>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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>> Well good morning everyone.  Happy to welcome you here to the Library of Congress this morning.  I am Carol Brown.  I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs in the John W. Kluge Center here at the library.  This event is sponsored by the John Kluge Center which was established through a generous endowment given by John W. Kluge.  Inspired by a vision of a way for the nation's leaders to tact the wisdom of mature scholars whose judgment and knowledge would bring fresh perspectives to government, with the idea that this center could provide a space where the world of affairs and the world of ideas could meet, where thinkers and doers could come together from mutually enriching conversation.  This center would attract the very best available minds in the scholarly world facilitate their access to the library's very remarkable collections and engage them in conversation--informal conversation with members of congress and other public figures and that is the founding vision for the center.  In addition, the center also brings the most promising junior scholars here to conduct research in the library's collections.  And we promote the scholarly and enterprise and other variety of other ways through small conferences, lectures, seminars, and this event this morning something of an experiment an informal conversation.  You can get more information about the center and these programs by going to the library's webpage.  If you go down the right side you'll see Kluge Center.  Go to the Kluge Center page and at the bottom you can sign up for email alerts and RSS feeds.  Most of the center's programs come directly out of the research of our wonderful scholars.  In this morning's program comes out of the certainly the long term knowledge and thought of our scholars but not specifically their research at the Kluge Center.  We noticed this spring as looked at who is going to be in the center that we had an amazing confluence of scholars deeply knowledgeable and well-positioned intellectually to consider moral questions and the implications of those questions in society.  It was kind of too good an opportunity to pass up and so Cardinal McCarrick suggested a subject we were try to figure how we would bring together this conversation of what it would be.  And I thank the Cardinal for suggesting human dignity as the idea.  You will see that--or all the scholars before you have been either currently are residents in this center have been the spring or we did ask one of our scholars to come, he's local scholar.  He was here quite a bit of time last spring.  So what we will have for this conversation is some of the very best of the thinkers and scholars that the Kluge Center has been able to bring together over the years.  We're not going to spend a lot of time on biographies and you will see then in your chairs, we have bios of all of the scholars.  But let me just say a further word about the program.  You will notice those of you who know Dr. Elshtain, will notice that she's on the program but she's not here.  Dr. Elshtain was taken sick last evening at the airport.  Dizziness and a range of other unpleasant symptoms and had remained in Chicago.  So my thanks to Dr. John Witte who I snag this morning as he walked in the door.  [Laughter] And he has agreed to moderate both of the panels.  And really I wanna thank you deeply for rescuing me and rescuing this event.  You'll see that Dr. Witte in fact is well qualified for this role.  He's a scholar of legal history, marriage law, religious--marriage law and religious liberty and directs a center for the study of law and religion at Emory University.  I won't say too much more but do take a look at his bio in the program.  Our hope this morning is that this conversation will look at the foundations of the concept of the dignity of the human prison.  And then go on to consider its power in the world.  It's an idea that initially when the Cardinal suggested to me I thought, "Well, that's--you know, that's interesting."  The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had a very complex dimension and deep resonances in a range of issues.  It's a really foundational idea.  And so what we wanna do this morning is to consider the deep currents, the rich hidden dimensions that often remain unex--unnoticed or unexplored, overlooked when people look at some of the issues that come out of the concept but don't actually go back to the foundations of the concept itself.  So we will not be concerned with public policy or passing concerns.  But instead try to probe for the deep humanistic understanding of this fundamental dimension of human experience.  I will just say a word about the participants so you can get familiar with their names.  But again please look at the bios.  We've been very uncreative and have simply seated people in alphabetical order.  And actually that will make it easy for you to track them in the--in the bios as well.  Dr. George Chrousos; Roshi Joan Halifax; Dr. Jennifer Hochschild; his Eminence Cardinal McCarrick; Dr. Abdulkarim Soroush, and our rescuer this morning, Dr. John Woody.  And at this point I'll turn it over to John.
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>> Well thank you very much Dr. Brown.  I certainly am no substitute for Jean Elshtain.  I can't imagine a person on the world who is a substitute Jean Bethke Elshtain.  But I will try to do a frail approximation of her role as chairing this event.  I know I speak for her and for all of us when I say that we are deeply grateful to Carolyn Brown and her colleagues in the Kluge Center for their generous hospitality for setting this intellectual banquet for us and for giving us the opportunity to discuss one of the fundamentals of our existence together as persons and peoples, the concept of human dignity in attendant understandings of human rights and responsibilities that that involves.  Dr. Elshtain prepared some brief opening remarks that were handed to me 23 minutes ago.  I've been through them once and I'll be--go through 'em a second time which is before you.  Just to frame the conversation and just reading them briefly, it's quite obvious that she has thought deeply about this topic, and in her opening remarks framed some of the conversation that we wanna have about the concept of human dignities.  So allow me at the insult to you simply to read her text.  And forgive me for not looking at you in so doing.  Here's Dr. Elshtain, we witness an event perhaps we see a person in custody, someone disarmed who possesses no threat being spat upon, mocked, slapped about, denied access to food or other of life's necessities.  Witnessing this, we are likely to remark in horror that this person's dignity is under assault, that a human being is being treated in a way that no human being should be treated.  Those of us familiar with Primo Levi's classic work Survival in Auschwitz may recall this heroine depiction of the remorseless stripping away of the humanity of the prisoner.  "They destroy you as a human being," first he tell us--tells this, "Before they actually kill your body."  We know what he means.  They strip you of the makers and markers of your humanity.  They reduce you to a quivering piece of starving flesh.  And then they kill you.  In fact it was the experience of World War II of gulags and death camps, that cropped to the explosion of concern with human dignity.  A status assumed by those who were the architects of the Universal Declaration of human rights.  It is precisely because we are beings who can be said to have an innate dignity.  God given the majority of the drafters believed that we have rights.  These rights are not given to us by the state and they can not be arbitrarily aggregated by states.  States may in fact do this but that is an occasion for condemnation not emendation, because that means the state has violated egregiously his legitimate role, its boundaries.
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>> The Universal Declaration reflected a discourse and a set of practices whether actual or in situ that had a long historic lineage.  The dignity and brotherhood or solidarity of human beings qua human was assumed to by those working in the natural law tradition.  Those who formulated a universal law of humanity like the Youth [inaudible] of the 6th Century CE.  Those who assume we are equally children of God.  This morally equality bestowed a dignity that could not be stripped away, or moral revolution and a long moral evolution led to the point that human dignity was now a status assumed by all rather than a narrow dignitatus assigned variously by rank or by vocation.  Modern critiques of the notion of dignity get it wrong then when they assumed that the notion of dignity is inherently distorted and distorting.  That it belongs to aristocratic societies that practice various forms of discrimination, we find unacceptable in modern human rights respecting cultures and polities.  Those who narrowly circumscribed the notion of "dignity forgets something vital," they forget that powerful terms and ideas travel well pass their point of origin.  What might once have been an exclusionary idea is now a capacious and an inclusionary one.  Of this troubled globe of ours proclaiming one's dignity and one's status as a possessor of rights maybe the only weapon available to the down cast, the tormented, the violated.  It's a universal language, voicing up potent truth about the human person.  We then recall the powerful moment in the film "The Elephant Man" when John Merrick a horribly deformed man whose appearance was grotesque and frightening to many cries out to those hounding him, "I am not an animal.  I am a human being."  Nothing more be said.  This is a remarkable thing, "I am a human being."  This is far more than a statement of specie's identity, or at that it would have no power to move us or to shame Merrick's tormenters.  Rather it is a normative claim of great force, "I am a human being.  There is a dignity that is mine that you cannot take away from me, however grotesque my body."  Of course there always complications, are there not?  On the one hand, we find unconditional inherent dignity present in all.  It cannot be stripped away.  And the words of the American Catholic Bishops pastoral letter on economic justice for all "Every human being possesses an inalienable dignity that stands human existence prior to any division and to racist or nations and prior to human labor and human achievement.  And the source of this dignity, we are creating in God's image.  We are not reducible to any set of human social practices.  Our dignity comes from God not from membership in a particular body or economic status or individual accomplishments.  On the other hand, one might say that human beings are social, historical, and vulnerable.  Their dignity maybe harmed or enhanced.  Our dignity can only be realizing community not by ourselves and isolation.  Indeed we judge societies in part by whether or not they protect or undermine human dignity."  So there are real external threats to human dignity.  But if it can be completely stripped away, then it's not been--then it is not a given.  It is not the status nearly all advocates of human dignity assumed.  As we say when we don't know what else to say, things are complicated.  And so to help sort these things out, we have this distinguished panel of Kluge fellows and Dr. Brown and Dr. Elshtain have been planning how to sort out this topic and they have ultimately as we heard in the introduction decided to divide it into two parts, and these porous boundaries between the two parts.  First, when we're looking at the foundations of human dignity, looking at such things as the history of the idea of human dignity, its importance, its relationship to rights its moral and philosophical ground in various religious and intellectual traditions.  We'll then move after the break to a power discussion and there we'll look at the experience of human dignity.  How it affect our relationships with ourselves or thinking about ourselves and what happens when its assault that are violated especially by tyrants.  So to get a start and we would like to invite our distinguished panelist each to offer us five, and I emphasize five minutes of opening remarks about the concept of human dignity especially in this first section about the foundations of human dignity.  Five and a half minutes is fine, after six minutes I'll try to be my best grim law professor and start getting out my [inaudible] whip.  The idea would to simply get five very wise souls to reflect on this dignity, I might even add some words as well which should be unwise and then we will interact with each other as a panel first and then interact with each of you.  And so as you listen to these opening remarks, may I invite you to think about hard questions, difficult issues that you'd like to see addressed, things that were not taken into account as we put together this collage of perspectives.  If you have very difficult questions, please put them to Cardinal McCarrick.  If you have easy questions, put them to the rest of the panel.  [Laughter] We're gonna start as Dr. Brown says in alphabetical order, and we'll start with Dr. Chrousos who comes to us with the wisdom of the Greeks, not only is that his proud fatherland, Dr. Chrousos also is a master of some of the early Greek classics and the wisdom that that tradition has given the West and indeed the world, but he comes also with his very deep medical toolbox.  He is an endocrinologist, always been thinking throughout his career about issues of stress, at both the cellular level all the way through to the remedial level with the place of meditation especially as an important part of the remedy package.  Let's invite him to open with a few remarks and then we'll go seriatim from there, Dr. Chrousos.
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>> I will try to give you a biological or scientific perspective to human dignity and I will start with the Ancient Greeks.  [Inaudible] who was a sophist in Athens had said "That the beginning of science is the visit of names."  So I'll just give you a couple of etymological informations.  Number one, dignity comes from the word dignus, Latin word means worth.  So dignity is self worth.  In Greek word is axia and worth is axios, preppin [phonetic] means owing, so axioprepeia is dignity in Ancient Greece, and Modern Greece which means self-worth or respect.  And I remind you the word axiomatic, which means worthy of its own.  So the Ancient Greeks knew and suggested that dignity was self evident and existent of course they exempted slaves and so forth, it wasn't that as good as it is today.  Now Sophocles had said something in one of his tragedies, which appears to be correct.  He said that there are many wonderful things and nothing is more wonderful than the human.  And now we know that the most complex being, the most complex system that we know of in this universe is the human.  What are complex systems?  Anything, the universe, the planetary systems, you know, the galaxies, but also the atmosphere, the biosphere, these are complex systems.  They have multiple interactions.  They are self-organizing, adapting through feedback loops, resilient contemplations, and emergent properties such as for example, from life with humans, from humans who have intellect, from intellect we have soul, from humans of civilization, and so forth.  A lot of emerging properties that we would not have imagined if we just knew the ingredients of humans, and we should consider human societies also as complex biological systems.  I wanna remind you that recently we found that there are, in our brains, the so-called mirror neurons which made us feel and act like people who are right next to us.  And also recently we've been talking about emotional epidemiology, so resonance with others, and emotion epidemiology, communicate with each other.  Somethings happens especially nowadays with the media and the idea spreads throughout the world.  I won't spend too much time on this to discuss complexity.  I'll just say that our DNA is 3 million bases--3 billion bases.  If you extend it, it's one meter long.  It's a molecule 1 meter long, but you can put it in a little cell, you can compact it.  And also we know that one from the other are proximately are different by about 1 percent.  Also we know that we have a tremendous brain, extreme complexity, 100 billion neurons.
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>>if you use the length of these neurons as cables and put them all together, that's 100,000 kilometers and only 1.2 kilograms of the brain, so tremendous complexity there as well.  The brain communicates with itself in multiple ways in the rest of the body and that's what you see here, that they're multiple, you know, extreme connections, human beings because they're so complex, have a so-called pedomorphosis or neoteny which means that we are not complete until we are about 27 years old.  So our brain continues to evolve, the final cables are connecting at the age of about 25 to 27.  And we now know that there is an area in the brain which you see in red, in this slide, which is the area that is responsible for self-awareness.  So everything goes there.  And that's exactly where dignity is in that area.  So human self-awareness, involves past, present, and future, cognition, emotion when it's brief, feeling when it's a little longer, and mood when it's all the time, most of the time.  It's involved with a reward and punishment, that's another place set on the brain.  Self worth is--as I said before, dignity is self evident.  And then we also have transcendence which many people feel, not everybody but it's also a human property, brain property.  Now, how does anybody view their dignity?  It's not the same in everybody, it depends on our genetics, constitution which can be developmental or epigenetic, in other words, changes in our own DNA, permanent changes, and environmental and of course social culture is key.  And of course dignity has a strong subjective, emotional component which can be feeling and can be mood.  Other areas that are important for how we feel our dignity; intrauterine stress, how we have been exposed; bonding, attachment, quality, how we'd interacted with that person who took care of us in the first years of life whether there's been abuse or neglect, and whether we've been exposed to trauma.  So whether we assault on--assaults on dignity.  Assaults on dignity are major human stressors.  So whenever you assault the dignity of somebody, that person usually is very, very stressed and that is reflected in his brain and in his body.  What are those?  First of all, everybody expects certain respect and expect it and perceive and applied sometimes is not the same.  So where there is a discrepancy there, that's stressful.  Socioeconomic status, poor people feel worse than more rich people, minority status, disease, disability status which I said before, job loss, downsizing, loss of control, depression.  Depression is a disease of human dignity because the individual with depression self inflicts assaults on their own dignity.  It's not that they're responsible for it.  It's biological to their extent.  However it's there and it's a horrible disease.  And finally, we have circumstantial assaults on dignity such as encounters with medicine which was the question I had, authority and others.  Whenever our dignity is assaulted, we feel dysphoria, which means embarrassment, irritability.  And if it's permanent and dependent on our genetics and our constitution, we can misinterpret the cues, occasion with prevailing negative affect.  Somebody in minority status, sometimes they feel assault on their dignity without--not being there, but it's there for them, you know, it's perceived and therefor it's correct.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I've said most of what I wanted to say.  I've to say I wanted to give you a little more biology.  I wanted to tell you that this dysphoric feelings that we have whenever our dignity is assaulted has to do with an area of the brain called amygdala, which is generating anxiety, fear, and anger, and aggression or despair, and also another part of the brain which is called the reward system.  And the reward system in somebody who has developed a certain dysphoric mood is really suffering from the assault on dignity that is sustained.  Thank you.
