Biological Ethics

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Chapter 2. Science and the Foundations of Ethics: Human Plurality

A. Ruiz Retegui

a) The plural status of man

In the preceding chapter on the foundation of human morality, although we have occasionally spoken of cultural traditions, of society, etc., the central object of consideration was man taken in general or, more precisely, in universal; that is to say, we have dealt with those properties, qualities and laws which are found in all men; we have therefore dealt with essential matters - pertaining to essence - and, therefore, we spoke of man in the singular because in that perspective the human essence is one.

This is in a way logical, for an intellectual study that claims to explain human phenomena cannot be an inventory of descriptions of concrete cases, but a search for the universal laws and properties that, being the measure of the cases, transcend them. Nor is science concerned with individual concrete cases: its research is aimed at finding the universal laws and determinations that allow for an orderly understanding of singular facts. Physics is not interested in whether this or that object has fallen as a consequence of its weight, however great or important its mass may be. Physics is interested in universal laws, for example, the law of gravity. If there are singular things of interest to science, it is those that serve as experiments and test of the universal laws.

However, the purely essential study of man is insufficient, because each one is the object, as we have said, of a singular and explicit creative act on the part of God, and for this reason cannot be considered a simple case of general laws. The absolute dignity of the human person, and the explicit creation of each one on which that dignity is based, demands that we extend our considerations to the peculiarities, absolutely proper to human plurality.

Certainly, human plurality makes it possible to establish universal laws and general considerations valid for all people: anthropological science, in its broadest sense, is possible. But if we were to stop our considerations at this level, we would run very serious risks at the evaluation of people. In fact, to affirm that man has been willed by God for himself does not immediately seem to mean that each person is absolutely worthy: the possibility of separating the value of man and the value of each person is real and has not been infrequent throughout history, especially in the domain of abstract and rationalist thought in recent centuries. The assertion that God willed man for himself could be understood in the sense that what was willed for himself was the human species, or man in universal. In that case the person, irreducible, singular and unrepeatable, would be reduced to a case, to an individual of the human species. The status would be similar to the case of an extraordinarily valuable literary work, with editions of thousands of copies. The value of each of these copies, although it depends on and participates in the value of the literary creation in question, is not identified with it. That artistic creation evidently exists only in those copies, and if they are all destroyed, the literary work is lost. However, without any contempt for it, some copies can be dispensed with. Moreover, if, because it is so highly valued, it is to be presented in a carefully printed form, the copies with defective details are destroyed. There is no lack of examples in recent centuries of ideologies that have crushed human beings precisely at degree scroll out of love for man. Of course, human ambition and ferocity have violated human dignity many times in history: the paradox is that the cruelest violations in recent history have taken place in the name of love for humanity. Logically, the more man is considered in the abstract and universal, the less the individual person is valued and the greater the risk of such violations. In fact, experience shows that the most serious violations of dignity staff have taken place in societies dominated by collectivist and universalising ideologies. In this sense, scientism is one of the greatest risks.

For this reason, a consideration of what is human that claims to do justice to the person must take into account that "human plurality has the double character of equality and distinction". If men were not equal, it would not even make sense to speak of plurality, and consequently no anthropological science would be possible: men could not understand each other, they could not explain their reasons, their behaviour, their projects, to others with the pretence of being understood. But if people were not different, there would be no point in speaking of the absolute dignity of the person: it would be enough to speak of individuals, that is to say, of concrete cases of humanity. The irreducible distinction between person and individual is expressed in ordinary language in the distinction between the questions of what is and who is. The what is is answered by an enumeration of universal qualities or properties, i.e., notes that can be found in other persons, and are therefore expressed by common names. The who is refers to the unrepeatable reality staff and is a question that can only be answered by the proper name or similar. When we try to explain discursively who a given person is, that is, when we try to make him known, we immediately find ourselves saying properties and qualities that can inevitably be present in many other people, and for this reason we remain in the realm of what he is, without ever agreeing to say who he is. No matter how tightly we may weave the mesh of qualities with which we seek to express the person, the person always escapes us. There is an unbridgeable distinction between knowing what someone is and knowing who they are. The head of staff of a large business may be very well documented about what each of his workers is, but only someone who deals personally with someone can know who he is, even if he does not have such a detailed knowledge of his properties. The direct contact in behaviour and conversation with the individual person is absolutely irreplaceable by the more complete "report staff ".

