois examples that are more appropriate to the Princeton faculty lounge than would be most people’s lives.

So again, it’s all about the strong dividing the world up to exclude the weak that are somehow an obstacle to their wishes. And you would think that those who – the progressive left – are constantly talking about the people versus the powerful and sort of totalitarian regimes. There’s nothing more, there’s nothing graver example of the abuse of the weak by the powerful, than the kind of dividing the world of persons up into who counts and who doesn’t count based on what the privileged and powerful want.

Albert Mohler:

Your background in terms of involvement on the issue includes the fact you were general counsel to the President’s Council on Bioethics in a very crucial time. You mentioned Professor Leon Kass, who was the chairman of that commission or task force. And let me tell you of a personal experience back when the president, that was President George W. Bush was going to announce the policy on research on embryos – already existing embryos, I was scheduled to be a guest that night on Larry King Live to discuss the issue. And so there were several of us all ready for the discussion, but the president did not make the announcement when we expected him to because of another news story that pressed everything back, upset the schedule. So when we were in the awkward position – and it was very interesting, I don’t want to go back to it frankly, but it was very interesting – because we were all live on TV not knowing what the report was going to say. What was it like to be a part of the deliberations of that task force?

Carter Snead:

Well, it was extraordinary, and I had the great privilege of being chosen by Leon to be the general counsel. A month after that August 9th talk came out, so my wife and I were watching, and I went to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, sort of great books, background history and philosophy of science. And Leon and his wonderful late wife Amy, were tutors there in the early 1970s, actually before I was born. But we came from a very similar background, and I had not yet ever met him, but I knew who he was and was a huge admirer of his work. And we’re watching that August 9th talk by President Bush. And it’s funny, because the knock on President Bush was, he wasn’t very articulate, he wasn’t very intellectual, but this is one of the most extraordinary talks I’ve ever heard, where he literally goes through the arguments for and against the use and destruction of embryos and research and what the federal government’s role is with respect to those kinds of activities. And you didn’t know until the very end of his talk what the policy was going to be. You heard rumors that it was going to be bad or good or whatever. And it was a very unusual and very elaborate kind of intellectual and moral reasoning that went into the policy itself. We don’t need to rehearse what exactly the policy was, but it was very complex, and it related to material cooperation with evil, very old sort of Catholic Jesuitical concepts of moral theology.

Albert Mohler:

Not that you’re against those.

Carter Snead:

No, no, no, no. I’m definitely not against those, although Jesuits can be good or bad, but no. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. Of course. But we have wonderful Jesuits, but the bottom line is, he announced the policy and we’re like, okay, okay. I can see why that’s the policy. It’s a policy designed to avoid any federal incentives for the use and destruction of embryos going forward. That was the theory, we could argue with whether it was effective or not, but that was the theory. It was designed not to create federal incentives for the use and destruction of embryos after August 9th, 2001. And then he said, “But I’m also creating a President’s Council on Bioethics with the chairman Leon Kass.” And my wife and I literally jumped out of our seats, “We’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe what a great outcome that is.”

And I had no idea I was going to be involved with that council after the fact. And so became involved very shortly thereafter in September, a month after the announcement of the policy, and it was an amazing experience. It was bioethics done the way it’s supposed to be done, the way it was done originally, with a genuinely interdisciplinary group of people who disagreed fundamentally on important questions. But you had theologians, you had philosophers, you had legal scholars, you had social scientists, James Q. Wilson, and Frank Fukiama, you had physicians. And it was an amazing group of people and genuinely intellectually diverse, ideologically diverse, which made it difficult actually, because it would get bogged down in stalemate a lot of the time. But it was an amazing experience. And Leon Kass was a great chairman, and Ed Pellegrino – wonderful Catholic physician and philosopher, passed away some years ago – was his successor.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I followed that very, very carefully with a lot of interest. My own assessment is, the bottom line is that it really aided a lot of conservative thinkers across a range of boundaries. What difference did it make in public policy long term?

Carter Snead:

So as you pointed out earlier, we are in such a polarized moment, and there’s so much gridlock. There was a moment that you’ll appreciate. The fact that Sam Brownback – Senator Brownback was identified as the principle champion for pro-life policies on embryo research and so on – made it, and this wasn’t his fault, but it made it impossible functionally for anyone on the left to join with him on these kinds of questions. Even though he himself was quite bipartisan in his own work, he ended up actually endorsing Kathleen Sebelius for HHS Secretary, which I actually, I wouldn’t have done that myself, but as an illustration of his kind of open-mindedness on these matters.

