Professor Patrick Lee will deliver a lecture, Moral Status and the Margins of Human Life, and defend the position that the basis for being a subject of rights is having a rational nature, and that every human being has a rational nature—a radical capacity for rational acts, including deliberate choices to shape one’s life. Objections concerning the boundaries of life, including brain death, will be considered, and the position that human embryos and severely cognitively impaired human beings are subjects of rights, defended. In the course of his lecture Lee will take up and resolve the question: when/under what circumstances is a person dead?
Professor Lee is the John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics, and Director of the Institute of Bioethics, at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Among his many publications are Abortion and Unborn Human Life, which is widely considered to be the best scholarly book arguing against abortion, and Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why it Matters, co-authored with Princeton Professor Robert P. George.