March 27 — 30, 2008
The Catholic University of America
Center for Law, Philosophy and Culture
Question
Where, we ask, is the common morality sufficient to guide our response to the urgent concerns of our global age? In the present convergence of world cultures, one’s own moral bearings may suddenly come to seem only marginally less alien than those of the foreign cultures swirling before one’s eyes. A technocratic morality of means, associated with a globe that, virtually by the hour, shrinks with new breakthroughs in telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and intercontinental travel, appears no less unsatisfactory, merely because it seems to fell every alternative mode of rationality rising in its path. Galloping technology makes possible interventions both in human biology and in the human environment and, in so doing, gives rise to a rush of sobering moral dilemmas. Merely because these interventions are possible are they, we ask, therefore, also morally allowable? The running tally of unforeseen external effects of the technologies deployed during the past century-and-a-half suggests, simultaneously, that human survival itself may slip beyond human control. We may ask: What hard or tragic choices now loom before us?
Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Deus caritas est, suggests, as solution to this challenge, a renewal, on a global basis, of the traditional capacity of human cultures to transmit the requisites of insight into the counsels of practical reason. He echoes his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who in his encyclical Veritatis splendor remarked that “prior to any and all particular philosophical systems,” human beings, when they seek to do the right thing, depend upon “a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity.” At the root of the possibility of “morally good action,” Pope John Paul II found an implicit “acknowledgement of God” as “foundation,” for “God has already given an answer to . . .[the] question [of the good] . . . by creating man and ordering him with wisdom and love to his final end, through the law which is inscribed in his heart (cf. Rom 2:15), . . ..” Leading thinkers from philosophy, theology, ethics and politics, representing diverse strands of Christian traditions as well as diverse world religions, gather to reflect on the global question posed above and on the meaning and viability of the solution sketched by these two popes.