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>> We turn to Roshi Joan Halifax, the distinguished scholar of anthropology and in deep--a Buddhist with great training as a Buddhist abbot and leadership especially in the field of death and dying where the issues of human dignity are joined with particular acuity, Roshi Halifax.
>> Thank you so much.  And Dr. Brown, where are you?  Thank you.  Hi!  You went from one place to another there.  So it's a great honor to be here.  And I wanna speak today primarily from the perspective of Buddhism.  There are many identities that we hold, I can speak as a woman, I can speak as a western individual, I can speak as an American, I can speak as an anthropologist.  But I think that lens that is most useful today is the lens of the tradition that I've been practicing in--since 1965.  So Buddhism is not so concerned with social policy.  It is also not so concerned with religious perspectives per se.  It is more concerned with the development of moral character.  And we could say that it's very upstream f social policy and very upstream of religion.  Although social policy and religion of course are in a reflexive relationship with how individuals develop into good people or not so good people.  So we can't really separate the two when we look from a system's perspective.  But from the Buddhist perspective going as far upstream as we can, we want to look at what Dr. Chrousos was addressing, how do we actually train the mind, work with the mind so that that conditions within the mental continuum that gives rise to pro-sociality and fundamentally to dignity, are encouraged.  And I think that it's very interesting to objectify dignity, to look at it as a kind of principle that is some outside of us, that is somehow embedded within the social continuum, but we want to actually look at that, as you know very important.  But at the same time look at--and we haven't really defined and I'm interested to see if our panel can do that today.  What are the components of dignity in terms of our direct human experience?  I would say Buddhism points to some of those mental qualities.  I'm going to refrain from naming those at this point because I'm very interested in what the rest of the panel has to say, but I wanna go back to the origins if you will of this Buddhist perspective regarding the development of moral character.  I wanna also say that moral character is not looked on as distinct from the mental quality of compassion.  So you cannot actually tease apart morality from compassion and--but this is a Buddhist perspective and I would be very interested in what our scholars have to say about this.  Now as most of you know, Buddhism came into being 2,500 years ago, more or less.  Buddha was not a Buddhist, which is kind of relieving, that was an afterthought, but he did attract a small group of individuals, if not from the legendary perspective but from the historical perspective, into a view of the human character which was based on a vision of what he called the "Middle Way," a path between extremes.  And he in his deep insight had a vision of how human beings suffer and I would suggest that that suffering could be proposed as something that is very related to the experience of human dignity.  We could say that when we are not in a context internally of dignity, within our own intrapsychic continuum, or that we do not respect others that is the grounds for suffering.
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>> The Buddha in his first teaching, articulated four very important perspectives that are, I think, fundamental to what we're addressing today.  He noticed clearly that suffering exists.  He didn't say life is suffering.  He just noticed that there is pervasive or ill being throughout the world, he also noticed that suffering has some particular qualities or roots and those qualities I think are important to look at in relation to dignity, one of those qualities is the quality of greed, rapaciousness, desire, wanting, grasping, and this relates I believe to a certain extent to what Dr. Chrousos was bringing up in relationship to the seek and reward system in the brain, this neural network that he was addressing.  So that this sense of dissatisfaction is a kind of characteristic that is very common among human beings, another characteristic is that of aversion, hatred.  And, well, hatred and aversion, pretty well summarize it, aggression, and that of course relates again to what Dr. Chrousos was speaking about in relation to punishment and so forth.  And the third characteristic that the Buddhist spoke about is the characteristic of ignorance is that, you know, capacity or absence of capacity for us to have basic insight about who we really are individually and collectively.  So my time is up but I like us to explore more about the relationship between dignity and mental conditions that we characterize as compassion and as wisdom.  Thank you.
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>> Thank you Roshi Halifax.  We turn to a world class political scientist, Jennifer Hochschild, a Harvard Professor who's been working on issues of how issues become politically hot, and playing with some of the mechanics of that in society and culture, and the media, and in law.  And her particular topic of choice for her research recently has been on the Human Genomic Project which in many ways hasn't become hot yet but she's resourcing a debate which I think is gonna erupt in the United States and around the world over the next 5 to 15 years and listening to her wisdom on this would be particularly welcome.  Dr. Hochschild.
>> Yup.
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>> I was trying to say I'm a political scientist.  So I actually, don't take issues of public policy or passing events.  I will contest that argument.  But my question is exactly how to think about public policy concerns and how to think more broadly about democratic governance, around issues of genomics and their use in both--in medicine, in the law, in ancestry testing and a variety of different arenas.  Genomics as a science is actually very new of course.  As most of you probably remember, sequencing the first human genome took about 3 billion dollars and about 12 years, it happened roughly during the 1990s.  Now, the cost of sequencing a genome is as 1 person says "Asymptoting to 0 is now costing thousands of dollars.  It will eventually cost hundreds dollars.  My prediction although I'm not unique in this is that by the time my grandchildren and some of you grandchildren are born, they'll have a genome stapled to their birth certificate, in effect everybody's genome is gonna be immediately accessible if needed medically or perhaps just in general.  And of course the science on this is very, very new.  How many genes do humans have?  Well, they originally argued there were hundreds of thousands.  Now the belief is, as we've just heard recently, something like 20, 23,000, the numbers keep kinda sliding downwards, fewer than earthworms or mice or fruit flies or various other things.  That in itself has raised questions of sort of dignity, or somehow is it less dignified to have fewer genes and that's developed the whole little side argument which the scientist don't take very seriously but it's a [inaudible] question.  Another kind of issue that arises in genomics, I'll talk a little bit more about this in the second session.  There's an assumption or there has been an assumption for many years that most of human genome is called junk DNA.  It doesn't code for genes, which means it doesn't code for proteins, which means it doesn't do any work.  That turns out to be very important n forensic biobanks, I say, I'll talk about them in a few minutes.  But that turns out probably not to be the case.  So the science is very new, it used to be very expensive, it's still very expensive but becoming more and more accessible to the broad public and to multiple uses.  Do genes cause disease?  Well, that's of course one of the big driving forces behind genomics.  For some rare diseases, the answer is yes.  There's a pretty clear one-to-one relationship between the particular genetic structure and a particular disease manifestation.  In most cases, the answer is no.  There are many genes that will lead to a single disease, or there are many diseases that can be associated with a single gene, or there are gene-gene interactions, or especially important for our purposes, there are gene-environmental interactions and so on.  Environment can actually change genes as well as the reverse and so on.  So that relationship between genetics and disease is a lot more complicated as we've heard already the world is complicated.  So, that's kind of one piece that I want to just hold in your mind for just a second.  A second development that's going on simultaneously is within neuroscience and researches in neuroscience are also contributing to the same sort of concretization, biologization of human manifestations, by using functional MRIs to identify particular parts of the brain that are differentially excited or mature differentially we've already seen an example of that.  Sort of when one is thinking or one is reacting with pleasure, or one is reacting with fear, different parts of the brain light up in different sorts of ways.  So in some point in a not too distant future, neuroscience and genomics are gonna be linked more tightly than they are now so that scientists will at least purport to be able to connect genetic inheritance, brain functioning, thoughts, attitudes, behaviors.  That's what leads us to the question of human dignity it seems to me.  We are willing to think about the relationship between genes and diseases.  And in fact, we think that's a crucially important thing to do.  Many of you are tax dollars are going to study this question.  But how do we think about the relationship between genes and behavior, or genes and beliefs, or genes and ideas.  This seems to me take us directly into the realm of how we understand human dignity.  What would it mean to say that I'm smart or aggressive or gay or musically talented or athletically talented or the reverse of all those things because I have a particular genetic structure that manifests, it's often a particular lighting up of a particular component of my brain.  Does that somehow undermine my dignity as a human to think about those traits or my character, myself, my persona in a very precisely identifiable visual manifestation in physical units, much smaller than cells, of course?  The questions of mind-body of course is a very old one, which I'm not gonna even do anything more than gesticulate toward.  This is an issue that has been around since, well, centuries, eons.  And they've got a lot of responses to it of course over the many years.  Some people have believed that we should escape from the body through physical discipline or through mental exercise.  We wanna allow the mind in some sense to move freely away from the body.  Others have done the reverse, by glorifying the body as the seat of the mind and the soul and the human personality, human dignity.  Some people have argued of course that humans are distinguished from animals because they not only have a body but they also have a mind that they can use that in some sense is distinguished from and separate from their bodily manifestation.  Well, how does all of these challenged by genomics?  That's, I think, the underlying question for us today.  A genome's--The genome scientist and the neuroscientist together, can eventually show exactly where the mind resides in the body in a very precise, very specific, very identifiable way on the kind of slides we saw earlier.  Does that undermine human dignity?  Or does is in fact reinforce it?  Does it require us to think about humans as being physical beings but the genius of translating physical manifestations into what we know as personalities, characters, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, how do we understand that?  Maybe that makes us more worthy of being understood as being this worth dignity rather than less so.  My question is not to try to answer those questions.  I don't know how to answer them, so I'm curious if anybody else who knows how to, but I certainly don't.  What I'm doing here is trying to look at sort of questions of democratic governance and questions of public policy around those very deep, very complicated, very ancient issues.  So for example, how do we think about political choice around these questions which directly affect issues of dignity?
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>> Should policy makers ban research into, for example, the genetic components of violence, or the genetic components of sexual orientation?  Should they ban work--funding for work on human cloning, which some states have done over the use of public funds for that?  Will the public, and will policy makers, will politicians be able to actually reconceptualize the old distinctions between nature and nurture, between gene and environment, between mind and body, between choice and compulsion, in ways that are subtle enough to actually capture these interactions and to capture the mutual causations the genomic science is revealing?  How in the end are these very deep and very complicated questions of dignity gonna translate into public policy choices, into democratic governance, by a population who will only understand a tiny fraction of what's actually going on in the science and in the philosophy?  And I don't know.  Those are my questions.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Thank you Professor Hochschild.  We turn to Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, a beloved leader of church, state, and society known around the world for his intense humanity, for his strong stance on issues of human rights and religious freedom, and a particular note in recent years that temps to build bridges between our Muslim and Christian friends.  He's been working on issues of human dignity and human rights, in a number of different quarters, and it is his inspiration to for us to have this panel and so we're looking for a fabulous thoughts from his eminence.
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[ Applause ]
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>> How did I ever get in with a group this smart?  [Laughter] I think 'cause I'm so old.  I'm at that age where you go to the doctor and you say "How are you?"  Or I say to them "How am I?"  And he says, "I wouldn't buy any long playing records."  [Laughter] But anyway, I'm really delighted and honored to be part of this group.  I--It is--They are universally beyond my can and my understanding of things.  But we'll do the best we can.  I'm grateful to our chief, Dr. Brown for her leadership and for her willingness to think about things that are maybe not on the [inaudible] new headlines of the daily papers.  But yet as we've heard already, so importantly vital for the society and for everything that we tend to do.  I'm very glad that one of my grand nephews is here.  I'm sure he will learn a lot from the other people who have spoken.  He's learned years ago never to learn anything from me so that's perfectly alright.  I want to--I want to actually begin with a story, and it's something that developed in my own life.  I served for a long time with the Cardinal Cooke, Terence Cooke, who was the Archbishop of New York and a very holy man, whatever we've all understand holiness to be after we finished this discussion.  But a very holy man and a very good person and he had a mantra.  He always said, "We are all brothers and sisters in God's one human family."  And that stuck with me and that basically is for me the mantra of what we're doing today, brothers and sisters in God's one human family.  And what does that mean?  How do we become this?  How does it play out in our lives?  Well, of course, we, from the Christian point of view, we have our foundation in scripture.  We believe that the--our holy books make it clear that we were created by a God who loves us, that we are people who for some wonderful reason, he has made in his own image and likeness.  This we find in Genesis.  We find it constantly repeated in the wisdom books where he says, "He has made us a little less than the angels with glory and honor, he has crowned us."  But we don't really feel that way, but that is what our--that is what our scriptures tells us.  So from a religious theological point of view, we are special, we are made special and we are for that reason, we are distinct from the animals, we are distinct from inanimate of lives and we are called to be brothers and sisters in God's one human family.  We are called to be relating to each other and relatives of each other.  Maybe it's a [inaudible] of Leon said at the best in the 2nd century from not always from a theological point of view, from a view of believers he said, Gloria Dei vivens homo.  The glory of God is the human being fully alive.  The glory of God of all God's creations.  The glory of God is the human being fully alive.  And the Catholic thinkers and philosophies and theologians would add, "Yes, the glory of God is the human being fully and redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ."  So that's all part of the complex of who we are as Christians and what we believe.  Of course, we will find this replicated in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and of the other, Duns Scotus and of the other great philosophers who borrowed from Aristotle and Plato and found in their understandings the deepest of all philosophy and that deepest of all philosophy is that--is that we are somehow reflecting the extraordinary gift of humanity that God has given us.  Extraordinary dignity that God has put into our lives, whatever that is and my colleagues are so smart as they begin to describe it.  It takes on many different multicolor than multi-varied form, but we would still say, but it is, it is extraordinary gift, extraordinary treasure that God has given to us and that is the dignity that we are special.  Unfortunately, we do not always live by that dignity.  Man or a woman can live his/her life in a way that is not--that does not respond to the dignity that God gives them.  We see evil people.  We see people who care nothing about others.  And this brings up the problem of evil in our world.  And I think when we speak about the genome theory and others.  It is something we need to think about and to work out how different people may react in different ways.  Is it a propensity of genes, is it--what is it?  We are all conscious.  However, there's a consciousness as Thomas would say this and why we would say this even today going back 2,000 years.  We are conscious of what--of doing what is wrong and conscious of doing what is right.  Now this is some--this is in our system and basically these understandings of what is right and what is wrong are part of who we are and part of how we live our lives.  I think--Well, I was fascinated when we learned about Buddha and his desire to do all things in moderation, the desire to--and because the ancient fathers of church said that "In medio stat virtus," "Virtues in the middle."  It's not in the extremes.  And so this is when we look at our extreme groups that are front in all our religions and in all our society, we tend to say they've missed the point, they've moved too far to one side and they've lost the rest of--they've lost the rest of humanity.  They've lost the rest of the community.  And if we are brothers and sisters, we can't afford to lose each other along the way.  So this human dignity is something which is--which I guess if you would look at to the attitudes from the gospel, human dignity would be something that should lead us to the--to this beatitude, to be patient, to be kind, to be meek, to be courageous.  All these things are our virtues.  And we have the sense that they are virtues that should be learned, that should be practiced, that should be part of our lives.  And if they are not then there is a fault in the dignity which we possess.  Catholic social thought begin to become very prominent about 130 years ago when Pope Leo XIII at almost age 90 produce an encyclical called Rerum Novarum, The New Things.  And he was looking at the industrial revolution, looking at the whole question of people getting different jobs, looking at the question of the economic changes that we're going out of the world at that time and also looking at the fact of the growth of the large cities and what affect that would have in all of humanity and in all our civilization.  And he developed then some of these important matters which ultimately we'll be discussing, I guess, here and in the second part of our discussions on human rights.  That human dignity is the source of human rights.