This distinction between who is and what is tends to blur in the realm of rationalist and universalising thought. However, this distinction was the core topic of the classical political Philosophy , where the affirmation of freedom staff was conceived first and foremost as the capacity to perform personal "deeds", actions of sufficient scope to show the person in his or her unrepeatable uniqueness. The areté of the Greeks - a word that has been ambiguously translated as virtue - was not properly a positive moral quality, but something prior to it: the human strength staff to perform unprecedented deeds and thus show one's own excellence staff. This is what a certain current use of the word hero points to, in the sense of the protagonist - not necessarily "heroic" - of a story or novel that sample his unique and unrepeatable reality.

The human person cannot be adequately known through universal properties, because those properties are necessarily parts, and the person transcends in its unity the sum of those parts. The person can be known, either with the attention staff , or through storytelling. Objective reports say too much and at the same time too little: they say too much what he or she is, but never who he or she is. This is why people feel violated - and are really violated - when general laws are automatically applied to them; whereas "all sorrows can be endured if we put them in a story or tell a story about them" (Isak Dinesen).

The knowledge of the person is thus subtracted from the general law of our speculative scientific knowledge , which is always an attempt to untangle the numerous strands of qualities that are mixed up in the case of existence staff.

The sphere where the person is most firmly grounded on his ontological foundation - and not only his empirical origin - is the home, where he knows he is loved for himself, and not for his qualities and achievements, which, however great they might be, would make him replaceable by another: the only firm ground for his existence is the sphere of love. It is only in this sphere that existence can sink its roots staff and draw energy for its own, free and unprecedented life. Universal laws and determinations, however just and fair they may be, cannot by themselves constitute an adequate space for life staff, they can only be borderline determinations for life. Logically, to the extent that laws are more detailed and determining, they force the homogenisation of personal conduct, making it difficult, or perhaps preventing, the realisation of what is most proper to them. Human plurality is thus presented to us as the strange plurality of unique and unrepeatable beings.

b) Creation and generation at the origin of each person

The paradoxical characteristics of human plurality call for a foundation. Here, as in the case of the foundation of the absolute dignity of the person, what is to be founded is already perceived in the immediate human experience. But that reality - the dignity of the person, or human plurality in the present case - presents such paradoxical characters - absolute dignity of the person in its evident contingency, plurality of unique beings - that it demands an explanation that makes it intellectually coherent. Of course, the peculiar human plurality or the absolute dignity of the person can be affirmed on the basis of immediate experience and be situated as a foundation for a philosophical reflection on Politics or Ethics: reflections of that subject are the Greek political Philosophy or the Kantian ethics. However, ideas have their logic, and if these paradoxes are not made intellectually coherent, sooner or later, one of the terms of these paradoxes will be negated by the other. Thus, the absolute dignity of the person was denied in the realm of Hegelian rationalist thought and its derivatives. Similarly, modern natural law disregards the peculiarities of the individual and entrusts the task of constructing a just society exclusively to universal laws, from subject scientism: the aim is to construct a just and humane society according to the model of the positive sciences.

Here we are not interested in starting from the peculiar human plurality in order to elaborate an intellectual construction of human society, but to detect as precisely as possible the foundations of this plurality in order to make it intellectually coherent and balanced, in the first place, and also to subsequently derive consequences from this foundation, since, as we shall see, the understanding of the foundation of the peculiar human plurality is extraordinarily fruitful for the understanding of other human phenomena of wide-ranging scope.

The foundation of human plurality is the composition of creation and generation that takes place in the concrete origin of each person.

The affirmation of the Christian doctrinal tradition of the direct creation of the soul of every human being by God presents many speculative problems, but its religious and anthropological significance is clear and decisive: each person responds to an explicit act of creation, to a singular and unique call on the part of God, and therefore has a destiny staff of relationship with Creator Love which can in no way be subsumed into a collective universal destiny. If explicitly created by God, the human person is a whole of meaning, i.e. the life of the person cannot be adequately understood by integrating it totally into a higher unity of meaning. The human person, though part of the world, is a whole, and justice will never be done to it if it is seen as part of a whole, or a moment of collective history, or an abstraction of a society, or a case of universal scientific laws. The reason Christian thought has given for affirming that the happiness final to which the person - every person - aspires is the direct relationship with God, without mediation, is precisely the fact that his soul has been created directly and immediately by God.

