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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.944)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Jason Eberle, Director of the Albert Nagy Center for Healthcare Ethics in St. Louis. And we're talking about his book, The Nature of Human Persons, Metaphysics and Bioethics. Dr. Eberle, wonderful to have you on today.
Jason Eberl (00:20.91)
Yeah, thank you so much, PJ. Appreciate the invitation.
PJ (00:24.088)
So tell me, why this book?
Jason Eberl (00:29.102)
You know, you start a research project, you kind of want to see it come to fruition. No. But yeah, no, in all seriousness, you know, so when I was studying for my PhD in philosophy, I was interested in questions of human nature, human personhood, philosophy of mind, the mind -body relationship.
And bioethics is like the furthest thing from what I want to do with my career. I basically thought that bioethics was just debating abortion all day. I didn't want to do that for my career. But when I was in grad school, one of my faculty mentors kind of opened my eyes to all the various fascinating issues that come up in bioethics that for a metaphysician like myself, where again, questions of personhood, personal identity, what it means to be human.
PJ (01:04.632)
haha
Jason Eberl (01:24.142)
the nature of the mind and the body, are very much relevant. And within bioethics, what I learned as I got into that field is that while there are some people with my particular background expertise, with my interests, who are engaging with some of the issues I am, there's also a fair number of people in the biotech field who kind of just, you know, assume metaphysics and these.
bigger questions, these bigger philosophical questions as, you know, not being relevant, not being important, or just questions like, well, we don't know the answer to that, so let's just proceed, you know, without trying to answer them. And I get that. I mean, these are questions that philosophers and theologians and others have been wrestling with for millennia. We don't have agreed upon answers to these. It's not like we're going to find them through a telescope or a microscope. That being said,
As I always tell my students, there's no joke about how in philosophy there are no right or wrong answers. So it seems like it's an easy A course. But what I tell my students is like, well, there are more or less reasonable answers. So what this book is, it's an attempt to give a reasonable answer, not necessarily an answer that can be defended as the truth.
there's always going to be objections to anyone's views. But basically, I'm making the best attempt I can make to say, here's a reasonable view of what it means to be a human person, sort of in contrast to various other views out there debated by philosophers, and then what the bioethical implications would be, particularly at the beginning and end of life. My current research has gone in kind of new and different directions.
So this book was kind of like the culmination, the end points, sort of the first phase of my research trajectory.
PJ (03:25.816)
So you plan on continuing this trajectory?
Jason Eberl (03:30.03)
The trajectory definitely of doing metaphysical speculation on human nature and human personhood and applying it to bioethical issues, just taking on different issues than what I do in this book. So for example, right now my current line of research is focused on human enhancement using biotechnology and transhumanism. Also the concept of disability and how that intersects with the.
enhancement discussion. So that's kind of what I'm already envisioning for my next book after this one. So it's the same philosophical mode I'm in, but just looking at different topics.
PJ (04:11.16)
Yeah, so of course you're tracking with, it was in the news and they're not saying anything about it, but I believe it was the quadriplegic just got the first neurolink put in, right? So we're in that kind of that realm. But then, and I think most people would be like, well, of course that's good for the quadriplegic, but then on the other side, you start having questions of like,
rich and poor divides over some of these enhancements. I remember from a gene editing discussion talking about like if you could influence your child's intellect or their sex or eye color, these sorts of things and creating economic divides across the biological spectrum. It gets sticky real fast. When you're like, can I allow a quadriplegic to be able to...
or someone who's totally paralyzed to be able to communicate, you're like, yeah, that sounds fine. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, okay, we need... That is a bigger discussion.
Jason Eberl (05:12.238)
Mm -hmm.
Jason Eberl (05:15.854)
Where you start drawing those lines, where we put the guardrails up, exactly. Or should there be lines in guardrails?
PJ (05:17.56)
Right. Yes. Can you talk us through the dominant strands of human nature, like in thought?