^M00:50:02
>> That it is--That is why I don't wanna jump ahead of the rule of border between the first and second part of the section.  But human dignity should arise human rights and therefore the whole question of what is good and what is bad, the whole question of freewill is so important.  We believe that since human beings have freewill and it has not been demonstrated at any other creature has that freewill, the ability to choose to do or not to do.  That we are not conditioned although we--this is something we must look at and find out how that conditioning if science begins to discover it, how that affects what we believe in who we think we are.  I think in--and I will close on this, the interesting part of a lot of the stuff that I've been doing in, and John was nice enough to mention, in talking to people of other religions, especially of people in the Abrahamic family, which is Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups that there is so much taken--so much that we believe that have its echoes in the teaching of other faiths.  A few years ago, I had the privilege of preaching a retreat to the faculty of theology of the International Islamic University in Malaysia.  And we spoke about Christian social thought, social teaching, the encyclicals, and with many, many questions, very brilliant questions.  These were very wise men and women.  And at the end of the third day, they came back to me and they said, "Well, all these things that you say, we find also in the holy Qur'an.  We find also in the Hadith of the prophet.  And all of these, I think brings us to a not a narrowing of our differences but a greater understanding of who we are as human beings, who we are members of a family and who we are in a special way as members of a family in which we belong as brothers and sisters.  I think with that we move to where we're going from here.  Thank you.
^M00:52:28
[ Applause ]
^M00:52:33
>> Thank you your eminence.  We turn finally to Professor Abdulkarim Soroush whom Foreign Policy Magazine calls one of the top hundred global thinkers.  He made his mark initially as a scientist and he's moved as well into issues of Islamic mysticism.  And now pilots a very, very difficult bridge back and forth between philosophy and science, religion and science, brings enormous erudition to this topic as you can see from his CV.  Now we're privileged to have him back at the Kluge Center after spending a semester apparently here--a year ago and we're honored to hear your remarks this morning.
>> Thank you.
>> Professor Soroush.
^M00:53:15
[ Applause ]
^M00:53:21
>> Good morning.  Good morning.  Being the last in the row has got advantages and disadvantages.  The advantage is you learn a lot and you will become very learned, when you come to the podium.  But the disadvantage is that most of what you want to say is already said and you're preempted by the eminent scholars before you.  Therefore, there remains not much for me to say except from Islamic perspective.  I come from Iran.  As you might know I'm from the Shiite branch of Islam.  And so this much for the bio which is not reflected in the papers, handouts given to you, and that might say something about my background, of course, western philosophy has been my main subject.  What I would like to say in five minutes is that very generally speaking actually we have got two answers to the question "Why we are here?"  The human beings, why we are here on the earth in this part of the world and in this part of time?  I mean, broadly speaking as I said, there are two answers to the question.  One, that we are the products of a blind accident.  We could not have been here, where not that accident happened.  And of course the theory of evolution, [inaudible] evolution tells a lot to us about the evolution of animals but it doesn't say much about the human beings, and especially human dignity.  Because as I said, they are the products of the blind accident, and if there were not the aggregation of some molecules, which was absolutely unplanned and did unintentional without any purpose, they would not have been here in this course.  So this is one answer to the question.  The second answer is that, we are here because we are intended to be here, because there has been a purpose and a plan for us to be here, somebody, some universal force, some universal mind, whatever, has intended, has wanted us to be here as human beings and he has offered us the dignity that we enjoy and we entertain.  Purpose of McCarrick--actually, Cardinal McCarrick mentioned here the idea of the Genesis, the verse that says that we are Imago Dei, we are images of God.  We are born and we are created on the image of God.  Such an expression you would not find in the Qur'an, I must say, but of course in the Qur'an, you would find that we are wise regents of God here.  We are agents of God.  And then there is another verse which is much more explicit on this particular issue.  And that we, I mean God, "I have dignified you children of Adam."  This is a very explicit verse in the Qur'an, that the dignity of man comes from dignification, if you like, of God.  We are dignified by Him.  We are respected by Him because we are inspired by him.  Part of the spirit of God is already in us and that's why we are human beings.  We are intended to be here.  There is a purpose behind our creation.  We have got a faith.  We have got an end.  We are not just, you know, a product of blind accidents as I mentioned.  So this is a very important watershed, a very important, you know, difference of ways.  I am not saying that unbelievers are not dignified.  Everybody is created by God, believers and unbelievers; and everybody is carrier of the spirit of God.  And because of that, everybody is dignified by God, no exception, man or woman, believers or nonbelievers, whoever we are.  But the main thing is that to remember and to bear in mind that the dignity comes from to us from the source of dignity.  And the source of dignity is God himself who has created us on his own image, who has dignified us, and who has given us this characteristic of being a human being.  Otherwise I would say our dignity will become a matter of convention, and a convention always is a convention, is a contract.  You might change your convention.  We are, you know, dignifying ourselves because these things that we need it.  We need to live, you know, a good life.  We need a life of respectfulness.  And because of that, you know, we come into a contract with each others.  We convene.  You know, we enter a convention.  But this is the conventional theory of human dignity.  But then we you bring in God and the creation and all that, that is a real dignity.  It is not a conventional.  It is not arbitrary.  It is not something which is based on some expediency.  It is real.  It is there and it comes from a real source of dignity.  And we are not only respected in our own eyes but respected in the eyes of God.  Let me just mention a philological point here, and that is the difference between dignity and respect.  I think the first speaker here mentioned that the dignity is self worth, which is absolutely correct, and I would like to add to it that respect as you know comes from spec which means to view, which means to look at something.  Therefore respect means to be viewed by others respectfully.  Whereas dignity means to enjoy dignity, you know, by yourself as a self-worth.  So therefore, we are both dignified and respected by God.  We are viewed by God respectfully, and we are dignified by him, you know, really and inherently.  So this is what is already there.  Now just to come to the last word, as Cardinal McCarrick mentioned, I'm not going to jump ahead but just to say a few words about the consequences of this idea.
^M01:00:01
>> Human morality is based on human dignity.  No doubt about it.  And if you're not dignified, there will be no morality.  They would, you know, denigrate ourselves to the levels of animals, to brute animal.  Therefore, morality, human dignity is a precondition for morality.  Here comes a very important principle which you would find it in the holy books, scriptures, both in Abrahamic religions and elsewhere especially in the Qur'an that the bad things that we should not do morally is not because we will be punished because of it, because it contradicts our dignity.  Therefore, morality is based on dignity in a very profound way.  Of course in all religions, in the Qur'an, and in the bible, you have got the story of the hell and the heavens and all that, but that is not the foundation of morality.  The foundation of morality is human dignity, as it does not become as, it does not fit as, you know, to tell a lie because we are dignified by God and because we are imbued with the spirit of God, the divine spirit, and so on.  And then comes of course the idea of human rights which is based on morality which in turn is based on human dignity.  So in one go, you can you know combine all these very important principles, very important fundamental, you know, pillar of human structure, that's for now.  Thank you very much.
^M01:01:34
[ Applause ]
^M01:01:40
>> Thank you Professor Soroush.  Besides masquerading Jean Bethke Elshtain, I'm also here as a panelist.  So I have a--I was just gonna fit in my words if they fit.  And I--there are a couple of things I just like to say to add to the conversation since I got up at 4 a.m. to write them, I thought I better at least relate them.  The--I come as a legal historian interested in the history of rights, especially in the west, and the interesting interaction between concepts of human dignity and human rights in the west.  First thing I'd like to say is that human rights are not a invention or creation of the west or of western Christianity.  Human rights in many ways are discovery that the west made often through hard and cruel experience and oftentimes through being confronted with tyranny and the counterpoise of assaults on human dignity and human rights.  We see in the evolution of rights talk in the west already in the 3rd through 6th century of the Common Era and the Classical Roman law early understandings of human rights, rights attached to property, to inheritance, to one's political office, to one's social status.  And those rights were captured in Latin terms ius or iure, and concepts of libertas or libertates, and concepts of facultas, facultates; rights, liberties, capacities, or powers.  What's interesting is that rights in the Roman law are reserved to those who have dignity, who have dignitas.  Or those who have dignitas that Roman law are not human beings, they are very select members of society that enjoyed citizenship status, mailed property to right pedigree, with a whole set of restrictions upon what attach to that person's dignity and what attach to that person's office in society.  But the basic architecture, the anatomy of rights is already there in prototypical form in these early Roman texts.  You move forward a millennium and you come in into the high middle ages where the Roman Catholic church was the great pan national sovereign of the west, human rights explode and the concept of human rights is public, private, penal, and procedural rights is a bit available at Medieval Canon Law.  And medi--And also available in part of Medieval Civil Law and Medieval Common Law.  And we have there our rights of property, rights of contract, rights of action against a neighbor who's harmed one, rights procedurally to be able to march into court, rights to sanctuary or succor, rights to a pilgrimage, education, to the sacraments, to the access to the mysteries of the faith, public rights of elections in ecclesiastical bodies, the representation.  These are all developed at some--in some detail in Medieval Canon Law operating as the legal system of the west with the church.  And there too, rights are attached to dignity.  What's now the dignity of Christ, the dignity of an Orthodox member of the church, and sometimes you look at it and it's Medieval Common Law are similar terms and rights are attached to the concept of being a free man which in Latin is a person with dignity.  So you have these two concepts of rights, rights that are still aristocratically based, and the civil law and common law, and rights that are rooted now in something more transcendent, the dignity of Christ which of course excludes heretics and Jews and even Eastern Orthodox let alone Muslims and those who are the minority called atheists.  We move in to the 16th and 17th century, rights stock explodes.  By 1650 in the Christian west, every right that appears in the US Bill of Rights 150 years later.  And the Bill of Rights of 1791, every one of those rights in 1650 has already been defined, defended and died for by Christians, Protestants, and Catholics who have worked out a really complex rights structure based upon tyranny and religious warfare.  They have tried to articulate the grounds in which a person and a group and sometimes a nation state could exercise their right to tyranny.  It was when there was consistent and persistent violation of their "fundamental rights."  What William didn't know for the first time calls their "inalienable rights," their untransferable rights.  And there we not see rights that are rooted in a concept of humanity, it's still Christian humanity.  It's still exclusive.  Catholics didn't give it to Protestants.  Protestants didn't give it to the Catholics.  Christians didn't give it to Jews, let alone the atheists, but there was richer notion here that there is something in the anthropology of humans that commanded a rights respect.  You move to the 18th century democratic revolution, especially the French revolution, we see a wider universality of this, a notion of the rights of man.  Not their citizenship in a church, not their status in society, but it's rights of man which can be claimed as we know famously from the various declarations.  But it's still man qua man, and it tends to be the white man, it's not the woman, it's not the child, it's not the Native American, it's not the indentured servant, it's not the slave, let alone nature or any other creature out there.  But there is an attempt in the 18th century to claim a concept of humanity, human dignity qua human dignity in its early form, in the early enlightenment forms, formulations that begins to speak to this concept of human dignity as we have it today.  But it took the horrors of World War II.  It took 60 million dying in 6 years.  It took the world looking at gas in the Hitler's death camps and Stalin's gulags.  It took the travesty of taking a nation and trying to eradicate it from the earth that forced the world to step up and say what are the fundamentals that we have as beings that are human beings?  And it's in the Universal Declaration of human rights of1948 and its many progeny and covenants and declarations and other understanding where we for the first time in the world tried to articulate what are the things that we can claim as humans qua humans regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of class, regardless of creed that we can claim as human beings on this earth.  And the starting point in the Universal Declaration is the concept of human dignity, that we all have basic dignity and at certain rights and responsibilities follow from that very declaration.  What's interesting is in 1948 after the Universal Declaration was issued and press conferences were held, Father Maritain, a great Catholic philosopher who was part of the drafting committee of the Universal Declaration, addressed a set of reporters and the reporters came to Father Maritain during the Q&A period and said to him, "Father Maritain, after you had all these people from various walks of like, all these religious groups, all these different parts of the world represented in your drafting committee and ramification committee, and how was it possible that with all of these diversity, you could agree together on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights."  And Father Maritain's answer was, "We could agree upon the human rights as long as we did not ask why."  And so profound statement which in many ways has been the challenge of the world since 1948, which is to ask why, why do humans have dignity?  Why do humans have rights?  And in many ways when human rights have become as a mirror in which various religious and cultural philosophical traditions around the world have been able to reflect upon themselves, to reflect upon their teachings, to reflect upon their ancient texts, reflect upon their great prophets and the heroes of faith and often the martyrs of the faith and to see in those ancient teachings and traditions, norms, practices, habits, ideals, exemplars, that we would in the 20th and 21st century call human rights.
