Changing the Hearts and Minds of those Embracing the Culture of Death a Suggested Strategy

Abstract

It is important to understand why excellent arguments developed by those who propose the “culture of life” are not able to persuade advocates of the “culture of death” to change their minds. Our freely chosen deeds “do not produce a change merely in the state of affairs outside of man but, to the extent that they are deliberate choices, they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits.”¹ Those who embrace the culture of death will not accept pro-life arguments because they have freely committed themselves to a way of life that closes their eyes and ears to the truth. They do not want to hear arguments incompatible with their basic commitments. Arguments are presented from Patrick Lee, Mortimer Adler, John Macquarrie, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI that can be used as a conceptual basis for reaching those imbued in the culture of death. This includes pointing out the intrinsic value of human life, the consequences of instituting a hierarchy of individuals based on their “worth” to society, and the yearning of all for the good and the true. These considerations can help persons think more deeply about who they are and their identity as persons, and evoke an “anamnesis” in the minds of some of our contemporaries who disagree with us so greatly on issues regarding the rights of all human beings, born or unborn.

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References

John Paul

Pope

II Veritatis splendor, no. 71. Translation that of Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

On this see my “Free Choice, Baptism, and the Christian Moral Life,” in Camminare nella luce: Prospettive della Teologia Morale a 10 Anni da Veritatis Splendor, ed. Melina

Livio

(Rome: Pontificia Universitá Lateranense, 2004), 455–459.

Paul

John

II Veritatis splendor, no. 71; the internal citation, from St. Gregory of Nyssa, is from his De vita Moysis, 2,3.

Paul

John

II Veritatis splendor, no. 65, original emphasis.

Paul

John

II Veritatis splendor, no. 71, original emphasis.

Paul

John

II Veritatis splendor, no. 65.

See, for example, the following: Fletcher

Joseph

, “Indicators of Humanhood: A Tentative Profile of Man,” Hastings Center Report 2.5 (November 1972): 1–4, in which he offered some twenty criteria for being counted as a human being, including a sense of time and of curiosity, and twenty criteria excluding human beings from being recognized as “persons,” among them Down syndrome. In December 1974, the Hastings Center Report published his essay, “Four Indicators of Humanhood—The Enquiry Matures” (4.6: 4-7). In this essay Fletcher declared that neocortical functioning is the sine qua non for being human as a person. Without this functioning the “person is non-existent no matter how much the individual's brain stem or mid-brain may continue to provide feelings and regulate autonomic physical functions. To be truly Homo Sapiens, we must be sapient, however minimally.” See also Peter Singer's Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New York: St. Martin's, 1995). In that book he contrasts the “Old Commandments” with his “New Commandments.” He replaces what he calls “Old Commandment 5, “Treat all human life as always more precious than any non-human life” with his New Commandment 5: “Do not discriminate on the basis of species.”

Lee

Patrick

Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 26–27, emphasis added.

Adler

Mortimer

The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 157ff.

10.

Adler

Mortimer

The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 202.

11.

Macquarrie

John

Three Issues in Ethics (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 111.

12.

Ratzinger

Joseph Cardinal

“Conscience and Truth,” given at a conference on Catholic Conscience: Foundation and Formation (Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop 1991) and originally published as edited by Rev. Russell Smith by the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Center, Braintree, MA (now the National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA), and reprinted in On Conscience: Two Essays by Cardinal Ratzinger (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). Ratzinger develops what he regards as the central anthropological and ontological meaning of conscience as anamnesis.

13.

On Conscience: Two Essays by Cardinal Ratzinger, 32, emphasis added.

14.

On Conscience: Two Essays by Cardinal Ratzinger, 36.