Jason Eberl (05:34.638)
Yeah, so of course, so there's a lot of views that again, span millennia, span different cultures. And I have my own background, my own training is in the sort of Western philosophical tradition. So, you know, in the book, I don't really treat things like, you know, Buddhist or Taoist perspectives. But because, you know,
you know, as you know, widely know, you know, Buddhist perspective on the self is the no self, right? It's kind of recognizing that there is no individual identity, at least that not one that's permanent, right? And not the one that we should cling to. Whereas pretty much in Western philosophical thought, going back to the, you know, the Greeks about 2500 years ago, right? There's a notion of the individual person, the individual human being. And,
The sort of poles of this discussion, you basically have one of the spectrum, going back to say Socrates and Plato, is what we today call dualism, right? The view that there is something about us. We can call it the soul, we can call it the mind, we can call it consciousness, we can call it the spirit, whatever it is, whatever term we use, that there is something about us that is immaterial.
that is transcendent of our bodies and that can presumably survive the death of our bodies. Okay, so there's dualism and there's different varieties of dualism that, and some of which I treat them in the book. Then at the other end of the spectrum, you have materialism or physicalism, right? This is the idea that we are just our bodies and brains, right? We're just meat sacks with quivering gray flesh in our skulls. And you know, that's all we are, right?
what we think of as the mind just is neural happenings in the brain and hormones and in our bloodstream and so on and so forth. And then, and again, there's kind of different varieties of materialism. I mean, they have all agreed that fundamental thesis, but like some materialists are okay with what we would call folk psychological terms, like belief, desire, right? So, you know, if I say to my wife, I love you, right? Some materials are like,
Jason Eberl (07:59.086)
Yeah, I mean, Jason's love for his wife is just, you know, endorphins being released in this prefrontal cortex whenever he sees her. But, you know, we can call that love. Whereas there are some materialists called eliminative this because they want to eliminate all that folk psychological language from vocabulary. So instead of talking about love, we talk about the rush of endorphins and the increased heart heartbeat whenever my light reflects off of my wife's face and strikes my retina. You know, that's really.
That's what love is, right? And then there are a range of views in between that basically try to take seriously the fact that we are physical creatures, we're animals, we're embodied beings, but that there arguably is something about our mind or consciousness, whatever, that isn't completely explained just by what's happening in our brains and the rest of our bodies.
PJ (08:55.032)
Where does, I think I've seen eliminativist accounts before, or at least that term, how does that react to, my work, not my work, my study in philosophy of mind has been basically following a little bit of John Searle. So what I encountered was epiphenomenalism. Is that similar to eliminativist?
Jason Eberl (09:18.254)
not, I mean, and an Alimidivist would be an Epiphenomenalist, but you don't, there are other Epiphenomenalists out there. yeah, yeah. Yeah. Basically an Epiphenomenalist is anyone who thinks that, again, what we refer to as consciousness or the conscious feel of things, a more technical term that's used as qualitative phenomenal experience or qualia for short, that these qualia,
PJ (09:26.904)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Eberl (09:48.238)
are have no causal power whatsoever. So again, something that a physicalist holds is the causal closure of the physical world. And that if we understood everything about the physical world and the law, the physical laws that govern happenings within the world, then we would understand everything about a human person, right? And so yes, there may be something like consciousness or in this qualitative, phenomenal feel of things.
but it's causally inert. It doesn't do anything. It's just a byproduct of the happenings in our brain.
PJ (10:24.088)
You yourself come at it from, you follow Aquinas. Where does that come from? Why did you choose Aquinas for your own account of human nature?