^M01:10:07
>> And I think the burden on human rights and human dignity conversation is to try to widen our vocabulary, to widen our grammar and to be much more open to a variety of anthologies that support human rights to recognize that in many ways the western rights formulations of 1948 were still dominated by the Abrahamic family that we need to include the wisdom of the east, the wisdom of the traditional people, the wisdom that we are gaining from the sciences and hard sciences, as we think about what it means to be human, what it means to have human dignity, and what it means to have human rights that are vindicateable.  And in many ways I think that's the burden of the conversation that we have around the world.  And I mean that's really weighed the burden of the conversation that we're having in our panel this morning.  We've heard from our distinguished scholars, the hard science and biological of material foundations of what human rights are, and we've heard the wisdom of the sages and the notion that human rights is in many ways lie in our divine agency, our divine inspiration, our divine telos, the divine imprint that we enjoy and the question is where in between can we find a resting point.  And I say, to get us started perhaps, just to put in the panel and to talk with each other then invite you to give us intervention, what is the question that Roshi Halifax put to us initially which are what are some of the components of human rights--or human dignities, excuse me, that we can all agree to regardless of the discipline, the profession, the confession that we bring to the table, are there certain components of human rights that we think are critical?  And then I think the second question that I'd like to push us a little bit to think about it is Professor Soroush's question by implication at the end, which is that is there a concept of human dignity that's possible without some understanding of the divine.  Some religious inspiration, some basic understanding that we are of transcendent origin or bare transcendent theologies?  To what extent does a human dignity understanding rest upon our material, our physical, our basic--evolved or created status as creatures.  And perhaps each of those questions would be ones that we could start with, but that just catalyzes the conversation.  Floor is open for any of our colleagues that want to interact with each other with these questions with the other issues they'd like to address, and then I'm gonna, after about 10 minutes, open the floor to all of you.
^M01:12:46
[ Pause ]
^M01:12:51
>> We all have mics so I guess we can speak--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> We all have mics here all live and I think we're talking off camera, right?  At least we're not gonna be in the media so you can venture--are you in the media or not in the media?  Some of us, some--
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> Alright.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
[ Laughter ]
>> Maybe Father Chrousos, you've had to listen longer than the rest of us, maybe we can start with you and--
>> Sure
>> --join any question that you'd like.
>> Well, I firmly believe that it is biological basis of the sense of dignity.  And I think the fact that there is a biological basis, doesn't reprove sacredness.  And that's the way I think, we should discuss it.
>> And what a person who's a professed atheist who wants to deny religion as a category does not wanna have any of this silly superstition, can that person still claim a concept of human dignity based upon your biology?
>> Absolutely, yes.
>> And how would you argue to him or her?
>> I would--That's way I started with a uniqueness of human beings.  We are unique in the sense of complexity.  So even if you look at it from a scientific point of view without thinking of religion at all, there is still uniqueness and we should require respect over minimum of dignity for everybody.
>> But isn't a fruit fly or a cheetah or an elephant unique too on that biological foundation?
>> I would say yes.  And actually, personally I think that we should respect the dignities of the animals as well.
>> Very good.  Please.
>> Well I think, you know, from a system's perspective, for example, we can say that dignity--or we could say dignity only resides in those who have a central nervous system or dignity only resides in those who believe in God.  But if you look at it systemically, you could say well the role of the human being is to have a central nervous system, among others who do and the role of the tree is to produce oxygen.  And so from a systemic perspective, you know, you can't really separate those parts of the natural world that generate the other parts that make it possible for, you know, we human beings to survive.  So, you know, I think that it's rather an interesting question that we're looking at here.  You know, when we say human beings were created in the image God, for example, which I believe is the Islamic perspective--is that correct--and is the Christian perspective.  But, you know, so they are the only creatures or the only beings or phenomenon that should be accorded respect or dignity, I think it's an interesting question to actually explore from the perspective that George is proposing that, you know, if we look at the entire system of which we are a part, I mean it would seem problematic to now accord dignity to everything and just to some sort of select group.  Because if we abuse, for example, one part of the system, that could actually affect our survivability.
>> And if everything gets dignity, does dignity mean anything?  And it's very unique and normative restraint that imposes upon the other if indeed everything before us has dignity because it's either distinctive in its own or it has formative capacities to form distinctiveness?
>> Well, I don't think that we have adequately defined dignity.  So before I answer that question of which I probably can't I would suggest that we go on to question number two.  That is somewhere floating in the ethos and that--what do we--you know, you've conflated dignity and rights.  And so, I think that's--you know, that's an important thing to look at.
>> Yeah.
>> Does dignity confer rights?  Do rights imply dignity, for example?  I am not clear on what we mean by dignity.  You know, I did, look it up.  I went--you know, George being, you know, right down the hall for me and, you know, occasionally discussing Greek language and he's certainly stirred my linguistic interest and the origins of our terms, I was not [inaudible] by actually with the etymology of dignity which comes from [inaudible] as you know, which means to accept.
>> Right.
>> Cardinal McCarrick, you wanted to--you're restraining yourself.
>> I was.  [Laughter] Well, only because the obvious is always very, very good in being consistent.  I think she put up a question which we can't just walk away from and it's the question of do say that only [inaudible] beings have the dignity?  And because the theology that we bring for the questions, I think we bring to it is that the whole world is created for men, and that is maybe a very proud and arrogant way of looking at life.  But I think if you say that, then other things have dignity in that if we use them badly, then we are only hurting this system that the God has created, where the things of this world who are not human beings do have a dignity, do have a role.  And if we do not treat them properly, their maltreatment affects the human race as we see now in the--our problem with global warming and climactic use of--in the wrong way of the things in this world.  So I think that's not the [inaudible]--it's not the answer that I think you would come up with but in a sense it does provide a dignity to everything that exists because everything that exists does fit in to this theological basis which we have.
>> Hochschild?
>> Alright, just for the sake of argument, I'm gonna channel my inner--I was gonna say atheist, but that [inaudible] is to see what--develop--see how this logic would develop if one doesn't start from a theologic perspective or doesn't start from a religious perspective.  And since I am totally uncertain of my own religious views, I think I can do this.  And I also wanna make claim about the distinctiveness, not the unique ability of only humans to have the dignity because I think the logic of the system and the logic of everything having a role is absolutely essential.  But I wanna put it to pitch for something like consciousness or self recognition or self understanding or self identification or something like that, whatever exactly the terminology is, that might have--in my view it's--again, we're back to sort of necessary insufficient and all that sort of stuff.
^M01:20:16
>> I would not wanna say that other things, trees, animals, whatever don't warrant that kind of dignity or kind of right or certainly a kind of respect.  But I am gonna make the argument that humans in some sense are qualitatively different.  And it has to do--and this is why I think both the genomics issue or this is or the underlying science and biology is both so terrifically interesting and fascinating and also not a treat because there is something about the translation from a particular element, you know, component of the brain or particular genetic structure that is not a direct linear transformation into thought or mind or consciousness or self identification or dignity or right, what ever those terms.  I'm using a more or less--synonymously which is probably is correct.  So, if this is the argument that I think one does not have to have a religious foundation for an assertion about dignity, right, respect, and I think these grounds for making a claim that humans warrant at least a different kind of dignity, right, respect, not instead of animals, nature in general but differently.  And it somehow revolves around the ability to think about ourselves and about others and to shape in some sense our selves and the world around us and we know that people do [inaudible] of that, but the capacity to do that somehow is--feels to me distinctive.
>> That's important.  Thank you.
>> Yeah.
>> Dr. Chrousos?
>> Well, what shall I say?  I think perhaps there's a misunderstanding here.  I'm not sure.  When we say that the source of dignity is God, it doesn't mean that nonreligious or nonbeliever, they do not have any dignity.  Everybody is dignified by God whether they are religious or nonreligious, they are--I mean in respective of race, of gender, or whatever, so then I looked at somebody and I see dignity in him in my eyes it is because he is dignified by the creator.  He is dignified whether he or she be a Christian, a non-Christian, a believer or unbeliever, a Buddhist, an atheist, who ever, it's like gravity.  You know they are weighty, you know, object.  Everyone of us has but a weight.  Whether we know the source the weight or not, we are anyway weighty object in this world.  Some people would say and I think that [inaudible] have gravities are powerful theory in order to explain why we are weighty.  You might, you know, guess some other theories.  I think the theory of creation is a very powerful theory in order to explain the dignity of human beings.  And I think it has been a very powerful and it is the foundation of many other things which we can derive from it.  Of course, you might guess, you might propose some other theories as to the source of the dignity of human beings.  Be it as it may, but I think the theory of creation, the theory of a purposeful creation that we are here in order to fulfill some purpose which is assigned to us by our creator, I think that's a very, very powerful theory that explains that they we dignified and we are by the source of dignity, there is something in us which comes from God which is inalienable because he has given and it is with us and it is a pillar of our existence and we are here in order to fulfill it.  So I think that is one of the main--I mean, important meanings and senses of the dignity.  The other thing that I would like to put my finger on it is this business of human rights.  Of course, in every sense, we are, you know, in favor of human rights.  But I think what is more perhaps relevant to the idea of human dignity is not human rights, it's human responsibilities.  Human rights is the language of the time, it's a fashion.  It's very important of course and as he explained here so eloquently and human beings have gone through, you know, turmoil and disasters and tragedies in order to discover the idea of human rights.  This is true enough.  But alas, human rights have overshadowed human responsibilities, human obligations, human duties.  Here again, comes in the idea of human dignity and with it comes human responsibilities.  And I actually was a participant in a conference some years ago by some--I mean the leaders of different religions, Buddhist and Christian, Muslim, Shiite, [inaudible] and many others in order to draft a declaration of human responsibilities.  It was very important and it was a complementary to the declaration of human right and that we are in dire need because, you know, this is my personal experience then I am here in the west and then I, you know, have presentations and public talks for, you know, western audience.  I usually emphasize the idea of human responsibilities because every mind is so imbued with human rights and you know need no more to tell you about human rights.  Everybody knows his rights.  But then I am back home in Iran and in my own society and give, you know, public talks.  I put my most emphasis on the idea of human rights rather than human obligation because they're actually beneath such an emphasis.  So I think human dignity, most--stem for most, I think, comes with human responsibility and then from his human responsibility you can derive human rights and that is an issue between my--I'll discuss later.
>> This is wonderful.  We--I think we can continue this for seven or eight more years but I think we've have a very patient audience who now about 10 minutes or so left to either engage in individual panelist or the group of panel who can speak to themselves.  If I could ask you to ask for one of our ushers to bring you a mic so we can records this.  Your thoughts will remain immortal that way.  And may I also insist to say that gravity is the soul of which, and the insistence of Witte, your chair.  [Laughter] So brief, profound questions right over here, please.  Next one is the gentleman in the vest.  Please, sir.
>> I just wanted to add a bit to George's beautiful talk.
>> Turn the mic on in the back, please.
>> Add something to George's beautiful talk in terms of the biological disposition towards dignity.  You know, the meaning of evolution is survival, granting other's dignity and human bonding is of survival value and it's clear that's hardwired in the brain.  The areas that transduce pleasure are activated when one has altruistic thoughts.  The other issue biologically, is that we're pretty unique in terms of the [inaudible] that a baby has to serve for 10 or 12 years of being utterly dependent for the first few years and profoundly dependent for several more years on the love and the nurturance and the caring of--and respect for that child's individuality and potential future.  And, you know--And the best of all possible worlds, base of human right would be the opportunity for a child to have that kind of experience because it takes a good early experience over many years to ensure that the child, say, will have the capacity to trust, which I think is a human right, and a capacity to love, which is also a human right.  And those potentialities can be inhibited, I think, with development--developmental problems.  And I do agree with the issues certainly and responsibility we have.  There're too many people in the world who have grab itself worth like the tyrants and it has to be tied to altruism and to respect others.
>> Thank you very much.  That was a strong statement and we'll leave it at that unless somebody wants to join it.  Please.
>> I have a question to Ms. Halifax.  Would this panel be a more interesting title for you if instead it was called Human Dignity, it was called Dignity of the Living?  Would that be more acceptable to you if it was called--if this panel was called the Dignity of The Living rather than Human Dignity?
>> Well, I wanna say I'm--the panelist are--is interesting to me whatever its title.  So I'm having an awfully good time thinking about things.  I think the question that you're proposing is an interesting question and it's reflected in what--you know, happened in Ecuador and their constitution vis-à-vis, you know, rights that's happening in Bolivia in terms of their constitution or, you know, rights for the natural world.
^M01:30:02
>> And it goes back to the question that Dr. Chrousos was posing with regards to a system's perspective.  You know, I feel like we're really--you know, at the beginning of our discourse that we haven't, you know, what you were suggesting I think is really fascinating and very interesting to me, this reflectivity or consciousness of the notion of itself mean that we can actually have a notion of dignity, of course, that is the case.  But does it mean that dignity is only prescribed for those who have a notion of the self?  You know, so these are questions.  Your question is very valuable to me.  It's a good one and I'm in that state of not knowing.  You know, I'm really--I'm feeling very open.  You know, including to the theistic perspective so don't let my Buddhism turn you away from me, please.  You know, I'm fascinated by--and of course I was born and raised a Christian.  So you know, I'm not completely ignorant of things theistic.  So I'm--I feel your question prompts a deeper questioning for us.  Thank you.
>> There're several questions here.  Those who have mics, right here, this front row.
>> This may relate--I don't know that we've parsed out the difference and I'm sure we all are.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> I don't that mic is turned on.
>> It's so hard to hear, anyway.
>> On, can hear me now?
>> Oh, Thank you.
>> Okay.  Parsing out the difference between respect for life and then what we're calling human dignity, I still don' feel like we--or I at least, do not have an understanding.  An example, probably too personal but I was very, very sick and not expected to live and I did live obviously.  I found that the smallest thing as an ant if I stepped on it, I would cry.  I became super hypersensitive to life.  Now, did I consider that a dignified life of the spider or the ant?  I don't know that I could say I did, but I had a huge appreciation for life itself.  And I just wonder if you have any thoughts anyone about how that is to you in terms of just we keep saying human dignity?  Can something that can't think, think with dignity, something with just the central nervous system?
>> [Inaudible] 'cause there're two--we get a life has a boundary line, self awareness is a boundary line and creation, serving, man serving creation, that's the three boundary lines so far.  Mrs. Hochschild.
>> I don't know how to answer this question so I'm gonna move a up a level of abstraction, right.  When in doubt, do a metaanalysis of the question rather than actually trying to answer it.
>> You'd be a good law professor.