And so there wasn’t a lot of direct payoff. I will say a couple of things that come to mind. One was President Bush shifting the focus of the embryonic stem cell funding policy to pluripotent cells, which are embryonic stem cells are one kind of pluripotent cell, but there are others as well. And they developed, around 2007, they developed this new way of reprogramming somatic cells, skin cells to behave the way embryonic stem cells would, so you could get the same benefit without using and destroying embryos. We wrote a white paper arguing for the uses of alternative sources of pluripotent cells, and that became an important part of President Bush’s 2007 executive order, which prioritized those and prioritize those approaches that had the best promise of short-term clinical benefit, which were again, were the adult stem cells and the induced pluripotent state stem cells. Even now sitting here right now, 20 plus years after the fact, 24 years after president’s Bush’s policy, 27 years after the derivation of human embryonic stem cells at the University of Wisconsin, the first time that was ever done was 1998. There’s still not any clinical applications of the use of embryonic stem cells, not one.

There may be a few clinical trials here or there. But the promise was, Christopher Reeve’s going to get up and walk, and all these amazing things are going to happen. None of them happened. And so President Bush wisely prioritized the non-embryo-destroying types of research. Also, there was a law passed called the Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006, which forbids the initiation of a clinical pregnancy solely for research purposes. It doesn’t actually forbid the initiation of the pregnancy, it forbids the receipt of any tissue in interstate commerce – that’s a complex way of the federal government getting at the problem. But basically it prevents line crossing between human and non-human in the reproductive space, and there’s a statute that forbids the patenting of embryos.

So those are three concrete things that we did, but mostly, as you said, we shaped the public conversation. We put in on paper the arguments that were used by pro-life people and other public and private figures and in educational settings, that I think really did have a salutary effect on building up a culture of life.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I often use the Council as an example of the importance of elections, electoral decisions.

Carter Snead:

Oh my goodness, yes.

Albert Mohler:

At that point, who was president of the United States meant everything.

Carter Snead:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

If it had been Al Gore, we would’ve ended up in a very, very different place.

Carter Snead:

No, absolutely we would’ve. In fact, one of the last, right before President Clinton stepped down as president, he was making arrangements to fund research involving the use and destruction of embryos, and even put together an NIH panel, and had regulations ready to go. And the election of 2000 changed all that. And President Bush came in and he said, I don’t want to promote the use and destruction of embryos with federal money. And so he crafted a policy meant to get at that goal.

I will say though, it’s interesting that despite all the accomplishments of the Trump administration on life issues, this is one that they did not, that did not correct. They kept in place President Obama’s policies on embryo destructive research and federal funding of stem cell research.

Albert Mohler:

Now, at least one theory of why that’s so is because President Bush, George W. Bush was surrounded by some very prominent intellectuals as well as officials in his administration who said, we need to bring Leon Kass into this. We need to bring Carter Snead into this. We need to bring Robbie George into this. I don’t think we have that in the Trump administration. I don’t think we have anything close to it right now.

Carter Snead:

Yeah, there’s trying to think about the people that were associated with the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Bush era. And so the more I think about it, I can’t think of anyone who is a part of that group that’s involved in the Trump administration.

Albert Mohler:

I think President Trump has shown himself persuadable on many of these issues, but someone’s got to be there to make the persuasive argument.

Carter Snead:

And I’m hoping – and again, I don’t have any inside information – I’m hoping it’s the case that they take a pause and think carefully about their IVF policies, because that’s something that is much in the news lately. And I think, if they look at it carefully, they’re going to realize this is a much bigger and more complex problem than simply saying “yes” or “no.” I mean, you have to think carefully about what you’re doing, and you have to think about what the IVF industry is like, what it does, and how it operates now before you give them a blank check.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been writing in this area for three decades.

Carter Snead

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

And a co-author of the position adopted by the SBC, I think very courageously. The SBC adopted this before the election in June of 2024. And I can just hope that there are some opportunities. I do think with the vice president, there are some opportunities, because he has been a part of some of these conversations. And so I hope over time, and I was encouraged by the fact that on behalf of the administration, he did speak up on the March for Life and other events like that, where obviously that was something that wasn’t automatically expected. So I saw that as encouragement.

Carter Snead:

I agree. I agree with that.