Jason Eberl (10:35.47)
Yeah, so at a personal level, I've just always been fascinated with Aquinas' thought. I grew up Catholic and still identify as Catholic. And Aquinas is this seminal figure in Catholic philosophical theology. And of course, I studied a lot of philosophy that had nothing to do with Aquinas, especially Plato and Aristotle. And Aquinas himself was very much influenced by Aristotle.
kind of a somewhat inaccurate trope that Aquinas baptized Aristotle, right? He basically took Aristotle's philosophy and Christianized it. That's convenient, but it's not wholly accurate. But the point is, Aquinas is influenced by Aristotle. He synthesizes not just Aristotle, but the Platonic philosophy he inherits through Augustine, one of his forebearers.
Roman thought that you get from Stoicism, through people like Cicero and Seneca, Islamic and Jewish thought. And he kind of synthesizes it all together with the best science of his day, which of course is almost a thousand year old science. So it's nothing like what we'd have today. And develops a very cohesive philosophical system.
you know, what one agrees with that system or not, right. But it's, it's, it's a very cohesive philosophical system. And it's always been fascinating to buy again. I don't agree with Aquinas on every single thing he says, but I, I do agree with him a lot and I do like his, his system and his mode of thinking. So, so that's kind of my personal, you know, best of church. And then I do think Aquinas as an Aristotelian does develop this nice, you know, via media, this middle road, middle approach.
between the extremes of dualism. And in some sense Aquinas' view can be called a dualistic view. He does believe in what we would call a soul and we can talk about what that means more in a second. But he's not the far end of that dualist spectrum. He also can be called a materialist because he does think we are animals. Our bodies are essential to our identity. He just doesn't think we can.
Jason Eberl (12:55.15)
reductively explain everything about us simply by reference to our bodies and our brains. So I like those middle approaches.
PJ (13:05.56)
see your admiration for Aquinas in what you said earlier that as you're looking to create your own work you're looking to avoid this kind of issue by issue how can we just solve this particular problem but you're trying to create a synthesis. Is that a fair way to read what you're doing here?
Jason Eberl (13:27.758)
Yeah, very much so. I mean, one of the things I always try to drill into my students is the need for philosophical consistency. Not that we shouldn't continually re -examine and adjust our views as new data comes to light, new thoughts emerge, new critiques that we have to take into account. We should always be willing to change our minds, change our views. So it's not about.
adopting a view and that just a theoretical viewpoint that just sticking with it no matter what. But as one develops their philosophical worldview over our whole lifetimes, yeah, it's the idea of you're not just looking at the issue by issue. And yeah, one of the things that does irk me is when I see people take a particular stance on one issue, and then they take a completely different stance on some distinct but related analogous issue.
and they don't see the inconsistency in their respective positions.
PJ (14:29.336)
Mm.
So it's one of the first things you really talk about. Can you talk to us about what hylomorphism is?
Jason Eberl (14:42.702)
Yeah, so hylomorphism, it's a term you'll pretty much never see outside of discussions of Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics. It's a view that, so it comes from two Greek words, hyla, which means matter, and morphos, which means form or also means change. So.
you combine these things. So basically for Aristotle, well, let me start with Plato, actually. Apologies to listeners who already, I might be dusting off the cobwebs of people's intro philosophy classes, but there's a famous painting by Raphael called The School of Athens. And you can find it pretty much on any philosophy department's website. It's...
PJ (15:33.048)
Yeah, it's so true. Yeah.
Jason Eberl (15:36.75)
Yeah, it's kind of a calling card. And in the middle of this painting, you have Plato and Aristotle standing and walking. And Plato is pointing up to the heavens. And this is reflective of his view that reality, what he called forms, which the word he the Greek word he uses is Eidos, from which we get our word idea from the forms of things is the fundamental reality. Everything we see with our senses in the physical world.
is not truly real. It's a shadow. It's a reflection of what the ultimate reality. So you might see, you know, a herd of horses and no one of those horses is the essence of being a horse itself, right? True, you know, horsiety, we can call it, or horseness is this pure form and it's transcendent and...