[ Laughter ]
>> I almost was.  In part of what this is about, this sort of lumpers versus splitters, right.  I mean, so the question is, is the crucial thing to pay attention to the systemic unification relationships, the ways in which all people, all beings, are in some sense unified and using the concept of dignity or perhaps the concept of respect to the concept to sort of role--each--you know, that was sort of the lumper logic, right, that sort of what we need to think about is the ways in which things are united and linked.  The splitter logic is the opposite.  That was the one I was [inaudible] anyway, that we--and I think was implied in your question a while ago which is why the law professor, the political scientist to sort of on the same page here.  If the word dignity applies to everything including the ant, then it's not a very conceptually sharp term.  So the splitter logic, which I suppose is where I come down, at least for the moment, is we need different terminology and different conceptions to understand, not to reject the idea that there is a unification and there [inaudible] system and that trees and other living beings have something--deserve respect.  They don't--I wouldn't use the language of rights.  I don't think I would use the language of dignity about the ant.  I would say, those are in some sense, should be saved for, in my argument at least at the moment, humans who have the capacity for consciousness and reflection.  So the meta-answer is do you--do you wanna reserve particular terms for particular relatively more defining characteristics.
>> Father McCarrick.
>> I finally followed through what as you're just saying.  I think we talked of respect for the things of this world that if they are made for the human person to use properly, to use in the way that will enhance their dignity, to use in a way that will make the world a better place because they are [inaudible] and that's the respect that we need to give them.  Just two quick stories, you know, St. Francis had great love for the things in this world, preached to animals, preached to birds and loved them.  And that has come down in the tradition of the Catholic community.  And I think many of the protestant communities to appreciate the things of this world and to respect them.  I always think of the story we talked about the ant.  There was a great saint who was a monk.  One day he was sleeping out under the sky and when he got up in the morning, he began his pilgrimage and he realize that there was an ant still on his throat and he walked all the way back to leave the ant where he had been sleeping so it would find where it was going to go.  That may be an extreme case but it certainly indicates that we need to have respect for all things that God has made.
>> I think on that note and at the risk of disrespect for those of you who had your hands up, let's take a brief break from this wonderful heavy conversation.  [Inaudible] call for about 20 minute break or so and reconvene at 11 o'clock and we'll continue the conversation.  Those in the queue please, will get priority and please indicate with us strong fist or something if you've been precluded this time.  After the break, what we plan to do is to invite our panelist each to make another five-minute intervention to get the conversation going about the power of human dignity and what it means, it's payoff in many ways.  And maybe just a reverse phenology and start with Professor Soroush and work back to Professor Chrousos so we can--everybody feels dignified.  Professor Hochschild, you're right [inaudible].  [Laughter] So let's take break and let's thank our panel for a great conversation so far.
[ Background Applause ]
>> Thank you.
>> Those of you here for the first time, I wanna welcome you to this conversation.  It's intended as a conversation.  We are moving from what have been an interesting conversations but foundations now looking at some of the power of the concept of human dignity at some of its payoff, what happens when human dignity is betrayed.  In many ways, we joined some of these questions inevitably already in our first panel this morning but we'll continue that conversation now.  To get us going, what we're gonna do is invite again our five panelists to each make brief remarks maximum of five minutes to put a few issues on the table.  Some of those maybe repeats of the issues we heard in our first hour and a half together and then have a conversation again amongst the five of us and then with each of you.  So please continue to sharpen your pens, pencils, and think of hard questions to put to our panel.  I'm gonna reserve 20 minutes at the end of this session so that there is more conversation with the audience.  You've been very patient and we're grateful for your solicitude.
>> Don't let us make second comments.
>> Maybe not.  That might be the way to do it.  So let's begin.  We've introduced each of our five panelists already and let's just go and reverse order and we'll begin with our distinguished Islamic colleague.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Oh, we're gonna start, well, you can just stay over here if you want.
>> Yeah.
>> You're welcome to do either way.  You have dignity of choice.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thank you very much for dignifying my choice.  [Laughter] And, okay.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Laughter ]
>> Yes, actually I'm going to talk about this possibility a little bit to follow up what I said in the previous session.  You remember that you made a remark that perhaps the idea and the issue of human dignity is more perhaps relevant or more attached to the idea of human responsibilities rather than human rights.  And I mentioned, and this is my feeling, you know, that I live here in the west as an outsider.  That's human rights is overdone.  And by overdoing human rights, actually we have literally forgotten or perhaps neglected the human responsibilities.  And there should be a complimentary, you know, declaration of human responsibilities and obligations in order to remind all of us that in addition to having rights and to claiming of rights, they have the responsibility to perform other responsibilities and most actually stem from the very foundation of human dignity.
^M01:40:04
>> We are dignified not only to claim something but to do something, to perform some responsibilities.  Perhaps overdoing human rights has got something to delete over egoism.  This is not my, you know, remark, my comment.  This has been, you know, said by some others, because always claiming something for yourself, for your individual as an individual, means some sort of egoism, selfishness and self, you know, glorifying if you like.  And in order to avoid that, in order to avoid overdoing that, we have to bring in again the language of duties, the forgotten language of obligations which is badly needed and badly absent from our literature, from our jargon of a language, in politics, in ethics and all that.  I can tell you that the language of human rights has done some harm to morality, has done some harm to politics.  They have got rights based morality.  We have got obligation based morality.  We have got rights based politics.  We have got obligation based politics, and so on and so forth.  This is--Actually the rights language is the language of the secularity, the secular role virtually from the time that the secular man was born.  The language of rights must bore with him.  It is not a bad thing in itself.  But as I said, it is something which has become so fat, so opulent that has made, you know, the language of obligation [inaudible].  And we are now being deprived of a very important part of our, you know, human traditions.  May I remind you that the language of rights is not the language of religion.  All Abrahamic religions, their language is language of obligations, language of rights seldom you can find there.  I can remind you of Leo Strauss, a well-known philosopher who is the forefather of neo-cons also.  Actually in his book on history and human rights, he mentions that the word "right" is never mentioned not even a single time in the whole [inaudible] New Testament.  And I would add that for that matter in the Qur'an also, you don't have the word "rights" in the modern sense of the word.  The language of all religions is the language of obligation as I repeat that.  And its secularization, you know, most stuff, the religious tradition including the language of religion was put aside.  And to some extent was, you know, neglected because of its--somehow conflict with the idea of the modern man and the ideas of secularism and so on and so forth.  Now of course when we work on the issue of human dignity, we have to remind ourselves that the neglected language should be revised and should be re-brought in and should be re-respected and revisited, because without that, the human dignity will not be fulfilled.  As I would argue, I mean in the panel.  Just to put a question to you, what do you think of caring for others?  Each comes, you know, stems originally and directly from the idea of human dignity.  Is it as a responsibility or is it overwrite caring for others?  What about loving others, what about being friends with others?  Then I mentioned the idea of love.  I would like to bring to your attention that there are concepts which are over and above and beyond right and responsibility.  Love is neither your right nor your responsibility.  It is something else.  It is much superior to these categories therefore I would like to say and we have got legalists and other panel that rights and responsibilities are good for the people of love.  That for morality and for the business of dignity you need some other concept especially and including the concept of love which actually placed on in a different level and at a superior level.  And when we talk about human dignity, we can not forget the issue of love.  Man is dignified because he is--he loves and he is to be loved.  You see there is a tradition from the prophet of Islam who says "That a man who does not love or is not being loved is no human being."  Loving is part of human being, of humanity.  And that part of our dignity.  Rumi, the celebrated mystic poet, he says, "Love is unique to human beings."  Love in a human sense is unique to human beings and that's why human beings are dignified because they are, you know, affect the bounty of God which is love and they have the capacity to love, they have the capacity to be loved.  Just to remind you, philosophy means love of wisdom.  You remember and you know all of you of course.  According to Aristotle and the philology of course tells us.  Remember that wisdom comes at the second rate.  Love comes first.  Love of wisdom.  Therefore, in order even to become a philosopher which is a purely rationalistic discipline, you have to include love and to exercise love in order to become philosopher.  Be it the love of wisdom or love of God or love of human beings and all that.  Therefore, my suggestion is perhaps to excavate and to scrutinize perhaps more about the relationship between responsibility and human dignity.  Thank you very much.
^M01:46:24
[ Applause ]
^M01:46:29
>> Thank you.  Cardinal McCarrick.
^M01:46:32
[ Pause ]
^M01:46:38
>> I would just like to look at this for a moment sterically because I think when we move on to the area of human rights that is a--it is something which has taken historical bounces along the way.  We've said already this morning that for many of us you might--were part of the scriptural foundations of our beliefs.  And so they were, as John pointed out so wonderfully, there was a growth in the understanding of human rights as time went by.  And what he didn't say and which I occlude to his [inaudible] was that the Catholic community had to learn a little more lately about human rights where people who didn't accept the teaching of the church rather strenuously and I think of the extraordinary work of which is evident in the 17th century, [inaudible] Baptist, the baptist who was really constricted by some Catholic principles and then by some other Protestant principles and yet maintained the right of freedom of religion.  The right that he would be able to believe that he understood God was teaching him to believe.  And that is very important.  It doesn't mean that we should not evangelize but it means we shouldn't [inaudible].  And I think this is--is very more--there is a right to evangelize.  I think there has to be if we truly believe who we are and what we--and what God has revealed to us we have the right to talk about it with other people.  We have to do it in a way that is always respectful of what those other believe and not try to denigrate their own beliefs.  We can present without attacking and I think that, of course, that we talk about human dignity.  And human dignity being in the middle as it was pointed out so often during this morning that it is moderation that the practice of right is in moderation.  The practice of dignity demands moderation.  And so, all these things are important.  Rights had developed over the years that we overall in--and see they have been around for long time.  Today, in Islam, there is a much greater understanding of liberty in many areas including the area of religious belief.  It actually goes back to the Holy Qur'an because there, we find that you cannot impose belief on somebody and that you should not take someone's right.  The prophet has said to us, "If you save one life, you've saved the whole world."  And I think that is what a beautiful powerful expression that is.  And so we must do two things as we study human rights.  We must go back to our beginnings.  Go back to the philosophical beginnings, [inaudible] if we believe as to the scriptural beginnings if we are not believers in that sense, go back to the basic understandings of ethics that have grown over the years aided embedded by my philosophy and by other abilities to look at the human being and see what he or she is all about.
^M01:50:04
>> But to ask to us, what are human rights?  How is it we face this in our society today.  Is it a right to burn a sacred book of another group?  Is that--Is there's a right--Is there a right that give you that gives you that right?  Is that freedom?  Or is that something else?  Or is it that a violation of the dignity of the person and do we then have a regulation of rights because we are brothers and sisters in God one human family.  Are the exercise of other rights dependent on the rights of other people and how do we work that out?  Is there a gradation?  Is there a priority of rights?  Well, [inaudible], most of us think there is that life is everything, begins at life.  You can't have other rights if you're not alive so that life is a major--obviously is the major factor on all--which all these things.  But I think we arrive at a point to say, well, now restore the human rights and then let us say, "Are any of these rights dependent on the rights of other people?"  And how do you make that judgment?  And I think this is where religion comes in.  This is where good philosophy comes in.  And probably when all is said and done this is where commonsense comes in.  So I think I'll leave you with those questions.
^M01:51:32
[ Applause ]
^M01:51:37
> Thank you your eminence.  Professor Hochschild.
^M01:51:39
[ Pause ]
^M01:51:47
>> My thinking about these issues tends to be much more--I could politely say concrete and probably more accurately mundane than many of my colleagues.  So I'm gonna talk about again sort of some of the policy and big political issues that emerged out of this genomics mind, the body issue that I was talking about a few minutes ago.  I'm gonna talk about five issues.  The first with a little bit longer than the other, so keep me on track with the time please.  Okay.  I would try remain--I mean, I only obviously be able to raise the issues and not discuss them in any deep--depth.  But these I think are five arenas in which issues of dignity, respect, responsibilities, and rights also, but especially dignity and respect.  I gonna be absolutely central to political disputes that we as the nation are gonna have over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years.  This is gonna play out of a long period of time and I'm gonna be actually central to policy decisions that got made about how to think about the relationship between genomic science in particular and human rights, human dignity, human responsibilities, human interactions.  So, five arenas.  The first one has to do with race or ethnicity.  For the moment, I'm gonna assume those two things mean the same thing although of course we know that they don't.  And this is very hard got into the field through the study of racial dynamics within genomic science.  And the question is, "Is there a biological component to what we understand as race or ethnicity or what we practice as race or ethnicity?"  The canonical early compendium genomic science, 1994 is great, big, beautiful, fat book published by Princeton Press when I was in the Board of Press says very clearly, has a section called the scholar--scientific failure of the concept of human race.  "Classification into races," and I'm quoting down here, "is a feudal exercise, the level at which we stopped our classification is completely arbitrary.  We can identify clusters of populations.  But at no level can clusters be identified with races.  Every level of clustering will determine a different partition.  There was no biological reason to prefer a particular one, et cetera.  So, there is no biology to race.  There is no race in biology.  Very clear statement.  The National Human Genome Research Institute pointed out that "All human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup."  So that was the first understanding.  The second understanding, however, subsequently research is a little more complicated.  The pharmacogenetics researcher, Esteban Burchard, I'm gonna use on my quote since I don't have really time to develop this argument.  "How distinctive our racial categories," he says.  Well, I don't think they're distinct to all.  That's part of the reason we measure ancestry, a narrower concept than race.  Race is a complex construct that includes social factors, self identity factors, third party factors of how do you review me, that also includes biological factors.  He is not going to relinquish the notion that there's something biological, inherent in this notion of ancestry or race and it comes out of the study of the human genome.  All responsible genomic scientists know the history of eugenics.  They know the history of 19th century racial science.  They understand why this is a nervous making proposition.  None wanna recreate that period.  But they can't help using the language of race or ethnicity.  [Inaudible] give one very quick example just as a stand up--to stand in for much longer argument.  So, articles headline in the newspapers "Racial queues in [inaudible] cancer found."  UK scientists found one of the genes increased risk in a [inaudible] cancer in people of European descent but not Japanese.  Professor Malcolm Dunlop who led the research says, "This is the first time that a race specific effect has been found for a genetic marker."  Doctor--Somebody [inaudible] from the cancer research, UK says, "We could begin now to explain some of the differences and the rates of disease between populations to a specific gene."  In short, it's embedded in the language that genetic science, genomic scientist use even if they clearly understand that they don't wanna go back in the direction of the old fashion racial science [inaudible] here.  So the question that seems to me, here's policy--this is policy and political question number one.  Can scientist policy maker citizens in general figure out how to use the language of biology of genetic inheritance of the human genome in the same sentence as or in the same paragraph at least as the language of race, ethnicity, ancestry without returning to the horrors of biological race.  I think we need to address that question, not ignore it.  I think the social scientist and humanist claim over the last 50 years that race is nothing but a social construction, isn't gonna be viable very clearly any longer over the 21st century.  We have to figure out how to talk about the biological elements in ancestry, ethnicity, race, geographic background, tribe, there's a whole bunch of terms here, in ways that respect the dignity of individuals and that don't take us back in the direction of the old fashioned biological science eugenic.  So I think there's a big issue with dignity here embedded in the very heart of what the science is about.  Four other issues that I'll just mention very quickly since I'm gonna run out of time.  The second one has to do with privacy issues.  Sometime over the next couple of decades, not quite yet but relatively soon, medical tests that have predict your likelihood of developing some terrible disease are gonna get pretty accurate and pretty accessible and many people are gonna use them.  Now how accurate and how accessible of course remains unclear, but assuming for the moment that these tests are gonna be pretty good.  Okay.  I'm a 25-year-old engaged to somebody who [inaudible] to get married.  I do one of these tests and I discover that 20 or 30 years from now I'm gonna get some terrible disease with a high likelihood that I'm gonna get this which is gonna destroy my life and destroy my family's life.  Does my perspective husband have a right to that information?  How do we think about issues of medical privacy when we can predict relatively clearly what our own medical future is gonna be in a way that's gonna directly affect the lives of other people?  Does my fiance have the right, does my husband have the right, do my children have the right to that information about my genetic future?  Suppose I have an identical twin, does my twin have the right because he or she is likely to have, supposed I don't wanna have that information, do I have the right to tell my twin that not to take this predictive medical test and so on.  So it's a whole series of very complicated issues about privacy rights, the dignity of the individual that I think are embedded in the medical science here.  Third issue, ancestry test, there's a whole complicated arena of genetic genealogy now which is developing as a kind of a layer on top of the more traditional genealogical studies that people have done.  Lots to be said about it but the--a relevant piece right now is the discovery of what the genetic genealogist call NPE.  Does anybody know what an NPE?  An NPE are the non-paternal event.  You can figure out what it means, right?  Somebody who thought they were the genetic, the biological son of somebody else or daughter of somebody else turns out not to be.  How do we understand the rights of the person who is determined not to be the offspring of an NPE or the parent or the presumed parent of an NPE?  So again, these issues of privacy, of dignity of the respect for individuals that are embedded in the nature of this kind of new knowledge.  Fourth issue, forensic biobanks.  These are bio--It now turns out that we have about 9 million samples of what was thought to be junk DNA, now perhaps not so junk. But in any case, 9 million samples of people who convicted of felonies and/or who are immigrants subject to deportation.  These are disproportionately black and Latino although that's not the nature of the [inaudible] and it turns out to be that's what the populations are.  Every state has these biobanks as a federal agency that does, the FBI collects them on and so on.  The biobanks are used to match a potential--a sample from a crime scene against the sample, the 9 million people in the biobank.
