Are There Failed Persons? Are You One of Them? | Prof. John O’Callaghan

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on December 1, 2021 at Purdue University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Prof. John O'Callaghan is the Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame as well as a permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. He served as the past President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. His areas of scholarly interest include Medieval Philosophy, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics. Prof. O'Callaghan earned his BS in Physics from St. Norbert College in 1984, an MS in Mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1996.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.2	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:10.6	So I'm here to talk about whether or not there are failed persons.
0:14.3	I definitely think there are.
0:16.2	However, before explaining why I think there are failed persons and who they might be,
0:20.6	I think it will be good to take a look, a little bit of a look more closely at our society to get a sense of what it thinks a failed human person is.
0:29.4	Its notion of a failed person is quite different from mine. It's important to think about the question of failed persons because there are growing movements here and abroad aimed at killing by medical means human beings who are judged in some sense to be failed persons.
0:45.6	Human beings who do not count as persons according to what I call the societal notion of failed persons.
0:52.6	The question for all of us who live within this society with its notion of failed persons. The question for all of us who live within this society,
0:56.2	with its notion of failed persons, is whether we will take part in and support this movement
1:02.5	toward killing human beings or avoid it, indeed whether we will push back against it.
1:08.9	This killing of human beings isn't simply confined to abortion,
1:12.5	as it has been legally available here in the United States for almost 50 years now.
1:17.6	Recent political discussions have made it clear that some leaders think such killing
1:21.6	ought to be allowed all the way up until birth and perhaps after. Indeed, very recently, there was an article in a
1:29.0	mainstream bioethics journal arguing that infanticide should be renamed post-birth abortion.
1:38.5	The article was not about the moral legitimacy of either infanticide or abortion. The moral
1:44.0	legitimacy of those acts was taken as a
1:46.2	given by the authors. It was an argument about the social impact of words. The authors took it for granted
1:52.9	that there's no rational moral distinction to be drawn between abortion and infanticide,
1:57.8	particularly late-term abortion. Thus, given the moral legitimacy of abortion,
2:03.5	the killing of infants after they are born is equally morally legitimate and should be equally
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