We can only perceive it when our souls are released from the entrapment in our bodies. That's Plato's view in a nutshell. Horciness, yeah, I like that. There you go, that's a good one. Yeah, that's right. And then Aristotle in the Raphael painting, right? He's more pointing towards the ground with his hand. The way I like to interpret it is he's telling Plato's, we would say today, keep it real, keep it grounded.
PJ (16:44.376)
I've always preferred horsiness myself, but you know, horsiday, horsayity, that's a new one for me. I like that too. I have to think about that. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Jason Eberl (17:07.182)
And for Aristotle, he also had this concept of form. But again, he's not referring to some transcendental pure ideal of things. He's referring to that principle of beingness and of change that is present within all material beings. So forms are present within material beings. They're not transcended from them. And so...
when you look at a horse, you are perceiving the form of horsiness in them. But also another different looking horse also has that same form. So again, at a conceptual, logical level, horsiness is something not fully captured by any individual horse, but it is present in all those individual horses. And same with humanity.
horse humanists, humanists, humanaity, yes. Thankfully we do have a word for that. We'll start with humanity. And so, yeah, each one of us embodies humanity, right? None of us do it perfectly. None of us just is the essence of humanity, but humanity is present within each one of us. Each of us, each of our material bodies has the form of humanity.
PJ (18:07.832)
Yeah, humidity, human ears, I don't know.
PJ (18:14.84)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Eberl (18:36.078)
So that's what hylomorphism is. It's the form matter together, making the composite unity of being. And so again, this is true for all things that exist, right? But for Plato, what this means for persons, for human beings, for us, is that, you know, when I'm looking at you through Zoom, of course, I'm not even really looking at you. I'm looking at an electronic reconstruction of you on my computer screen.
but you know, if I were directly perceiving your body, even then I wouldn't be perceiving you, right? You PJ are a soul, your, your mind, your, your consciousness, you're this immaterial thing that I can't directly perceive. Whereas Aristotle would say, no, I am perceiving you. I'm not perceiving all of you because there are aspects of your being that, that are not accessible to my senses.
But when I'm looking at your body and hearing your voice, I am directly perceiving something that is essentially a part of you. And so that's where the hylomorphic view differs from what we can call in particular platonic dualism.
PJ (19:52.568)
How would the two of them react to a letter from me?
if that makes sense because would they talk about perceiving me in that letter and how does that create a difference in how they would talk about perceiving me in that letter because it seems like if it's just a if my body is just a medium to the Platonist.
then the letter is also just a medium to the platonist. Whereas for Aristotle, if I understand his view correctly, he's like, that's not as much you as I would get as like your body is very much you.
Jason Eberl (20:29.902)
I mean, I think in both cases, the letter would be viewed as something that is, it's communicating, right? It's a medium by which something about you, your mental thoughts, right? That you're sharing in this letter are being transmitted to me. Of course, things can get lost in translation, right? You might write something in your letter, you intend to be sarcastic and I read it literally. And I'm like, God, PJ is such a jerk for writing that.
And you're like, no, no, no, I meant that sarcastically. That was just a joke. Right. So so anytime we're communicating something about ourselves through some sort of medium, there's always the opportunity for it to get misconstrued. And I think that's true for both Plato and Aristotle. It's just that with Plato, how you express yourself through your body to me is almost like that letter already. It's already just a medium.
by which you're communicating your thoughts, your psychology. And so already things can get lost in translation. That can happen in Aristotle's view as well. But again, there's much more direct connection between your thoughts and the embodied behavior that expresses your thoughts.
PJ (21:44.792)
And is it through kind of this hylomorphistic view, I don't know if I just made up a word or not, but is it through this Aristotelian view that we come to find Aquinas possibly being a materialist and a dualist at the same time?
