Liberty in Christ

A recent piece in The Public Discourse rooted the future of bioethics in the ideals of “America’s founding promises and insights”: specifically life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A viable bioethics, the piece argues, ought to set out to secure such ideals for both physician and patient.

But, the piece begins, “this will be neither the first nor the last time this year” that those ideals are invoked, in some kind of appeal. In the midst of our 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence, a good deal of reflection has commenced upon the principles that informed this country’s founding. And much of it has begun by trying to define what these terms even mean. What are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

The Public Discourse finds itself running against this sort of question often. Noticing differences of perspective in how we perceive the pursuit of happiness, for instance, it asks, “Is that happiness no more than the satisfaction of autonomously held desires? Or is it to be found instead in objective goods, including, for the patient, the good of health and, for the physician, the goods of health, work, and solidarity?” It’s one of many instances in which the piece marks a tension in how we use these terms.

This may disrupt a subtle presupposition we tend to have. In the surge of patriotism this 250th anniversary has brought, we can begin to think that our founding, proudly American values are universal – universally understood, and universally held. But actually all three of them derive, most fundamentally, from metaphysical views about what it means to be human. And that’s an intellectual space in which we don’t stand readily in agreement.

For instance: on one hand, all three of these ideals do have a Christian resonance. Jesus came, as he said, to offer abundant life. Liberty or freedom is also a noble Christian word: freedom from death, from the guilt of sin, from the wound in our nature, and from the tyranny of the devil, such that we become what we’re created to be, reaching our full stature. And as for happiness: Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s notion that happiness is the final end of humanity, for which other things are pursued, but he affirmed that the vision of God and union with him is the definition of happiness.

But this isn’t a vision of the human person or of these values that tends to swirl around in our culture. Indeed the Enlightenment movement, which affected the founding fathers’ views and continues to make its way in our common life today, de-spiritualized these values, and insisted that they be expressed in political, social, and cultural modes alone, with no reference to the spiritual realities that support them. Thus to be free is to have no one telling you what to do in the material relations of this life. Life belongs to me and me alone. And happiness is whatever I decide will most please me personally. Rather than appealing to transcendent, objective realities, these versions of our founding ideals are reduced to subjective criteria: securing them is a matter of personal experience and feeling. Same words; far different understandings of what they mean.

So, while there can be a motive to use these apparently common ideals to bridge divides and foster dialogue in our country, whether in the realm of bioethics or any other, it may be worth bearing in mind that an appeal to the ideals is, by itself, insufficient. Anyone can blindly and generically appeal to them, and mean most anything by them. The question really is what is meant by them, and that’s not something that can be derived from the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or any other document itself. We need an interpretive lens that we bring to those documents and these terms. And in our surge of patriotism in this 250th anniversary, perhaps that’s our most pressing site for bridging divides and striving for clarity.