At the same time, it is clear that the concrete origin of every human being is the generation by his parents. Creation and generation are to be understood as being peculiarly and intimately united in the origin of the person. This peculiar union between creation and generation, closely related to man's somatic-spiritual condition, to his worldliness and to his plurality, is not easily intelligible. The easiest way to explain the composition between creation of the soul and generation is to affirm that God creates the soul while the parents beget the body. But this explanation is immediately intellectually satisfactory only if one accepts a dualistic outline of man, that is, if one conceives of him as composed of two substances: the soul created by God and the body begotten by the parents. The dualistic outline , perhaps because of its ease of comprehension, made its fortune in the intellectual history of the West and its cadence was the progressive equating of the body to the machine and, in parallel, the negation of the spirit. As a consequence, the consideration of man increasingly took on the character of a positive scientific knowledge which, as we have already said, is of a universalising nature and, therefore, ignorant of the absolute dignity of the person. But this dualism is not compatible either with our experience staff, or with the traditional teaching of Christian anthropology. In fact, the fundamental question of Christian anthropology was the problem of reconciling the substantial unity of man - man is one "thing" - and the spirituality, and therefore the immortality, of the soul.

The affirmation of the unity of the person forces us to understand that creation and generation are composed in a more intimate way than is expressed according to the dualistic outline . Whatever speculative solution is given to the harmonisation between the unity of the person, creation and generation, its meaning is unequivocal: the parents, who beget the child, and God collaborate in a unique way - without parallel or similarity in the world - in giving life to the new person. In terms of classical, Christian thought it can be said that the parents, by means of generative acts, arrange the subject whose substantial form, i.e. its radical, human determination, through a creative act on the part of God. It is not that God creates a spiritual substance which is united with the material substance engendered by the parents. The proper term of creation is the person, and the person himself is the term of generation. But God creates it by its spiritual dimension, while the parents beget it by its somatic dimension: that which is created by God and that which is begotten by the parents is the same being. It could be said that the parents arrange the subject whose proper form is the soul created directly by God, so that they actually cause the soul materially. For this reason, human generation is called pro-creation, and it can be said with propriety, not metaphorically, that the parents participate in the creative power of God.

Science can obviously account for the process of generation, but it cannot account for creation, nor, therefore, for the absolute dignity of the person. This is not surprising because, as we know, scientific consideration presupposes a methodological reduction of the object under study.

c) Relationship between person and individual

In so far as he is begotten by his parents, the human person participates with them in the human condition, i.e. he has their very nature in a specific sense, and is therefore capable of being considered an individual of the human species, in whom the universal laws of the essence of man are fulfilled. He is thus measured by these laws and his existence can be considered to be regulated by the general considerations of anthropology. As result of a creative act, the person transcends his status as an individual of the species and is constituted as a unique, unrepeatable, unrepeatable being endowed with absolute dignity: he is an absolute good.

The whole mystery of the human condition lies in the tension between these two poles: its individual condition and its condition staff.

As an individual of the species, the individual man is a piece of nature. Generation, which is materially regulated by laws common to the rest of the material world, has constituted his organic unity out of elements which were formerly scattered over the world and which would be scattered again after death. If the person were only begotten and not created, he could be considered as a singular but transitory moment of the vital or dynamic current that runs through the whole subject. Man, belonging to the chain of generations, is not only an individual of the species, but is included in the processes Materials transited by the forces that move the subject. Not infrequently we people also experience psychologically our belonging to a kind of tumultuous chaos of telluric forces of passions and blind vital forces that are found in the becoming of the world. We experience ourselves subject between subject, but not only subject physically, but subject as a point in which the energies of the tumultuous chaos of blind and interpersonal forces and passions are condensed. What Nietzsche called Dionysian has its occasion or its support in this dimension of ours. Also the so-called extreme "ecologism", which advocates the total immersion of man in nature, has this same point of support.

But the person is not only begotten, not only a point of turbulence, transiently stable, in the vital river of the universe. Nietzsche was coherent: if God is denied, the Dionysian, the passionate, the irrational, must be dominant, indeed, the only thing.

By being result of a call from Creator Love, the person is constituted in a whole, in a perfectly differentiated unity, called to a direct relationship with God staff. The condition staff, result of his creaturely condition, prevents the singular man from falling into the undifferentiated chaos of a blind vital current, and makes him connatural with the free, clear, lucid response: it constitutes him as a subject of indeclinable responsibility before Creator Love. This dimension does not exactly coincide with the Nietzschean "Apollonian", because Nietzsche could not quite understand the condition staff, from his crisp and polemically atheistic perspective.

Perhaps no one has expressed the strength of this tension between chaos and clarity staff, between the elemental forces of vital passion and the freedom staff of love, between belonging to the "river-god of blood" and the call of the "clear star", between brute nature and the person, as R.M. Rilke has done in his "Duino Elegies".