Albert Mohler:

Speaking of IVF, the fact is that most Americans don’t give this much thought as an ethical or moral issue. That’s one of the frustrations for those of us who’ve been trying to awaken, I’ll say, the evangelical conscience on these issues. I think the same thing in parallel is largely the case about birth control and specifically contraception in general. And I think it demonstrates the fact that we’re not very good at thinking about these things in anticipation of these developments. And once the horse is out of the barn, so to speak, it is very, very hard to get that back in. And I think that’s part of the problem we have on IVF. There was not enough sustained attention to it when it first developed, and now it’s just become a part of the landscape for many people.

Carter Snead:

I agree with you. And there are some incredibly powerful human motivations to not think too hard about it. There are people who are desperate to have children, these, they’re all good things. People are desperate to have children.

Albert Mohler:

Well, they’re good in the proper context.

Carter Snead:

Exactly. The desire for children is good. Yeah. The desire for a child is good. You can understand the physical, emotional, financial exhaustion of people who are desperate to be parents. But again, I don’t want to be too dramatic, but many instances, and this is context of abortion as well, where you feel like you’re in a crisis and someone offers you a way out. We’re going to do this one thing, this one time, and you never have to think about it ever again. I’m going to fix this problem for you. It’s how the devil operates actually. I mean, I don’t want to become too theological, but these are temptations that are understandable.

Albert Mohler:

This is a safe place to do that, by the way.

Carter Snead:

Yeah, no, exactly. Well, it’s definitely the devil. The devil is the one that says to you, “Look, I can make this problem go away, just get an abortion, just do this, I know that you really want this, you don’t have to tell anybody, don’t worry about it, once you’re done with this, you can just move on and everything will be great.” And that is, it’s in those moments of weakness that we most need our Lord, and we most need one another to keep us on the path. But the other problem is people don’t even know what IVF is. They don’t even know how it works. They don’t know, they confuse it with all sorts of, you may remember that Governor Waltz was claiming that he and his wife had done IVF, but they didn’t do IVF. They didn’t even know.

Albert Mohler:

Didn’t even know. Yeah,

Carter Snead:

They did IUI, which is completely different. It’s a completely different thing. And people don’t understand what an embryo is. Or although people that do IVF though, and have spare embryos – that’s a terrible way to describe another human being that’s in a cryo storage situation – they sort of, in their gut understand that they’re dealing with something that’s not just a part of a person, but this is actually, and they have very ambivalent dispositions and social science evidence backs that up. Most people who have IVF babies in freezers or they don’t want to get rid of them, they don’t quite know what to do. And it’s a huge question.

One of the brilliant moments in President Bush’s tenure was when he vetoed the congressional effort to liberalize his embryonic stem cell funding policy. And what he did is in the east room of the White House, maybe you were there, he had a group of the “snowflake babies.” He had a group of little kids. Little kids and babies, who had been adopted as embryos, and were now on stage to illustrate the continuity of identity between the embryonic stage of development and later stages of human development and the same organism. These are not spare human beings. These are our little children. And they were embryos. Everybody, you and I, Al were embryos in a way that we were never an egg or a sperm. I know you know this, but to your listeners, it bears reiterating that we’re talking about that the developmental life trajectory begins at the embryonic stage of development for everybody.

And this is something that people, I mean, the debate right now over IVF makes me feel crazy, because I feel like nobody remembers what we were talking about in the early two thousands. We were arguing about embryonic stem cell research, talked about what an embryo is. You have people like Orrin Hatch saying, “Life doesn’t begin in a lab.” I’m like, well, of course it does. Now that we have the capacity to achieve fertilization outside the body, yes, it does begin in a laboratory. And so in any event, people are talking as if we didn’t, these conversations 20 plus years ago, where we actually had a national discussion about the moral status of the embryonic human being.

Albert Mohler:

Well, we had a discussion and it was at the national level, and it was at the White House. I was asked for a written statement on the legitimacy of snowflake adoptions. And that’s not something, that’s not two sentences that requires some contextualization and reasoning.

Carter Snead:

Careful, no, that’s complex question.

Albert Mohler:

But I think a lot of that just didn’t filter down to the popular consciousness at all. I don’t think the average American, not only did they not know that event didn’t take place, the average American still doesn’t know that it’s a thing, that it’s a reality, that the moral stakes are even present.

Carter Snead:

No, you’re exactly right. And it’s true. Most people, and most people don’t want to think about these things as well. But you’re exactly right. This is not in the level of discourse that you and I are used to, and the public spaces that we’re used to working in, most people don’t even know. And then the other problem is that given the fact that there are so many people who know babies who are conceived by IVF, when they hear any kind of even moderate critical argument about IVF, what they hear is condemnation of the parents. You don’t care about this baby. And nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, in the book, I argue that the kind of wide open, wild west of no regulation and no limits that we have in the American context of IVF and ART, that’s a framework designed for needs and wants of very different kinds of people.