^M02:00:01
>> Most of the people in the biobank are themselves imprisoned so they're unlikely to have been the person who actually did the crime at the crime scene.  So the matching is complicated.  But the issue that I wanna raise here is that there's something called familial matching.  So it turns out that when you've got the 9 million people in biobank, you can match to a 70 or 80 or 90 percent, not identical match, not a perfect match.  So it's not the person.  But it's likely to be a family member of the person whose sample is at the crime scene is in the felon sample.  So I go Mr. Smith and I say look, I know you didn't commit this crime because it's not a perfect match, but do you have a cousin named Johnny and where was Johnny last Friday night, and can I have a sample of your cousin Johnny's DNA please and so on?  So you can get--develop a kind of familial connection to the people in the biobank that can spread very far across the population.  Now, do we think is a good or a bad thing?  It's gonna be a very complicated issue over the next few decades as these familial matchings become increasingly wide spread.  They are gonna be disproportionately African-Americans and Latinos because that's who is disproportionately in the forensic biobank, of the samples that we already have available.  And because Latinos families are larger so arithmetically it's gonna be a larger population.  This may help in solving crimes.  The Grim Sleeper in Los Angeles was found this way.  If anybody knows that case, I could talk more about it later.  But it also suggests that there's gonna be policemen showing up in a lot of people's doors saying by the way, where was your cousin Johnny last Friday night.  So, there are big issues of sort of family responsibility, of the individual dignity, of the right of the victim, of the right of the family member of people who have already been convicted of felonies.  Big issue.  Finally, medical biobanks.  Again, there are samples being collected sometimes with explicit consent and sometimes not that are kept in research biobanks that the medical profession and scientists are using to do some of the DNA research.  So the question--I mean, there're many questions here, but one of them for example is the scientific community have the right to use the sample, perhaps that I gave intentionally and voluntarily to study one disease.  Do they have the right to use my sample to study other diseases?  What's--Whose--owns that DNA sample?  Is the dignity of the patient, the rights of the patient, do I have to specify exactly which diseases you may use my DNA sample to study and which not?  There has been a quick case recently, the Havasupai Indian tribe in Southwest United States in which DNA samples were collected to study one disease and have been used to study another and they claimed this was a violation of their rights as individuals and a violation of the dignity of the [inaudible] the autonomy, the self-boundedness of the tribe itself.  These are all issues that are gonna keep coming up over the next 20 or 30 or 40 years.  They're very difficult policy issues.  They're even more difficult political issues and they're extremely difficult moral and ethical issues.  So stay tuned.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you very much.  Roshi Halifax.
>> Yeah, I think I'll just stay seated.  It seems easier to declaim from my seat than from the podium.  So, I--you know, I wanna acknowledge what you're saying about the interesting distinction between rights and responsibilities and I think that's an important distinction to make.  As we try to define, which we have not yet, in fact, what dignity is, I hate to--
>> Too hard [inaudible]
>> I know.  It's too hard but it's worth.  We have to surface it.  I mean, you know, we're speaking about rights, what you said about responsibilities or responsibility I think is very important but we still have not actually gotten granular with regards to what we mean by dignity.  Is this--Is dignity an intrapsychic component, is it interpersonal, is it interspecies, is it systemic.  I mean, you know, what is it per se and there are a number of words in, you know, my own tradition that would apply to dignity?  But interestingly enough, there is no word in Sanskrit that I know of that translates as dignity.  So, you know, what you were--Dr. Witte was talking about in terms of the historical development of an image, you know, what we mean by dignity vis-a-vis particularly theistic religions, you know, the ones that are at least I'm familiar with, you know, is very interesting.  I'm speaking specifically about the development of moral character.  I wanna go back to this because I think without the development of moral character, dignity is not possible and moral character would include such things as moral sensitivity.  That is the actual ability, to realize that there is a problem in the room so to speak and there are other components to moral character.  Another is being able to reason, to engage reasoning around ethical dilemmas.  There's also commitment that we would value a moral perspective more than we would value say a business outcome or political outcome.  I think that's very important and that also entails a view that comprises dignity.  And the other is that we actually have the means to make a moral decision even though there might be moral remainder.  It might not be a decision that we're completely happy with.  So our moral remainder implies that, you know, 80 percent of the decision was a good decision and 20 percent wasn't.  Now, I think that what I wanna just point to now is where for me the rubber meets the road and I think the rubber meets the road for each of us in a slightly different place.  Since 1970, I've been working in the end of life care field.  1965, I began my Buddhist practice.  So I'm almost 70 and I've had a chance to--you know, through my own Buddhist practice and also in my work in the end of life care field to look at this issue around dignity.  How do we treat dying people in our culture?  You know, I also teach in Asia and Europe.  And by the way, how dying people are treated in different Asian countries is, you know, quite different often than how we treat dying people.  I've never taught in the Middle East so I don't know, you know, what the customs are there.  But this goes back to a piece that was developed by David Kessler that is about the rights of the dying and I would suggest, you know, what you prompted me to think about is that it's not simply the rights of the dying that are to be respected which means they are accorded dignity in the process of dying.  But also the responsibilities that we have as professional and as family caregivers to record dying people, dignity.  And then I think we can translate, that's very close to us because all of us will face this in a one way or another.  And I don't have sufficient time.  I actually have Kessler's rights here, so I won't wick up my minute that's left with these rights.  So maybe I'll have a chance to share some of those with you.  Because I think, when we developed the lens about how we treat those who were dying, we can take those principles and apply them for example to the natural world or to people we're at war with and so forth.
^M02:08:22
[ Applause ]
^M02:08:28
>> Thank you.  Dr. Chrousos.
>> Let me go back to the definition of human dignity, just human.  It's a subjective feeling and it's part of self awareness and has a lot of emotion in it.  So if somebody feels that his dignity is respected, that person is in a group homeostasis from the point of view of interacting with the environment.  Now, if that person for any reason becomes a second class citizen, moves to a different place, his dignity is assaulted in a sustained way.  Let me use the example, the immigrants going from one country to another.  In their country, they have their own dignity.  When they go to that country, immediately they've become second class citizen especially if they're workers and so forth.  And their sense of dignity is assaulted and some of them are particularly sensitive to it and gradually they change and they are in a different balance and their balance is not good for their health.  That this homeostasis or bad homeostasis, bad balance, could be called cacostasis; in other words, in a bad sustained state.  Now what happens to them?  And that's very important.  They've become vulnerable to many diseases.  Number one, they've become vulnerable to psychiatric disease.
^M02:09:59
>> I was a medical student in Athens when they were workers from villages going to Germany.  And at the psychiatric course though, we had people brought back from Germany because they decompensated and they had a psychotic attack, you now, depression attack, and so forth.  So one is psychiatric disease.  Now the second is, and that took longer but it happens, is they develop the so called chronic noncommunicable disease, which are actually the diseases that affect our society now and that's obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes type 2, depression, hypertension, and so forth.  All of these disorders developed over time and they increase our all cost mortality.  So it's not surprising that minorities or people who are second class citizens such immigrants die younger.  Their life expectancy is curtailed by 7 to 14 years.  It's not only that, they probably they don't eat as well.  They don't have good medical care and support.  But a large percentage of their disease and cause of death is the fact that they are in this homeostasis and cacostasis and that's because they feel different, they feel dysphoric for prolonged periods of time.  In other words, their mood becomes dysphoric which changes our physiology.  Our brain changes, there are chemicals that are secreted in the brain and the periphery and this chemicals which we know and understand now very well are causing these disorders.  So it's key to--[inaudible] that all humans anywhere regardless of where they are from, how they look, and so forth, a major source of morbidity and mortality is the assault, sustained assault on their dignity.  Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Wonderful addition already on the floor.  I think what I would invite the panelists to do is to reflect with each other on any topic that has come up but also to move to the audience so we can have a public conversation with all of you to join some of these issues or to raise other ones that have not been joined.  If any panelist wants to speak to some of the topics on the table already, please do so, and then we'll be coming around with microphones to collect your questions on the floor.
>> I have a--
>> Cardinal McCarrick.
>> I have a one sentence to throw out because I think it affects the number of things that we've been saying.  According to the way that I look at dignity and I think this is basically around, let us say, dignity is something that you can abuse but you cannot lose.  In other words, the worst person in the world if this is the understanding that we have a dignity, dignity comes from God, it is part of your--it is part of being a human being and you can't lose it, you can abused it, you can live a terrible life but you can't lose it.  And so that means that the worst person in the world still has [inaudible] with dignity, that makes it hard but I think it is something to--
>> Thank you.  Other colleagues or--We wanna hear from you, I think is the message of the silence.  So let's have some questions.  Those that were in the cue before the break and didn't have a chance [inaudible] have priority but let's get some conversation going from the floor.  Bottom over here, or that gentleman, please.  So sorry.
>> Thank you.  I was wondering if we could discuss the relationship between dignity and guilt and that seems to be something that can tie a few things together here that might also helps us to find what we're talking about with dignity.  It can partially connect the biological and the social issues of it and even help, you know, connect ourselves in a more personal way with something that we're talking about largely as something that other people do to other people.  And I mean, we've all done [inaudible] on this become something that you internalized and you can become, you know, literally sick with [inaudible], whereas at the same time, things that we think of other people doing [inaudible] to human dignity are things that we either externalize and think, oh, they should feel guilty about this or that, you know, either by association with, you know, humans as a species we feel guilty as a whole.  And I'm not sure if there's a direct question here but I think it is a useful way to sort of pull out the differences and I think that ties in the idea of responsibilities versus human rights, whereas, you know, we don't think of ourselves as violators of human rights usually but we've all been [inaudible] to dignity at some point and this--I don't know, I might humanized and personalized it a little bit.
>> As the daughter of a Jewish father and a Puritan mother I know all of the [inaudible], you'd wanna say about guilt, I can beat you.  So I think with that raises for me is a variation of the question of what is this thing called--that we're calling dignity that most of us are sort of possible tips of you dancing around because it's too hard to define.  Is it a fundamentally relational concept or is it a fundamentally internal concept?  So, if I miss treat you, do you still retain you dignity?  If you mistreat yourself, do you still retain your dignity?  Or you only have dignity in some sense if I treat you in a manner that accords your dignity.  That's why I think the issue of rights comes in.  I can claim rights till the cows come home.  And if you don't in some sense respect mine or grant mine or design a society in a government structure that reinforces them, my claim is worth very much.  I think somehow the issue of responsibility fits in here in a way that I can quite articulate.  But I think part of which you are getting at is whether this is a--if fundamentally relational concept such as that it's not actually meaningful conceptually, unless there's an interaction or whether it's an inherent phenomenon within the person perhaps even within other [inaudible] beings--I don't know how far one would wanna take that.  Actually, you know, how do you treat me, I still got it.  And you should feel guilty because you're not according me what intrinsically have or something.  I mean, I'm getting lost here but I think that is part of what you're getting.  And I think it's a really critical question to try to sort out.  I think I would wanna say if not--if dignity is not definitionally relational it's so closely entwined that that I'm not comfortable within idea with the concept of dignity--the rest of the world entirely violates.  It feels to me in some sense that becomes an empty claim in a way that will be socially is deeply troubling.
>> Can I say something?
>> Please, Chrousos.
>> Well, I find myself the question very interesting, very important.  And I think we should be grateful to you to bring up the issue of guilt and perhaps shame, you know, with respect and relationship with the idea of human dignity.  Perhaps you deliberately avoided the word "shame" and you used "guilt."  I'm not sure but these two are quite apart and different from each other.  Psychologically, philosophically, morally all these--it's a very great issue actually.  That I think that there is a very strong relationship between guilt, feeling guilty, and feeling shameful and human dignity.  In other words, the feeling of shame and guilt does not exist in animals.  Therefore, we do not accord them.  You know, the issue of dignity, dignity you find it where you find shame, there you find guilt, is exactly like the idea of the concept of doubt.  The usually--I mean, considered doubt as less important than certainty.  It is less important but we have to remember that where you have got doubt, you can have certainty and vise-versa.  You do not have doubt in animals because you do not have certainty there because you do not have reasoning there.  So all this come in a package, you know, therefore we have dignity because we can be shameful, but sometimes we do.  We can feel guilty of what we can sometimes do and so on and so forth.  And just again to remind you that the story or the myth of creation in all Abrahamic religions including Islam and in Christianity and Judaism, you have the idea of shame.  You know, coming through Adam.  You know, then he ate, you know, he concede--I mean he approached the forbidden tree.  Then you know he felt guilty about what he did.  And from there came in the idea of shame and guilt and together within the idea of dignity of human being.  From there actually God said the dignified human being.  Because they can feel shameful, they can feel guilty, and they can distinguish between bad and good.