But the relationship between these two poles is not civil service examination, and perhaps this is the most serious error of appreciation of the brilliant poet. It is not a dialectic between good and evil, between the "hidden and guilty" and the "clear and innocent" because generation and creation are not dialectically composed. They are not the negative and positive moments of a dialectic that gives rise to man. Man does not mix subject evil, the work of negativity, and good spirit, the creation of God Love. Such dualistic resonances are a constant temptation, but they are not Christian. Creation, which is called from the person to God, is a divine blessing on generation that turns it into procreation. Moreover, the whole reality of the world is result of the divine design to create man; because man is the only creature of this world that has been willed by itself, all the other creatures, all the vital flow that permeates the universe depends on, is the fruit of, the divine design that calls people.

The creative call does not accede to a strange subject . The parents beget, they have this capacity because God has granted it to them in view of his creative design. Therefore, even if the parents dispose, by virtue of their generative capacity, a subject that was previously dispersed, the begotten person is all created, that is to say, all of him, in all his dimensions, is result of a call and therefore all the human dimensions are intrinsically directed towards God.

The consequences of this peculiar composition between creation and generation are very wide-ranging, and here we can only outline some of them.

d) The double transcendence of the person, to God and to the world

If human existence staff is result of a creative call of divine Love, that is to say, if the person is the fruit of a creative call that constitutes him from nothingness, the first thing that, in order of nature, man has is his openness to God. All the other elements follow from this openness and are marked by it. The creationist vision thus leads us to overcome a way of seeing things that is very much in conformity with our way of knowing, which tends to grasp, in the first place, the concrete entities and only subsequently detects, as accessory, the relative affections. It is not that man, already constituted by essential and substantial elements, is affected by a call. The call does not access an already constituted being, but constitutes it from nothingness. That is why openness to God is the first and most intimate thing to him and not something that accesses a supposed intimacy subsisting in itself. When Augustine wrote that "God is more intimate to me than I am to myself" he was not making a pious metaphor, but was pointing to something radically decisive in the anthropology derived from creation. The same thing was affirmed by the medievalists when they said that the human being receives being through the soul, that is, through openness to God, and, in general, that substance receives being through form. This reality, despite the clarity and importance of its meaning, is very difficult to illustrate with examples from our experience. The reason for this difficulty is that, only when the knower is creative wisdom and only when the lover is creative Love, do the act of knowledge and the act of creative love precede, because they cause, the known and the loved. On the other hand, our relations of knowledge and love always presuppose a pre-existing intelligible and good object, which is why it is so difficult to think - and much more difficult to imagine - that it is a call that constitutes the creature. Perhaps it could be illustrated by accidental realities, as, for example, the whirlwind that originates in a fluid when it is absorbed. The whirlwind is not "something" but an affection of the fluid in question. But if we imaginatively consider the whirlwind as a "something", then it is clear that it is all constituted by and dependent on absorption, so that the direction towards the point of attraction - the sink, for example - is what has primacy in all that is.

The creature thus has a structure in which the fundamental aspect is its relationship to God. Certainly this relationship is composed of other aspects, because the creature is not a pure relationship, but has aspects of being in itself. But all these aspects depend on the creative call, that is, on the relation of finality or completion to God. The traditional Philosophy asserts that the final cause is the cause of the causality of all causes. This affirmation, which has its direct meaning in the operation of an agent, is exactly transcribed in the result of the operation when the one who works is God the Creator, who fully measures, from his most radical determination, the created reality.

Therefore it can be said that, as St. Augustine affirmed, creatures exist as true because God knows them, because they are the fruit of creative wisdom, and they exist as good because they are the fruit of the call of Creative Love. Creative Love and Creative Wisdom are the measure of all created reality. That is why the creature is first and foremost appearance before God: it is not that God's gaze penetrates to the substantial intimacy of the creature, but it is the gaze that constitutes the creature. Consequently, the acceptance of the creature of which we spoke in dealing with the creationist foundation of morality is fundamentally a letting oneself be looked at and a letting oneself be loved. It is not the same thing to be looked at or to be loved as to let oneself be looked at or to let oneself be loved. The former is something proper to the one who looks or wills, and only something passive in the object. Letting oneself be loved or letting oneself be known implies, as we know from experience, a refusal to back down, and therefore requires an active stance. That is the fullest and most proper activity of the creature: to accept the gaze of Creative Wisdom and the benevolence of Creative Love. In an expression more immediate to our experience, this attitude could be called trust, faith and love.

The human creature has, then, a fundamental transcendence which is not mere openness to the universal, but primarily and fundamentally to God. This transcendence is not expressed in terms of knowledge or speculative desire, but in terms of submission and trust. Human life, in its radical sense, is - must be - a life of faith.