People that are going to get fertility treatments aren’t going to maximize their unencumbered will. They’re going, because they want to be parents, which means they want to be in a relationship with a child. And so it’s very different. The framework you can criticize, and I do in the book very strenuously, the framework of non-regulation of IVF based on the proposition that what people need is radical freedom to do whatever they want. But that’s not even what – no one who’s ever been sick or gone to a doctor for any reason is going because they want radical freedom. That’s not what’s happening. That’s an anthropological mistake. It’s a mistake about the presupposition of what a person is and what they need to flourish.

Albert Mohler:

But even on the snowflake adoption issue, just to take this one illustration, it points to the fact that the context changes continually. And so you say, okay, I’ve made a statement on that. I think I can live with that statement. Well, okay, everything changes. But a part of what I wrote in my statement was, this cannot be subversive of marriage and family, but that’s exactly what it’s become.

Carter Snead:

Yeah. So I make a similar argument in the book. I say, “If you think about…” — and people sort of came to me and said, “Why didn’t you just say in the book that IVF is immoral and should be banned and blah?” — and I don’t say that in the book. I don’t say the opposite. But what I say in the book is, to think about any form of procreation, you have to think about what parents are, what children are, and you have to think about what it means to bring a child into the world and how a child is begotten and not made, and a child is a mysterious stranger that you welcome and love unconditionally. Fundamentally, what a child is, is a gift. And any form of procreation, whether it’s natural, or enhanced, or using technology that moves you away from the idea of what you’re doing is you’re welcoming a gift with gratitude to love unconditionally, to care for as a coequal human being that’s begotten, not made is something that should give us pause. And that applies to a wide array of things. And I don’t draw the conclusion for the reader and say, “And therefore…” – I just try to say, this is how you think about it.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I’m involved in a writing project right now, and one of the parts of that project that most fascinates me is the shift in Western thought from the family as the base unit of society to the individuals as the base unit of society.

Carter Snead:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

And that’s absolutely massive, because if we’re talking about IVF and all we were talking about is the family as the basic unit of society, that would be defined one way. The moment you make it the autonomous individual, you’ve got two gay guys having an embryo created and then a surrogate mother in Ukraine. This is something that, again, the beginning, those who start asking the question, they ask the question, and it’s in my context, I’m almost always asked, okay, here’s a husband and a wife. They’re struggling with the ability to have a baby. Why isn’t this just an un alloy good?

Carter Snead:

It’s just like a marginal departure from what the normal course of affairs would be, as opposed to, I mean, one of the most common interventions in IVF is sex selection. Right? And you think about that for a minute and you’re like, well, what does that mean? What happens to the embryos that are of the wrong sex? They get destroyed. You know what I mean?

Albert Mohler:

What about the catalogs?

Carter Snead:

Right. No, no. You got batches of embryos, absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

If you’re a consumer of embryos, you can now look through profiles of sperm donors and egg donors. It is eugenics all over again.

Carter Snead:

They conceive batches of embryonic siblings that you choose from, and they have polygenic risk scores for IQ, and hair color, and eye color, and all these nonmedical circumstances.

Albert Mohler:

But they can also put in subtle things now, which I don’t think really existed 15 years ago. Now, if you look at these databases, you also have things that are subtle, such as hobbies.

Carter Snead:

Of course. Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s mind blowing.

Albert Mohler:

You want your kid to be a pitcher? You want a sperm donor whose hobby is first baseball, that tells you something.

Carter Snead:

Right. No, of course. And in fact, the first sperm bank like this, I can’t remember the name of it, but it was like – the Nobel Laureate sperm bank. And there was only one Nobel laureate, who donated his sperm. Most of the sperm was perfectly normal, average sperm or worse, which is not obviously how we talk about it, but you know what I mean. And it turns out it was the guy who was like a white supremacist Nobel Prize winner. So he was like a radical.

Albert Mohler:

Oh my goodness. I have to say, is this kind of a macabre twist on all of this. I’m just going to guess that the baseball list and the Nobel Prize list are not the same list.

Carter Snead:

Who knows what they’re, they’re probably all the same guy. But it is a total commodification and commercialization. And one of the most disturbing examples is where you have couples who use a surrogate and then it turns out the baby has down syndrome, and they identify it in utero and they demand that the baby be aborted. And there’s no legal way you can do that in this country, to compel an abortion, but you can certainly terrify a young woman and make her absolutely use terrible things.