^M02:20:00
>> So I think this is a very important package which all comes--I mean together with respect and the responsibility and rights.  Then comes the idea of shame and guilt.  It's so important.
>> So Dr. Soroush, you're just beginning to open up for us what we mean by the term guilt--dignity.  I would just, you know, you've talked about respect, responsibility and so forth.  Are there other qualities that you would assign to dignity?
>> Yeah, well, I mean this issue of shame and--
>> That's an [inaudible]--you know--
>> Sorry?
>> The antithesis of dignity.
>> The what?
>> The antithesis of dignity.
>> No, it is not antithesis.  No it is not.
>> Uh-huh.
>> It is actually a consequence of dignity.  Since you have dignity and you are dignified you can feel shame for.  Oh yes, absolutely.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> It's the consequence.
>> You know, I'm sorry.  I associated immediately with the word humiliation.
>> No, no.
>> Yeah.  Which of course is a way to deprive a human being of dignity.
>> No.
>> To shame one.
>> Yeah.  To--Yeah.  To feel shameful means that you feel that perhaps you have done something which does not befit your dignity.  You know, you have not observed your dignity.
>> This goes back to what I was speaking about earlier in terms of the development of moral character.
>> That's right.
>> And moral characteristics and it--you know it would then refer to ethics, precepts, and so forth.
>> Right.
>> Roshi Halifax is there concept akin to shame or to self responsibility?
>> Yes.
>> As you are listing the various qualities of moral character, responsibility, the capacity to engage in reasoning about what those moral givens are, valuing moral over policy or economic or other decisions, the notions of making a moral decision.  I mean, those I take are part of the--
>> Buddhist cannon.
>> --chemistry--chemistry of a Buddhist understanding of--
>> Absolutely.
>> --of dignity.
>> Absolutely.
>> Are there other elements that you did not have an opportunity to list that you would include within the anatomy of dignity from of Buddhist tradition?
>> I think that, you know, the two components that are--the sort key mental qualities in Buddhism which are interconnected, which point to dignity.  One of those qualities we would call wisdom.  I think some of you have read Steven Hall's book.  Thank you so much, Dr. Chrousos for assigning me to that.  Wisdom is a very important mental quality and it has a number of characteristics and I'm--I won't, you know, ran the research out on you here.  I haven't brought, you know, the synopsis of the paper.  But anyway, I won't subject you to that level of granularity.  So a wisdom is one of the mental characteristics that is I would say a precursor to dignity.  And the other is compassion.  And that is our--you know, our capacity to care for other beings.  That we are not engaged in behaviors that harm others which conduce to what, you know, you were speaking about in terms of guilt and shame.  So I would say those are two precursors to--or two mental qualities that I believe are precursors to human dignity.
>> Can I push on that just one little--or the compassion question, is it the capacity as an agent to be compassionate or also the capacity of an agent to receive compassion?  This is [inaudible] was dealing with the person who is dying, who has lost many of these characteristics that you include as elements of dignity but nonetheless is deserving of dignity or having his or her dignity respected.  But could you broaden that a little for us?
>> Yeah.
>> But I think that's an incredibly important insight for us and the bridge that provides thinking about the dignity of the nonhuman.
>> Number--This is question that comes with the issue of hastening death, you know, and all of the details related to that.  So--And it is a very deep moral and ethical question in medicine as well as, you know, for people in our culture and probably, you know, globally.  Do we withdraw medical care, do we not, and so on and so forth?  From our Buddhist perspective, I would say that we recognize that all human beings--all beings are going die.  We recognize the truth of impermanence.  Our main perspective is how do we alleviate suffering.  We can--We have to become more granular about what suffering is.  But also in having worked in this field now for over 40 years and sat with many, many people, hundreds of people who [inaudible], and in their dying process, it is just--and you know, at the affect of level from one perspective, one wants to bring the great mercy in order to relieve the suffering of the dying individual at the same time an individual is awakening within a professional or a family or friend caregiver potentially great compassion.  And at the same time there are many--I'll give you a personal example.  This is very personal, forgive me for this high level argument, but I took a bad fall I shuttered a leg.  And when I was in the hospital being--rather in the ambulance being taken to the hospital I saw that--given me morphine, looked very distress, well, I had a reason, I was in shock and so on and so forth.  But I reached over to him and I said, "How are you?"  And he's turned to me and he's--I--you know, I just felt something was really heavy in his heart.  And he turned to me and he said, "My wife is dying of cancer."  And it was a moment of mutuality in the experience of compassion.  You know, I was in this extremely fragile situation, you know, being borne in an ambulance to the hospital but I could feel that the person who was sitting beside me who is a perfect stranger was also suffering.  And I just asked the question.  And I would suggest, I learned that from dying people.  Very often when I walk into a room of a dying person, they aren't there with their list of complaints.  The first question they'll ask is how are you doing?  So this manifestation of compassion in the midst suffering I think is an extraordinary example of human dignity.  And I just give that--you know, we've been talking way up here and I wanted to kind of ground it in human experience if you don't mind.
>> Beautifully done.  I've--Cardinal McCarrick, Professor Soroush, and Professor Hochschild, unless Hochschild get speak to this very issue, otherwise I'll put you in the cue.
>> It is actually this very issue which is to say--
>> With the indulgence of our two colleagues, please.
>> I think we have--on two sides of me--two sides of definitions of dignity which I wanna articulate.  Yours is--
>> Objective.
>> Yes.
>> And subjective but there are two difference, thank you.
>> You've just said it.
>> Yeah.
>> People have dignity regardless of what they do.  Yours is there are moral components than in some sense either are precursors to or definitions of or intrinsic in or something like that dignity.
>> Right.
>> And absent those moral components--the person doesn't have dignity, I--so--
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I don't know where--I'm sitting in the middle not, you know, precisely on the fence.  But I think we have two quite distinct conceptions going on here.  Well I think it goes back to what Dr. Soroush was saying in terms of responsibility.  That dignity accords responsibility or implies responsibility.  But that is substantive argument whereas yours--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> Even demands responsibility.
>> Yes.  I--Objective fact of humanity regardless of what anybody does.
>> I can go quickly.  But one thing before when I know I'm going, may I give you call?
>> I would be honored Cardinal.
[ Laughter ]
>> I think what the doctor said is absolutely right.  There are--We have--We can talk about two kinds of dignity.  And I think it's important--both of them are important, absolutely important.  I think the objective dignity that we all have is important because it means we can never, of course, anybody are.  We can't no matter how bad they are, no matter how week they are, no matter how dying they are, we can [inaudible].  We always have to love them.  We always have to care for them.  We always have to realize that they are--a theistic point of view that they are children of God and our brother and sister.  Well on the other hand, the--this thing that--this other kind of dignity, this dignity with subjective yields to a subjective recognition and that yields to a subjective responsibility in the world.  Yields to a subjective opportunity to the world better.  But my point I guess would be if we didn't have objective dignity, if we really weren't the children of God in some wonderful way, we wouldn't be--have this opportunity and this responsibility to be dignified in our dealings with others.  It's all I wanna say.  I'm done.
>> That was nice, nice colloquy and much of three of you.  Thank you very much.
>> Thank you.
>> Professor Soroush.
>> You know I'm not in the [inaudible]
>> Reconciliation--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> So that was a one question that provoked a--seemed in colloquy.  The next one of equal power.  Please madam.
>> As Dr. Soroush--Oh, first of all I'd like to welcome Jim Billington joining our gathering [inaudible].
^M02:30:04
[ Applause ]
^M02:30:09
>> Thank you for coming.
>> Thanks for coming.  My question is for Dr. Soroush about the inter--intrinsic value of other living beings in the natural world their interconnectedness with all of life of the multiple species.  If Jane Goodall were here, she'd remind us that we're genetically connected to chimpanzees and other living beings by 99 point something percent.  Don't you think it's a value for us to remember our embeddedness in the community of life on the planet and in recognizing that we're only one of many species on the planet and the moral character of who we are is how with what respect we relate to other forms of life.  And it's this web of life that assures our survival on the planet.  In a very fundamental way, could you comment on our--
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Dr. Chrousos, I think.
>> Dr. Soroush, yes.
>> Chrousos.
>> Chrousos, Dr. Chrousos.
>> I think indeed we are part of this web of life.  As far as we know, it's only on earth this web of life.  We depend on it.  If we destroy the environment, we will pay as well.  So in my opinion, we have a moral obligation to respect the rest of life and where that life is.  So the answer is yes.  It may not have what we call subjective sense of dignity although I believe some animals especially the higher ones probably have it.  Just as we do.  And that's the reason nobody--you wouldn't like somebody torturing a dog, right.  Why, because you wouldn't like somebody torturing a human either, right.  It's an assault on the dog's dignity.  You will have empathy.  You resonate, you feel it.  So the answer is part of our duties of our moral obligations is to respect the environment and the living in this environment.
>> Thank you.  For those the holding the microphone, there's a question here from this lady, please.
>> I wanted to go back to Jennifer Hochschild.  You had brought up--I'd like to dig into this further.  You were talking about privacy versus finding out, you know, about our ancestry, about our records.  There's been more revelation, more revealing, and we're digging more into privacy rights versus need to know.  And I think my basic question is, "How far should we go into this?"  And you brought up some very important questions about say, if you're engage to someone and, you know, up the line that you might get a genetic disease maybe it's been in your family or whatever.  Should you reveal that?  Could we have more discussion on that please?
>> Not me, is the short answer.  Yeah, and I think this is a really interesting, really complicated question.  I also think it's gonna be a full employment policy for attorneys for decades.  I mean like, you know, this is gonna be for better or for worst and maybe for worse this is gonna be a litigated question rather than a politically resolved or individually resolved question.  That's my guess.  I'm--You know I'm a professor, right.  I'm in the business of thinking that more information always, supposedly, is better than less.  So my instinct is to say that genomic science is a good thing despite all the issues that I've been raising despite--and you know--and I--there's a whole realm of people who are very, very nervous about this in the arena of race, in the arena of privacy, and arena of using the illegal system and arena of violation of individual's right.  I mean, I was suggesting what some of those concerns are.  My instinct is that the more we know, the better of we us individuals are and we as a society are.  In part because there are real--the obvious reason for that is for the medical innovations that one hopes will be coming down the road in relatively near future.  We'll see.  But I mean this in a sort of a deeper sense that human knowing more about their biological elements doesn't violate their sense of person who had autonomy, dignity, mind, consciousness whatever it is that we're talking about.  So that's been my fundamental premises that more information is better than less.  Recognizing that there are some real dangers, the one needs to worry about both individually and collectively as a society.  So I don't think--I think if I were forced to come down, if you push me really hard to come down this question of whether my family for example has the right to know my own genetic future.  I think if you--I wanna obey the answering as much as I--as I can.  But I think if you push me, I'd say they probably do.  That in the end, information ought to be public?  In not public to the whole world, but that in intimate family relationships--I would feel betrayed if my husband's parent whomever didn't give me that information partly because it's a matter of kind of trust and long term mutual respect and probably because it's gonna affect my life.  I mean in a purely self interested sense somehow.  You know, if my life is gonna get turned up side down 20 or 30 years form now.  Again, we're assuming that the science is correct, right, which is of course a big question.  In any case, I think we have to think very hard about conditions under which our normal presumptions of the rights of privacy which are surely very powerful in the medical arena both legally and morally and convent--tradition.  Maybe we're moving into an era in which that needs to be challenged more than any of us including myself have been willing to, it depends.  If we can genuinely predict the future with some high degree of certainty to people whose lives are gonna be transformed by my future, I think then sometimes have the right to know that.  I don't know how far--I mean if you push back, I'm not sure I'd maintain that position.
[ Laughter ]
>> [Inaudible] accurate the information might be.  I mean this is kind of a road that we're just beginning.
>> At this point the information is--
>> How accurate are the test, say, that I find I have a genetic disease later to find out, oh, no you don't, or maybe it jumps generations and I'm given the wrong information.
>> Very big question.
>> Yeah.
>> The FDA is in the middle of this right now, for example.  I mean the whole question of direct to consumer genetic testing is a big policy arena right now for exactly that reason.  The sciences I think, correct me if I'm wrong at this, is pretty good on narrow questions.  Are you are, are you not a carrier of a particular genetic defect?  I think we know pretty accurately the answer is yes or no.  Are you likely to get a certain kind of breast cancer or a certain kind of schizophrenia to get really scary?  Twenty years down the road, I don't think the science is anywhere nearly good enough on this yet.  So I think we've got a few years basically in which I would not say people have the right to know the predictions of my genetic future on the grounds that those predictions aren't good enough yet.  But I think that's a true and be in the long run evasive.  Because I think again, correct me if I'm wrong, the people who really know the medicine could--can correct that as we move in to the 21st century, there are going to be more and more medical futures about which is the science is gonna get better and better.  Which particular diseases, which timing, how precise the predictions have to be like--I don't think anybody can tell.  But we're moving in that direction I think.  Is that appears [inaudible]?
>> Absolutely and it's coming very fast actually.  Faster than we--than we'd have thought--
>> And much faster than we collect--
>> --10 years ago.
>> And much faster than we as a society or as a political democracy have the capacity to deal with, I mean that there's no politician that I've talked with who has any idea how to think about this stuff.  And the FDA is beginning to try to figure out how to regulate it.  And they're mired down.
>> I think your prediction is that this is gonna be driven in part by litigation initially and lawyers are terribly clumsy instruments for having to make these hard kind of questions.
>> Bad case.
>> The wonderful quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. that says, "All of the great question of theology, philosophy, and science ultimately come to law for the resolution.  And God forgive us and bless us all."  [Laughter] And it's really true.  It's a scary proposition [inaudible] we turned at the lawyers to make all of our hardest judgments.  And often times with the most clumsy of science.  So the stuff that you and Dr. Soroush and others are doing to make this knowledge available to others so that lawyers are not doing this simply at the whim of a jury of 12, or the policy makers are not doing this simply with pedestrian knowledge and part of chief legislative staff person.