But man's transcendence is not exhausted by what we have said so far, because up to this point we have considered the creative call as if it were simple. In reality, as we are seeing in this chapter, the creative call is compounded with generation. This means that the call, which is the basis of the openness and radical transcendence of the person, includes in itself also an earthly mediation. For this reason, the radical openness of man to God - and the consequent duty to love him - is inseparable from and underlies an openness of the person to the world. Openness to the world, that is, to persons and through them to other creatures, is not definitive and cannot be understood in itself, but it can be experienced very directly. Logically, when God's creation is dispensed with, transcendence towards God is also dispensed with, and only transcendence towards others remains, which is why it has come to be said that in "this world... being and appearance coincide". This assertion is not a simple denial of the substantiality of objects, and it is certainly not expressed out of ignorance of the existence of deceptive appearances. Rather, it is the affirmation made from the attentive observation of the relational character of reality and especially of the human person: an affirmation that has the blur of considering that the worldly appearance is the final, but which has the good sense to point out a direct consequence of the peculiar creation of the human person.

Just as creation is made up of generation, openness to God is made up of openness to others and to the world. In the Gospel Jesus affirms that the first and greatest commandment is the commandment to love God, but immediately adds a "second" commandment "like" the first. By calling it "second" he distinguishes it from the first, but his immediate affirmation and declaration of its likeness express his connection to it. The basis of the requirement of neighbourly love is not primarily explained by a resemblance between man and God, by virtue of which man must will what God wills and how God wills it. The reason is more deeply rooted in the ontological foundations of the person: the transcendence of the person is also a consequence of a creatural love, for procreative generation is intimately connected with the creative call. This is why man does not love others in the same way as he can or must love, for example, the angels: and this is why in the Decalogue the precept of love for the parents who beget the person is placed in fourth place, as an intermediate between the precepts that express the duties of openness to God and the precepts that express the duties of openness to the world.

This is why the duty of love for others also includes the duty of trust in others. This is not a requirement of pure generosity, but a response to a worldly component of the creative call. Mistrust in people is not immoral only because it violates a precept, or because it goes against a psychological requirement of human existence, but because it is a denial of one of the ontological foundations - not certainly the primary and foundational one, but indissolubly linked to it - of the person himself.

Discussions between personalism and communitarianism, when posed as a disjunctive, are outlandish, inhuman and abstract because they ignore that the creative call that constitutes the person as a person is also the foundation of human plurality, precisely by virtue of its composition with generation.

The openness of the person to the world, in the sense that the person has a relationship to the world that precedes his or her dimension of substantiality, is easily traceable in life experience.

Perhaps the most decisive manifestation of this reality is the phenomenon, already mentioned, that man becomes maximally self-transparent within ethical experience, which means that he does not grasp his truth in a "goal" way but in a way that is connected to the moral knowledge of his action in the world.

But it is the whole of human existence, the whole of life, that reflects this status. The person can be known in his or her singularity in a trance of action, which means that we do not really know ourselves, but that we are known. The Greek doctrine of the daimon staff which others can see, but which always remains hidden from our gaze, is nothing more than the expression of the universal experience that others who live with us, contemplate our actions and listen to our speeches, know us better than we know ourselves. It is not that we possess a being staff that sample "slightly" to others through expressive means subject to our own will. When someone claims that they do not manage to make themselves known or do not manage to make the richness of their life known to others who are close to them, they are simply deceiving themselves. Before those who live with us and witness our life, we are uncovered, because our being-appearance-before-God has a reflection, not certainly exhaustive and fully adequate, but intrinsic, in our appearance before others. It is a different matter if one does not succeed in making known a message that one has received and tries to transmit to others. Then the complaint about not knowing how to explain oneself may be justified. But when it is a question of a doctrine of life, the way of transmission should no longer be to rely on techniques of expression, but that of vital assimilation, and that way, for those who contemplate life, is infallible: there being and appearance coincide as a matter of course, although there too the person can distort himself, as before God, so as not to let himself be known. But then he is violating himself.

Evidently, when the relationship with God disappears from the perspective, the condition staff is no longer based on creation and is entrusted entirely to human plurality: to knowledge and to the relationship with others. Here we have arrived at logical consequences of frightening significance: the condition staff is given by society. It is understood then that whoever has not been seen or named by a proper name by other men, is not considered a person. Abortion or infanticide can then be justified. This attitude, even if it is criminal, is understandable when creation is disregarded. It has a certain foundation, which is the fact that the condition staff is intrinsically linked to "being looked at". For this reason, even in a more upright perspective, human culture distinguished and punished in very different ways the murder of someone who has already appeared before men - which was called murder - and the murder of someone who had not yet appeared or had only been born: thus abortion or infanticide were punished much more lightly than the murder of a mature person.

e) Nature and history: culture and Education

Because of its intimate composition with creation, human procreation has a scope far beyond mere physical or biological causation. Creator Love is not only the cause of the temporal origin of the person's existence, but its constant foundation. Creator Love does not cause the becoming of the person, but the person himself. For this reason, although human generation can be studied in its concrete historical facticity, its human scope and meaning cannot be reduced to that of an event definitively enclosed in its historical past: in some way human procreation must have a broader temporal scope.