Albert Mohler:

And well, not only that, you see how dark this is because now you have an entire field of tort litigation, which is about failed promises or failed contracts in terms of IVF and the two cases in the headlines in the last month in which women have said, “This is not the baby that I ordered.”

Carter Snead:

Right, exactly. And then you have the entire Republican legislature and Governor Alabama, rushing to immunize the entire IVF industry from any lawsuits whatsoever that involve the use and destruction of embryos. Because in a case where the IVF parents sued the clinic, because the clinic mishandled their embryos and ended up destroying their embryos. So in that case, the Alabama Supreme Court decision that said, yes, you’re entitled to sue under the Wrongful Death Act pursuant to a very straightforward reading of the statute, which included the unborn and utero. And so why can’t we make an exception for ex utero human beings? That became this terrible theocratic decision, that was attacked relentlessly by Republicans and Democrats. And then you had this sort of rush of panic, where they all said, “Okay, we’re going to immunize the IVF industry.” And if there’s any industry that doesn’t need immunity, it’s the IVF industry. These folks are the least regulated and least self-regulated industries in this medical space.

Albert Mohler:

Carter, I had a hard lesson in the midst of all of that because I was at least involved in being cited and drawn into the conversation there in Alabama and responded to it. But I have a lot of ties to Alabama, wasn’t born there, but I have an awful lot of ties to Alabama, including to prominent political leaders in Alabama, and many of them who are Christians, deeply committed Christians, showed evidence of that over time. And I was absolutely confounded by the fact that so many of them said to me, as a serious moral argument in their minds, but these are very nice people. And I went to school in Birmingham. You grew up in Birmingham. That is a lousy moral argument.

Carter Snead:

There are a lot of nice people in the world that, including myself, that have done terrible things and think terrible things.

Albert Mohler:

That is not a basis for normative law.

Carter Snead:

And you would think that a Christian understanding the concept of original sin and our fallen nature, you can’t rely on the beneficence of others when you’re talking about lives being at stake.

Albert Mohler:

Well, I appreciate your book so much. I’m looking forward to the next one. I believe it, at least conceptualizes, Ethics at the Edges of Humanity.

Carter Snead:

Absolutely. It’s a book about the boundaries of the moral ontological and ultimately legal community. Who counts as one of us, who gets to do the counting, and according to what criteria? And that’s something that you and I have been talking about already this hour. It’s a question that you can’t avoid when you talk about bioethics, but there are some recent advances in biotechnology and bioengineering that bring this question into very sharp relief. And it’s not simply beings that we encounter and wondering what our relationship with these beings are, but these are beings that we create in the laboratory, so-called synthetic embryos. Animal humans – particularly chimeras, non-human animals that have either human brains or human reproductive organs. And then third, and strangest of all are called neural organoids, which are mini brains. So the question, it’s a book about the markers of humanity, about parts and wholes and obligations of stewardship and how to think about who we are and what we owe to each other in that context.

Albert Mohler:

So how fast can we get a copy? When are we going to see it?

Carter Snead:

The manuscript is due to Harvard University Press on December 31st, so I’m hard at work on it. And in fact, right now, today I was working on a chapter that’s horrifying. It’s about, there’s a whole chapter dedicated to what I call the failure of personhood theory. You and I have been talking about, this effort by bioethics people to gerrymander the world in a way that according to their goals and purposes, and I try to show how that’s a failure. But I also get into this whole dehumanization literature efforts, to try to exclude members of the human family. If you begin with the indigenous cultures in the 16th century in the Americas, you talk about obviously the Holocaust, talk about African slavery, talk about the Rwanda genocide, talk about efforts to eliminate disabled people. There is a dark and extensive history of trying to constrict the circle of humanity to exclude those who are burdens to us or who sort of frustrate our own purposes.

Albert Mohler:

Well, Carter, I’m very thankful for you, for your courageous tackling of these issues and for the wisdom you bring to these conversations. I’ll just have to tell you, I’m looking forward to the next one.

Carter Snead:

Thanks, Al. Thanks so much. It’s great talking to you, and thank you for all of your extraordinary work as well.

Albert Mohler:

God bless you.

Carter Snead:

God bless you.

Albert Mohler:

Many thanks to my guest, Carter Snead for thinking with me today.

If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. For a realm of materials, just go to my website at albertmohler.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.

Until next time, keep thinking.

The post The Wicked Dangers of Personhood Theory — A Conversation with Professor Carter Snead appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

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