Care, conscience, and hospitality - with Xavier Symons

Episode 2 of Careful Thinking

         Maurycy Minkowski, 'By the Sick Sister', 1905 (commons.wikimedia.org)

My guest on the second episode of the ‘Careful Thinking’ podcast is Xavier Symons, a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, who will soon be taking up a new post as director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at Australian Catholic University.

I first came across Xavier’s work via an article he wrote about care for people suffering from dementia, which was informed by some of the ideas and theories that have influenced my own recent thinking about care. I was also impressed by a more recent article by Xavier on the role of hospitality in care (from which I’ve borrowed the header image for this post), which referenced the writings of Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher whose work I’m currently exploring as a possible resource for developing a personalist ethic of care. These articles prompted me to get hold of a copy of Xavier’s recent book on conscience and conscientious objection in healthcare, which I’d warmly recommend.

                                                           Xavier Symons

Our conversation in this episode ranged widely over these and many other topics, the thread running through them being the influence on Xavier’s work of Catholic social teaching, and of Christian personalist philosophy. The potential of personalism for informing care ethics has yet to be fully explored, in my view, and Xavier’s work makes a valuable contribution. Linus Vanlaere and Chris Gastmans have done pioneering work in this area, building on what’s known as ‘Louvain/Leuven personalism’, but the variety of Christian personalism associated with thinkers such as Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein is rarely referenced by care ethicists (though, on Stein, see Episode 4 of the podcast).

Here’s a key quote by Xavier from our conversation:

The basic commitment of every form of personalism….is that persons are morally special and existentially special in the universe. There’s something special about persons…there’s something wonderful and magnificent about being a unique and unrepeatable individual….Personalists are focused on ensuring that society’s moral and social norms reflect the recognition that every human person has an inherent and inalienable dignity, and we need to make sure that we are promoting and respecting that, and we’re not…becoming morally numb to the plight of persons in different situations of social disadvantage.

For me I think that’s really important in the context of dementia because my concern is that there’s a kind of social death that people with dementia undergo, not dissimilar to those experiencing racism…where they kind of become invisible to society…in which they’re physically present but morally absent, kind of morally non-existent, not worthy of consideration. That’s a deep concern that I have, in the way people with disabilities, physical and mental, are treated in our society.

I hope you’ll give the episode a listen. You can find it here, or wherever you get your podcasts. As always, do feel free to leave a comment below.

You can download a transcript of the episode here:

Careful Thinking Episode 2 Transcript

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