Indeed, if what constitutes man as a person has been composed through earthly mediation, man's openness to others must be profoundly significant for his own being staff. The person is not only constituted by a creative call, but also by the generation which is the principle of human plurality. This is why the plural condition of man is decisive for the constitution of the person. Decisive not in the sense of exclusivity, because, let us repeat, it is God's direct creation that constitutes the human creature as a person of absolute dignity. But it is decisive, because plurality has its beginning in generation, and generation is intrinsically linked to that creation. Creation has counted on plurality, and for this reason it needs it in order to fulfil its design. This is expressed not only in the concrete act of generation, but in the whole history of life staff. Thus, for example, man is naturally rational, and the foundation of his rationality is creation, but in the same way that God's creative call "passed" through the mediation of the parents, for the fulfilment of his natural rationality, the person needs the mediation of other men.

In the 18th century J.J. Rousseau observed that human rationality is not natural because it depends on language which is evidently cultural and historical. This is a fallacy because "natural" and "historical" are not opposed to each other, but claim each other: what is natural in man is not simply innate. Already the classical Philosophy had claimed that the knowledge of first principles was natural but not innate, because it required man's meeting with the world.

This is perceptible to an attentive look at the temporal process leading from birth to the human maturation of the person. Modern psychology has tried to detect and express the decisive character of the first period of the child's life outside the mother's womb. The mother does not only provide the physical equipment for life, she does not only nourish and defend the physical life of her child. With her affection and protection, love and strength, she gives, in the environment created by her lap, perhaps the most important lesson we humans need to face life with confidence. It is the lesson of the unity between being - facticity, brute force - and meaning - love, good. The person who enters the world finds himself in a multiplicity of facts that is chaotic, and that, for this reason, causes fear, and makes him shy away. The child's fear of the dark is an expression of the fear of the unintelligible, of the chaotic. The resource to maternal protection is the search for a realm where things become clear and protection is found from the threat of blind facticity. Perhaps it is in this way that the person has, implicitly, the first and most fundamental knowledge that the world into which he or she has been thrown is not a chaos of brute forces where the strongest triumphs, but a realm where goodness, righteousness, love, are, in the last written request, united with the most decisive power over the course of events. In this way the mother's lap, which extends into the home, is the first manifestation of God in the life of the person, of God who is both powerful and good. Only with this intimate conviction - stronger than the intellectual one, and which cannot be replaced by the most rigorous intellectual explanations - can we face the task of living in a world where goodness and brute deeds only accidentally coincide. If we did not have the conviction that in the end "good will triumph in the end", that is, if we did not have a primordial faith that the foundation of everything is the good and powerful God, we would not be able to live as people, because it would be to deprive the actual good of all meaning. This is not utilitarianism, nor a selfish moral approach, but the foundation of meaningful action. The activity of the scientist is also based on this fundamental conviction that the chaotic multiplicity of phenomena that we observe in the world must have an order, an intelligible meaning. As Einstein said, the most admirable thing is that the world has an order that we can know. Without this fundamental conviction, the harsh factuality, the harshness of facts and human evil, would plunge us into absurdity and despair. In the realm of motherly love, which we experience in the first months of our lives as undeniably strong, we learn that the world is good. Only in this way can we withstand the evils that we will undoubtedly encounter in the future. The mother with her affection and strength introduces the person into the world which by divine creation is human, it is her home. It is natural for man to find himself in the world as in his own home, but he can only achieve this through maternal mediation or some suitable substitute.

The natural, that is to say, what man is to be according to the design of Creative Wisdom, intrinsically demands the historical or cultural, which is the mediation of other men. In short, in order to be what he is, the person needs plurality.

Herein lies the anthropological greatness of Education and culture. At the same time, this gives us the core topic to see the magnitude of its risks. The right of parents to the Education of their children is not based on a particular school of social thought, but on man's own natural condition. It is not merely a public or political statement, but an ontological one. Its consequences will have to be expressed in law and in social organisation, but it must be based on man's own plural condition and on the peculiarity of his origin.

