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

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at Brown University on February 20, 2020.

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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	As I say, it's a great pleasure to be here.
0:04.0	Aquinas will be explicitly mentioned near the end of the paper, but I'm hoping not to really mention him along the way explicitly.
0:13.0	But if you're familiar with Aquinas, I think you won't find what I say here foreign to what you're familiar with.
0:20.0	So, I'm here to talk to you today about whether or not there are failed human persons.
0:25.2	I'm not going to stand over here by the way because the moment you're here that light
0:29.2	is right in your face.
0:30.3	So I'm sorry if I'm behind here because it seems like it'd be awkward if I was way over here.
0:41.6	I'm here to talk to you today about whether or not there are failed human persons.
0:45.4	I definitely think there are failed human persons.
0:50.6	However, before explaining why I think there are failed persons and who they might be,
0:55.8	I think it will be good to look a little bit at our society to get a sense of what it thinks a failed human person is.
0:59.3	Its notion of a failed person is quite different from mine.
1:04.3	It is important in particular for those of you who are already in or will enter into the
1:09.5	medical profession, if or any are here, and related
1:13.1	fields to take a look at this societal notion of a failed person, but also for those of
1:18.6	you generally who care about how we think about and administer medicine. What's good about
1:24.1	it and what might be bad about it. It's important since there are growing movements here and abroad
1:30.3	aimed at killing by medical means human beings who are judged in some sense to be failed persons.
1:38.2	Human beings who do not count as persons according to this societal notion.
1:43.3	The question for all of us who live within
1:45.5	this society with its notion of failed persons is whether we will take part in and support this
1:51.8	movement toward killing human beings or avoid it. Indeed, whether we will push back against it.
	...

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