Dr. Steven
Suits
Medical Doctor, Ethics Consultant Speaks To Erskine Students
A Columbia medical doctor and adjunct professor of ethics at Erskine Theological Seminary spoke to college students about what it means to be human during a Thursday convocation in Lesesne Auditorium on the Erskine campus.
Dr. Steven Suits is medical director of Community Medical Centers and an ethics consultant.
Suits used the Terri Schaivo case in Florida to illustrate what it means to be a human person.
“You have to look at whether or not she’s still a person and has a right to life,” Suits said.
Terri Schaivo is the brain-damaged woman who is at the center of controversy over whether she should be kept alive.
Her husband, Michael, claimed in a court filing this week that a hastily passed state law empowering Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to keep her alive violated the state constitution.
Lawyers for Michael Schaivo contended that the law infringed on Terri Schaivo’s right to privacy and the separation of powers provisions of the Florida Constitution.
Terro Schaivo suffered severe brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped. The legal battle over her fate is one of the nation’s longest and most contentious right-to-die cases.
The question of what it means to be a human person is at the center of how a person stands on this issue and others, Suits said.
“The way you answer that question affects the position you take on many issues of our day,” he said.
Suits said Terri Schaivo’s situation can be analyzed from a political or cultural standpoint, but this does not address the most pertinent issue.
“Terri Schaivo is why we must ask the question of what it means to be a human person,” Suits said.
He said it is important to review experiences in history and the type of thinking that has permeated society.
Starting with Greco-Roman thinking, Suits traced perspectives on what it means to be a person.
The consequences of that thinking are the “key to hope for the human person,” he said. “If we do not speak out, who will?”
The perspective of early Christendom has dominated Western thinking from the 3rd century until the modern day and says that “personhood” results when someone “has the capacity for rational discernment,” Suits said.
Rational discernment develops individual substance and determines the “self-identity of a being who may develop over time,” he said.
That thinking developed in the Middle Ages with the idea of the “superiority” of a human as the most developed creature in God’s creation.
The idea of an inherent human dignity also gained ground, Suits said.
“Inner subjectivity” was the thinking in early modern times and turned the focus away from the heavens and looked inside for truth, he said.
Thinking in middle modern times saw science develop as the “queen of reason,” Suits said. “Queen Science has replaced that which is not material.”
In later modern times, the focus has shifted to the community, which is not a bad thing, he said, but the individual depends on the community for nurture.
The grounding of a person is his soul and determines personhood, Suits said.
He said God is model case of a person – God is premiere, God is spirit/soul, God is immaterial.
Suits said human persons are substances through wholeness, unity of properties, unity of separable parts and unity of capacities (tendencies).
Those capacities are real “even though they might not be realized or expressed,” he said.
Suits said it is not the body that determines the soul, but the soul that determines the body.
“It is not to have a soul, it is to be a soul,” he said.