The caveat of the scope of culture for the configuration of the human personality could lead one to think, as Machiavelli asserted, that the human subject is susceptible to any cultural determination. Indeed, if one disregards the design of Creative Wisdom, the man who is born could be considered as an indefinitely flexible material substratum. The Education would inevitably be manipulative.

On the contrary, the vision of man as a creature called through procreation leads us to a conception of the Education as the path to the fulfilment of what man already is, but cannot complete without the mediation of the human training . It is the affirmation of a divine creative design that allows us to distinguish the humanising Education from the manipulative Education . This distinction is based, in final, on the Admissions Office or not of a truth about man, which the Education would serve.

We have already seen that Education is necessary. The risk involved in satisfying this need is to take an approach to training which, instead of being at the service of what the person is, tries to shape people according to an external idea directive , i.e. one which is not recognised as being present in any way in the learner. This happens when the reality of a creative design is denied, and, therefore, when the truth of man that is already present in him is denied. But the result can be similar when, from a faith perspective, the wound of original sin is considered so deep that it leads to a mistrust of what the person has in himself, and attempts are made to ensure the pretended righteousness by means of an exact determination of all acts. This is the case of those formators who are so passionate about a certain orthodoxy that "they often suffocate people in the passionate attempt to protect them. The degree program towards more and more severe sanctions or censures, towards more and more particular rules, the exasperated search for a meticulous regulation of any possible event, seems to give them self-confidence: but they will have inhibited, ignorant or fractious children. Security before anything else" is an anti-life motto par excellence" (J.B. Torelló).

The apparent opposite is true of those who are so insecure about what they should teach that they fear that any educational activity will be manipulative for the helpless child who is born, and would like the child to make the choice for himself.

I said: apparently the opposite. Indeed, despite the difference between the two positions, they both coincide in conceiving Education as a violent imposition from outside of a set of ideas and behavioural patterns that are foreign to the subject staff.

The immense proliferation of family Education or training courses for parents, along with their undoubted merits, always give rise to certain perplexities: 'how is it that we were trained by parents who had not taken such courses? And if they are now so essential that it is even proposed - and sometimes carried out - to separate children from their parents, to entrust them to specialised institutions to be educated by experts, it is certainly because Education has become as technical a matter as the production of sophisticated appliances from raw materials. That is to say, the Education is an induction from outside, of something that is in no way in the passive subject of it.

In fact, our own experience, that of those of us who were educated by "non-specialists", is the best counter-proof to this perspective. In a vision of man as a creature of God, it is recognised that the person already has, as the classics said, the "seeds of virtue", and so Education has much in common with cultivation. It is therefore understandable that for an attentive gaze such as Plato's, the Education was seen as a process of remembering, i.e. as an educting of what was in the person. This is the meaning of the liberal Education in the classical sense. "The liberal Education is a cultivated human being. "Culture" - from the Latin, cultura - means primarily agriculture: the cultivation of the soil and its products, caring for the soil, improving the soil of agreement with its nature. Schools "Culture" means, in a derivative form, today, primarily the cultivation of the mind, the care and improvement of the mind's native agreement with the nature of the mind. As the soil needs cultivators, so the mind needs a teacher. But it is not so easy to find teachers as it is to find farmers" (Leo Strauss).

The classical liberal Education is based on the confidence that the person already has seeds in him/herself that must be developed. The Education is thus a service to the truth of the person, i.e. to his or her nature and to his or her natural capacities and inclinations as a person.

Scientism, which starts, as we know, from the denial of natural meanings and purposes, the first thing it aims at in the field of training is the elimination of natural purposes in order to remain exclusively with the components Materials and their properties, among which could be counted the sensitive and psychic passions, in order to build with them the social whole, as artefacts are built with raw materials. The Education then tends not to favour the "seeds of virtue" found in people, but to induce the concrete attitudes that make individuals good elements of the social "construct".

Scientism takes a dim view of the classical liberal Education , because it is just the opposite: the classical liberal Education is a redoubt of faith in the nature of man, which implies a confession, at least implicit, of creation. Thus the classical liberal Education "demands the firmness implied in the resolution to take theories in vogue as mere opinions, or to regard generalised opinions as extreme opinions which are likely to be at least as erroneous as the strangest and least popular opinions. The liberal Education is a liberation from vulgarity" (Leo Strauss).