^M02:40:10
>> That's really critical.  And the more you can make this public, the more people are aware of what the choices are.  I think the better position we're gonna be to make this paradigm shifts which is gonna be the question about what is privacy ultimately entail.  And then what do the rights give you?  I mean that our family member has a right to know, what does that give you?  Medical insurance company that's a bigger deal.
>> Employer.
>> Employer, those become harder questions.  So wonderful--
>> It's gonna be driven--the fear is it's gonna be driven a few very dramatic cases.
>> Exactly.
>> Rather than something that looks like a broad deliberative process.
>> Yeah.  And then the bad cases make bad law syndrome is back.  I think we have--there are two questions that have provoked wonderful conversation.  So the bar is high for you madam.  There's a question at the back if somebody could bring a microphone to our distinguished guest.
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> I agree, you know, the whole medical world is evolving and it's a good thing on certain level.  But to your point, where do we come to remain creature and not become God with--how do we remain creature and human without becoming God and making those decisions, taking those decisions with all these information that we have to raise it to the pinnacle that we are God so we are going to decide with this information that you don't get treated or that you are whatever.  You know, I mean that you're gonna have this disease and so you shouldn't marry this person.  You know, we take a way of fundamental human right and dignity I think as well when our--when we get to--I just it's a complicated issue I know.  You know it's important to have the medical but it's also important to live a life of--I don't--I have--for lack of better word, a faith and trust.
>> How could you--like two sentences then immediately turn to the people who are expert on this panel or to talk about what it means to--stupid to think about.  God I don't know--I don't know how to talk about that at all.  I--Yes, I mean this is--I mean one of the arenas in which it's before us right now is prenatal testing, right.  And I haven't talked about that but that's not 5 or 10 to 20 or 30 years down the road.  That's with us right now.  And, you know, we all know--many of us in the room probably know, the heart break of giving birth to or deciding about giving birth to a child who's gonna be profoundly deformed.  Or problematic in such but do we have the right to choose that, you know?  I don't--I guess I don't formulate it in a language of becoming Gods.  I don't--That deals to me like such a leap conceptually but I don't know how to think about it.  But the question of what of decision making for ourselves for others for the next generation, those are big issues.  I mean lots of people--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> Comes back to the issue of remainder.  I mean I think that often decisions are made from--you know, an omission perspective is that we know it all.  And in fact, you know, living more within determine to see I think you know your certainty is--it's one of the things that [inaudible] identify as a component of wisdom, the capacity to live with uncertainty.  And I think that our lawyers and our scientist could acknowledge a little more uncertainty in the human continuum.
>> I would like to say that there are two issues that we must not confuse.  One is the quest for the truth, which is a purpose of science and I think that should continue and impede it.  And the other is how we apply this science.  So that's the part that needs to be regulated.
>>Yeah.
>> Depending--
>> The application.
>> --on the society and the--yeah.
>> You wouldn't put any limits on the scientific research?
>> No.  I think we should go for the truth.  The more we know it, the better it is.
>> And, yeah, that the--
>> And then there's a whole ground that we cannot know.  And, you know, I think my [inaudible] friends over here can--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> Is this self-evident rule that the more we know the better we are?  I mean do take it like that or granted?
>> I think knowing the truth is best.  We need to proceed for that.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> Knowing the truth is different than knowing the facts.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> Alright.
>> Oh no, go ahead.
>> Oh, I wanna hear what your answer [inaudible].
>> Let's push on.  It's not knowing truth or not knowing the truth.  Let's enjoin--Let's join that issue and then Cardinal McCarrick wants to jump in this too.
>> Yeah.  I mean this is not--I mean that's self evident that the--did we all fall better provided they know more than we do.  I mean there must be a balance between knowledge and ignorance in our life.  Otherwise I mean, the more we know, it's not actually self evident that they improved our life.  So sometimes the feeling of happiness is when you do not know about your disease, for example.  And it is not usually the case that the doctors should say the patient that he or she has [inaudible] such a disease.  Because he or she might feel [inaudible].
>> We agree with that.  Actually you mentioned before the paternity issue.  We know now that about 15 percent of children born in the United States are not the children of their father.  And what do you do?  I think--And there's been a decision of that, you just don't tell.  You know, all the laboratories, genetics laboratory et cetera, it's not a no, no.  And I think that's--it's a correct decision.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> It can destroy a family of course.  So that's the truth, but this is application, you know, I am--it would--you're telling two different.  You know, it's knowing the truth in science, you know, understanding the phenomena--
>> Maybe not good for me to know the truth.
>> But how we apply them in our society is different.  That has to be regulated.
>> Yeah.  That is a very good story.  I mean John, that--just to change the--but mostly I mean Rumi tells us, you know, the story of somebody who went to Moses and ask him to teach him the language of animals.  And Moses actually abstained and said this is no good for you to know the language of animal.  But he insisted I mean [inaudible] and eventually Moses taught him the language of animals.  So he then like home and hear his dog and his donkey they're talking to each other.  And the dog told the donkey that tomorrow, the day today after the man will die.  And so he was so depressed and very stressed and went back to Moses, and said, please do, you know, I take back the knowledge from me because I cannot live, you know, a happy life.  So I mean this is a story which tells us that perhaps it is not good for everybody to know everything.  We do not, you know, become Gods.  Of course, I mean God is different.  But to know everything or perhaps to make a balance between the knowledge and ignorance is something which [inaudible] every--I mean night we have a dream telling God what's we are to do the next day.  What would happen to us the next day so on and so forth.  The whole life will become different.  We will not live anymore the life that we are living now.  So be better off, you know, not to something in order to struggle, you know, for improving things, in order to fight against something.  In order to--That ignorance gives us a more sense of happiness I think.
>> Dr. Chrousos.  I think that you're talking about truth in a scientific sense.
>> Right.
>> Knowing about the body knowing about--
>> Exactly.
>> --[inaudible] system, knowing about [inaudible] system.
>> I want to separate this two, yes.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Right.  From the application in humans.  Yeah.
>> And you're--that divide between truth and application a big one for you.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> I don't think that separation is possible.
>> Not completely but--
>> I mean conceptually maybe it is.
>> Yeah.
>> But it seems to me in the real world if there is a piece of scientific [inaudible] that correct or incorrect it can agreed upon by consensus amongst the--it's gonna move into the public [inaudible].
>> It's gonna be part of the uncertainty of life.
>> It's gonna move at the public arena.
>> We have to deal with.
>> And so for your understanding of human dignity, I take it more knowledge is better as a way of respecting the dignity of the other and having the capacity to make judgments about yourself based upon that knowledge.
>> Exactly.
>> Is that what [inaudible]?
>> But Jennifer is saying the opposite, in saying that we have to respect privacy.
>> Right.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> But no--But no, I'm not agreeing with him about the knowledge.  I actually--yeah, no I think--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> That kind of knowledge is better.  But your kind of knowledge is to be protected.
>> Yeah.
>> And that's also what you're saying, Dr. Soroush.
>> No.  Actually I think I'm not saying that.  I'm sorry but I'm not being right there.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I think that probably more knowledge is always better, I'm a little cautious about the always, but I'm close to you on that.  And I guess I am very nervous about the idea of keeping information from somebody else to whom it matters.  I'm--I don't think that I as a doctor would have the right not to tell my patient information that I know about them.  I don't think I as a spouse would have the right not to tell my husband information that's gonna affect his life.  So I'm actually pretty close although I understand that this is a very risky proposition.
^M02:50:02
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> I mean this really varies--
>> But I'm close to [inaudible] on this one, I think.  Although, as a political and policy matter, this make me very nervous what I'm not saying.
>> In this country.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> This is a very culturally narrow argument that I'm making.  Absolutely.
>> This is why law professor near the end of the semester with a class to just gives up.  He just let him talk, let him talk.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I think that all of you say the means of acquiring the knowledge has severe limits based in part on dignity.  So experiment on the body and the like are certainly are beyond the past.
>> Absolutely.
>> Even those--those are conducive to finding the truth.
>> Right.
>> And the means of applying the knowledge likewise have limits also based on human dignity.
>> Exactly.
>> So but the question is, when does the body and per se like for example--example, cells that are taken from a--you know, a subject, and then the subject dies and the cells lived on.  What--You know, what about that?
>> These cells can be used for science.  And they are.  We're still using that--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> And they're very useful, I mean we're learning a lot from them.
>> Sixty years.
>> Sixty years.
>> And we--
>> Does everybody know what he's talking about with regard the Hela cells gives it--
>> It was--whose name was Helen something?
>> Henry--no, no, Henrietta Lacks.
>> Right.
>> Not Helen Lang.
>> Something like that.
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> She had cancer of the--
>> Cervix.
>> Of the cervix.  So those cells as you know--cancer cells are [inaudible] immortal.  So they were [inaudible] and they've been kept alive until now.  And they're everywhere in laboratories in the world.
>> Even when they aren't wanted.
>> Right.  And we're using them to understand the DNA that functions a various proteins, different kinds of functions in the cell and so forth.  I don't see anything bad from that--from that use.  I think it's all good.
>> Cardinal McCarrick you've been very patient.
>> I am.
>> [Inaudible] just a bit [inaudible] colloquy I wanted to see if--
>> It's an excellent colloquy and I learn a lot just listening to these very wonderful people who are--who knows so much more than I do.  But just let me--let just threw a couple of things in.  I think knowledge is always good.  It is how we use the knowledge that can be bad.  So I think we recognize that, is that you--we need to know all the things that we can know.  What we need to do only the things that we should do is to preserve the dignity of the human being and to preserve who we are as children I would say of a loving God who is father.  With regard to the deeper question, when I was young which is before anyone including Dr. Billington was a child.  I--When I was very young, there was a great composer named Victor Herbert who had one wonderful song and it was "Ah!  Sweet Mystery of Life, At Last I've Found You."  And, you know, there have to be mysteries in life.  If we have no mysteries in life then our life becomes a very blend and unproductive thing.  So we should not be afraid of mysteries.  And I think human dignity is maybe one of those mysteries in the objective sense certainly.  And maybe even I think in the subjective sense as we try to enhance the dignity of people as we try to recognize the dignity of people, as we try to live a life that is filled with that the same objective dignity and make it subjective in the way that we treat other people.  So I think all these things are--all these things are scientific facts but they're always still part of mystery.  And I think whereas we rejoice in the science, the great discoveries that have been made, we should not get too upset that there are still mysteries because I think that's how we grow and that's really how we live.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you very much.  It was a beautiful statement.  It could be our final statement unless somebody else has a question or comment from the floor.  There's a madam on back row.  Let's make this the final question.  And--
>> There're actually two people in the back [inaudible]
>> I'm sorry, I can't see [inaudible]
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
>> There're 2 people in back row.
>> But I ask both of you to put your question seriatim and then we'll have the panel engage your respective questions to the extent opt and then we'll call it--close.  Please ma'am.
>> Okay.  I wanted to ask Dr. Chrousos about--he said that he felt it was okay for the Hela cells to be used.  But the family has strong objections to the use of their ancestor's--or grand--I believe the grandchildren once you are contesting it now.  How do you balance the argument between the--of the family saying that the doctors had no right to take those cells without familial permission?  They were just kind of co-opted.
>> [Inaudible] when they were not getting consents, et cetera.  Now for anything would do--in other words, right now if the family have not allowed it they're gonna use these cells.  It's too late now to collect those cells back or stop using them.  But--
>> They have no right?
>> But starting about they--I think the family has rights.  I agree with that.  And a few years ago--or not a few about 20, 25 years ago any use would do of biological samples will have to take concrete consent especially when they're using the DNA.  That's--They're particularly strict about that and they're correct about it.
>> But the consent is to use the DNA not necessarily for research only a particular disease, right.  So there remains an issue of consent if by grant consent to take a biological sample for my tumor from myself [inaudible].
>> Yes and I mean we do get these consents.
>> As I understand it now, correct me if I'm wrong.  It's in a sense, it's a global consent.  It's not a consent for the study of a particular--for particular research project.
>> You can get a global consent and you can get a specific consent.  And people have a choice.  For example, we've gotten DNA to study a particular disease as important to the family.  And I tell you, would I want anything else?  That's it.  Then you have to abide by this--by their wish.
>> There's another question at the back row.  Forgive me I can't see you so I can't identify you.
>> Yeah.
>> Please.
>> Thank you.  This one is--It's a simple question for Cardinal McCarrick.  The--You mentioned that human rights come from human dignity.  And specifically in the mundane area of, you know, economics and politics.  If you talk about economic human rights, in light of what you've said about the social doctrine of the church and the last 150 years since--I don't know, I think you said.  Is there any connection between human dignity and the concept of social justice, would you care to comment on that?
>> Yeah.  I think they are very closely connected, obviously.  I think that the teaching Louis XIII, then all the popes since then have basically been--that is because there is this spec--this objective dignity that should be subjectified in the way we live our lives because that's there then there has to be social justice.  That all those things are--if you were dealing with word, and you wouldn't have it, but you're dealing with people.  And therefore you're dealing with God's human family and therefore the need is to use what you do in a valid modern way as you deal with other people.  And that [inaudible] what I'm gonna say, you know, the morale, compassion is all tied in with this.  We all are very close to each other in the way we deal with other people.  I think every religion hopefully in the world is close to each other in the way we deal with other people.  We find that we who are with Catholics or Christians or Muslims, we find that in this the subjective human dignity that God has given to us all.  And that calls on us to deal with each other in a--in that wholesome in a respectful, and in a loving way.  So that's--they're all together.
>> And Cardinal I think we--you know, we can extend that at this time that our human dignity is actually increased when we--accord dignity not only the human beings but to, you know--
>> Whether we call it respect or human dignity or whatever.
>> Right.  But that we--you know we are accorded to--we offer it to not just human beings but to creatures and the earth and so forth that--you know, and this by the way I think is very interesting implications for corporations, and your question of responsibility, the relationship between responsibility and dignity.
>> Well, this has been a wonderful panel that we lawyers say that half the case is picking the right jury and I think that Dr. Brown has picked the right jury.  Dr. Chrousos, Roshi Halifax--Joan Hallofecks, Professor Hochschild, Cardinal McCarrickm and Professor Soroush, I think they deserve a very warm round of applause.
^M02:59:50
[ Applause ]
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
^M02:59:58
>> Please also thank our wonderful moderator who stepped in and rescued us.
[ Applause ]
>> John, thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us at loc.gov.  This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us at loc.gov.