Veronique Millon/The Hoya Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, lectures on bioethics Wednesday night in the Leavey Center.

Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, lectured Wednesday night, outlining the public conversation on the adequacy of bioethics and commended Georgetown for its continuing work in the area of bioethics education.

George, the eighth archbishop of Chicago who has served in the capacity since 1997, comes from the nation’s third largest archdiocese as a renowned spiritual leader and speaker on bioethics.

“The university community is responsible for disciplines and public conversation on many matters,” George said, “and it is the wisdom of the experience of humanity that enables the church to speak to human concerns.”

George then focused on the public conversation of the adequacy around bioethics from first a scientific and social perspective, and then later from a political perspective.

“In both cases, when talking about the adequacy of bioethics, we are arguing against forms of reductionism, which is inadequate at this moment in life,” George said, arguing that reproductive cloning is a violation of human dignity.

Further explaining the ideas of human dignity, George said that the human person is a master of himself, and that he possesses life and goods as a right. “What is genetically human is a personal subject,” he said, “and to miss the subject is to miss the basis of human dignity.”

George later explained that his goal was an eventual prevention of such exercises as human cloning, as he explained that it was robbing people of their humanity and identity, and later appealed to the philosophical and anthropological ideologies of Pope Leo XIII.

“The body is the objectification of the personal subject . and we must place the personal subject at the center of the analysis,” George said.

George stated three interrelated qualities of a human, the most important being that human dignity is the property of endowed human nature at birth. “It is an identity we achieve throughout the course of our lives; we have the ability to choose who we are,” he said.

George noted the emergence of a “medical commodity” instead of a unique human self when talking about the current medical and scientific discoveries and innovations such as cloning and the freezing of the human embryo.

“Although the result is good, the means must be ruled out,” he said.

Switching to bioethics from a political perspective, George stressed that human rights have taken center stage in global discourse.

“Human rights define the social structures necessary to human understanding,” he said. “Moral relations define rights and integrity of persons.”

In reference to the culture of the United States, George explained how law is the only thing that our nation has in common.

“There are differences in so many other things, but the law has evolved into a social contract,” he said. “Courts play an ambiguous role as they place themselves above morality.”

George then explained how it is the role of the university and the church to prepare people for the public conversation around both bioethics and public policy. “It is [the university’s] job to keep the people informed, and I thank Georgetown for its many efforts,” he said.

The John Collins Harvey Lectureship in Health Care Ethics was created as a permanent tribute to the pursuit of excellence in medicine, health care reform and ethics by Dr. John Collins Harvey. The Center for Clinical Bioethics, directed by Sr. Carol Taylor, hopes that the lectureship will become a centerpiece in Georgetown’s commitment to provide leadership in this arena, as Georgetown is recognized as a world-renowned leader in the area of ethics education for health care professionals, educators, policy makers and the public.

“We are greatly proud of his work and what [Dr. Harvey] has done for the medical community in understanding what is better both ethically and morally,” Taylor said.