Jason Eberl (21:50.838)
You
Jason Eberl (22:03.054)
Right, exactly. So Aquinas pretty much adopts whole cloth Aristotle's hylomorphic view. I'll explain in a minute one key way in which they differ. But the main thing he adopts from Aristotle is, yes, this idea that I, Jason Eberle, a human being, a human person, and this composite unity of matter informed by what
what both Aquinas and Aristotle call a rational soul or an intellective soul. The term soul, we kind of think of as a religious term nowadays. you know, soul talk, that's what religious believers believe. And of course, Aquinas is a religious believer, but Aristotle wasn't. I mean, he may have believed in some things about the Greek religion of his time. But from all, you know,
For all intents and purposes, Aristotle is what we today call secular philosopher, right? And Aristotle is, the Greek word for soul he uses is suke, P -S -U -C -H -E, or psi, epsilon, chi, epsilon, eta actually at the end, not epsilon. But we get our word psyche from that, right? Psychology, psychiatry, psych,
PJ (23:19.448)
Yeah.
Jason Eberl (23:29.902)
and so what Aristotle means by suke is simply a particular type of form. Again, on his view, everything that exists has a form. My phone has a form of iPhone -ness, right? Water has a form of water -ness. But there's something particular Aristotle thinks. He thinks there's a sort of ontological category divide, a leap in...
in types of being, when we move from inanimate objects to what we call animate objects. Of course, the word animate comes from the Latin word for soul, anima. So the idea is that Aracel defines the soul. He has a whole book called Deonima, right? Again, that's the Latin term he didn't use that was put on that book. But right at the beginning, he defines the soul as the first principle of things that
have the potential, by which means the power of life. So all living things have a soul. A blade of grass has a soul. An oak tree has a soul. Our dogs and cats have souls. And human beings have souls. But there are different types of soul, different types of suke. What Aristotle calls the vegetative soul of things that are just alive. And then what he calls the sensitive or sentient soul.
which are the souls of animals, things that can perceive their environment and behaviorally respond to it, that have consciousness. And then finally, the rational or intellectual soul of things that are self -conscious, beings that are self -aware, capable of thinking in abstract conceptual ways, and which have what we would call today free will. And so again, all this is in Aristotle, all of this is being...
PJ (25:22.296)
you
Jason Eberl (25:27.406)
by Aquinas. And then the one big difference between Aquinas and Aristotle is there's a huge debate, a huge dispute among Aristotle scholars about whether Aristotle believed that the, well, there's basically three options on the table that, you know, I'll just call it the rational soul. Whether the rational soul is destroyed when the body dies.
So every other form goes out of existence when the piece of matter which it is the form is destroyed. If I take my iPhone and I smash it on the ground and break it out of different pieces, yes, there are other iPhones out there, but the form of this particular iPhone has been annihilated. It's gone. There's no iPhone heaven. We're all our past dead iPhones. They have all the different versions.
PJ (26:23.544)
That sounds like an update we need, right? All iPhones go to heaven instead of all dogs. Right, yeah.
Jason Eberl (26:27.406)
Right. Exactly. And, and, you know, the same is true of living things, right. And, but then when we get to the human being, it seems like because we have this, these powers, these capacities for self -awareness, intellect of thought, autonomous volition or free will, that these are things that Aristotle himself argues are not reducible to the material physical operations of the body.
So it seems like the soul, the rational soul, can do things without the body. And that would seem to imply that the soul can exist without the body. Now...
The, what I think is the right interpretation of Aristotle. Again, this is still disputing Aristotle scholars. Well, I put his right interpretation is that Aristotle himself thought that yes, while the soul can do these things without the body, it actually does need the body for some very, a very important reason to supply data to think about, right? We're not born with knowledge. Plato, if you read his dialogue, the Meno has this,
a key passage where Socrates is kind of functioning as the mouthpiece for Plato. He takes a young servant boy and he starts asking a series of questions. This is what we call the Socratic method, right? And it pulls this knowledge of like advanced geometry and mathematics out of this uneducated servant boy. And the point that Plato is trying to make is even this servant boy has the knowledge within him.
because his soul pre -existed his body and at one time was understood the forms of things. And that embodiment was such a trauma that caused his and all of our souls to forget that knowledge and through learning, through education, right? Even though the word educe means to lead out of, to lead us out of the dark cave of ignorance into the light of knowledge, right? But that light is within us. Well, Aristotle says no.