Sometimes, in the field of mass culture, voices are raised against those who devote themselves to receive training with determination and intensity. They are accused of being repressed or "underage" volunteers. Particularly today, it is common to shrink back from submission to give or receive a deep and well-determined Education in the religious and moral sphere, and yet a resolute withdrawal of Education is encouraged in other human aspects whose values are undisputed in society (e.g. almost nobody doubts whether it is good to give children an intense scientific training , despite the great mentality-shaping power of this training, or, in certain cases, to allow them to be formed with a strong, determined political consciousness). This tells us sample that these reservations are not really about disqualifying the unconditional acceptance of certain values, but about a status crisis of faith in moral and religious values as an expression of the truth of the person, which have been replaced by the values that society imposes by making itself absolute in the educational activity of the scientist. This transmutation of values is sometimes manifested in the certainty and firmness with which "accepted" science is transmitted, and the simultaneous reservation to make ethical considerations, even if it is on aspects that deal with very serious aspects of the value of the person.

Logically, when the crisis of values is total, the only thing left is the evaluation of freedom. But the elevation of freedom to a supreme value and the corresponding ideal of Education for freedom leave the person sunk in scepticism, because no absolute meaning is recognised. The values are, then, those created by freedom itself, which are therefore as precarious and contingent as the decision that gave rise to them. The core topic is again the fact that freedom is not properly a human value. It is something more basic: freedom is the condition for the human realisation of its truth and, therefore, of its values.

The tremendous proliferation of "pedagogism" is not a passing cultural fad or something unimportant. It concerns such a fundamental aspect of the human condition that the various theories of Education are almost the epiphenomenon, perhaps the most effective and shaping, of the various conceptions of human nature, of its dignity staff, of its truth and of the character of plurality.

f) Moral law and conscience

Man's condition staff makes him a unique and unrepeatable being. But, just as creation is not opposed to but is composed with generation, so too the condition staff is not opposed to the condition of the individual of the human species. Moreover, as we have seen, the very condition staff includes the dimension of relationship with other people.

It is this peculiarity of human plurality that is at the basis of the phenomenon we are now going to consider, which is the nature of the laws that "measure" the condition staff.

At first it may seem paradoxical to speak of laws that measure people as such. Such laws should be universal norms regulating the cases that fall under them. There are indeed such laws of the person as such. The fact that God creates each person by means of generation allows us to speak of a divine project about man, in universal, because in the divine creative design, the human life of each person was not intended to be isolated or independent, but a life of a person among persons: "it is not good that man should be alone". In creating each person individually, God loves that person with a "unique love", that is, he loves him "by name". But in composing this creation with generation, God constitutes man in a plural condition, he loves the human family of unique and at the same time equal persons. The "equality" of these unique beings who are persons is indeed a most peculiar equality. Its measure is the law of man as such.

Obviously, as a material being or in terms of non-personal aspects, the human person is measured by universal laws. Physical or chemical laws regulate human reality in the same way as they regulate other beings. As a "heavy" being, the human person has a law which makes it a concrete case of the law of gravity.

The law of man as such, i.e. the law that regulates his behaviour as a person and marks the demands of his being staff is, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, the moral law.

Certainly the moral law is universal, for it expresses the demands of the fulfilment of the person in his truth according to the creative design. But this law cannot be of a universality identical to that of, for example, physical laws which immediately measure concrete cases. This is the peculiarity of the moral law that distinguishes it from any other law subject .

The moral law regulates the person through the conscience, which is the organ in which the universal laws of man, as such, are personalised.

To personalise moral laws is not merely to internalise them, as if the difference between moral laws and physical laws were only that the former are observed with knowledge. The personalisation of the law assumes that the universally valid moral law is expressed in demands that have personal tones, and that different concrete acts can prevail.

Of course, if we consider negative moral laws, i.e. those prohibiting inhuman acts, their content is unambiguous, and here personalisation is practically equivalent to internalisation. But the content of moral laws is broader than the mere prohibition of evil acts. The moral law is imperative of positive acts of virtue, and here the exercise of virtue can be expressed in different acts. Maximilian Kolbe performed an imperative of charity by offering his life for a father of a family. This act was a heroic act of charity. But it could also have been an act of charity to allow oneself to be replaced. Not all the positive demands of the virtues can be materially determined in concrete acts. That is the task of conscience. Conscience personalises the universal law, which is why it can be said that conscience is the organ of the vocation staff. It is there, and not only in the universal call of the moral laws, that God's call to each person resounds in the course of his or her life.

If conscience were only the organ of the internalisation of law, its training would consist in the theoretical knowledge of universal laws and, perhaps, in the strengthening of the will to comply with them. But the fact that conscience is the organ of the personalisation of the law implies that its training needs, besides the sufficient theoretical knowledge of the universal moral norms, inner refinement or connaturality with moral values and with the sense of God's concrete call to moral duty. This connaturality is achieved by frequent and faithful attention with moral values and by the guidance of good teachers.