Jason Eberl (28:33.07)
A, souls don't pre -exist bodies, they're created within the bodies as the bodies come into existence. And there's no previous knowledge there. So we have to learn. How do we learn? Through sensation. We sense the world around us. So I only know things about horses because I've seen horses and I've heard horses and I've ridden horses and I've smelled horses.
Actually my very first job I only lasted for two days, but was cleaning out horse stalls It was summertime in Las Vegas and the mixture of the heat and the smell I just couldn't take it and I left a god job of Burger King instead That was in high school. But anyways, so the point is that's how I know horses So the point is is even though I can think about horses now without having to have a horse directly in front of me I had to learn about horses through
using my body to gain knowledge of them. And so it seems like then, because of the dependence of the soul on the body to gain knowledge through our senses, that without the body, the soul wouldn't function. At least that's what I take to be Aristotle's view. Aquinas takes a different view. He thinks, and he thinks this is true just on philosophical grounds. Again, obviously he's a Christian, he believes in, you know.
life beyond death, resurrection of the body, and so on and so forth. But he believes that it's philosophically defensible on Aristotle's own terms that the soul can still do things without the body. First of all, I can think about knowledge it's already gained. So again, just as I can think about horses now, I can think about horses. I don't have to perceive more horses to be thinking about horses. I had that knowledge. Two, I can think about my own self.
kind of solipsistic existence just to be thinking about one's own self for all eternity, but I can do that. And I can will, right? Based on the knowledge that I have, I can formulate desires and will for things. So the point is, if the soul can do something without the body, then it can exist without the body. And therefore Aquinas argues that death does not mean the annihilation of the soul.
PJ (30:55.032)
going to take a quick detour here because I'd love to come back to some of the issues you address in the book. Can you talk to me a little bit more about the Center for Healthcare Ethics? What is the point of that and what issues do you generally address? Because I feel that your work has come out of dealing with what you're dealing with there.
Jason Eberl (31:23.47)
Yeah, very much so. So as I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, I started out studying philosophy, actually here at St. Louis University in our philosophy department here, and was interested in getting an Aquinas and metaphysics and philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion. And then I became interested in bioethics through my time here. And then...
When I went on the job market a little over 20 years ago, you know, the philosophy academic job market is not great and it's only gotten worse. Yeah. And, and so I basically applied, I applied for like a hundred jobs, literally, everything from like a post -stock at Notre Dame to, you know, teaching at Maricopa County Community College back in Arizona, where I grew up, like the whole spectrum. I was just, I just wanted a job and.
PJ (32:00.984)
I've heard rumors, yeah.
Jason Eberl (32:19.342)
And I was applying for jobs as a medievalist, as a metaphysician, and as a bioethicist. And I ended up landing a bioethics job at Indiana University in Indianapolis. And so I kind of then just started to devote my time there to, again, focusing on bioethical issues, but approaching them as a philosopher, as a metaphysician, using Aquinas as my philosophical touchstone, along with.
they get ancillary figures like Aristotle and so on. And so like I said, that kind of drove the development of my research and then also my teaching career. So come full circle, about six years ago, I returned here to St. Louis University as director of our Center for Healthcare Ethics, which we're a distinct academic department. We have our own faculty, our own PhD program, our own undergraduate, major, and minor. Although we have,
joint PhD programs, both with our theology department, we're a Catholic Jesuit university, so we have a theology department, and then with our philosophy department. And I mentioned that because that really captures, I think, the particular charism, the particular essential feature of our program. Because there are about, I think we're up to seven or eight PhD programs, I think there's seven in existence and an eighth one is being planned in the country.
in bioethics, right? There's lots of philosophy, but there's only a handful. There are a lot of master's programs, a lot of postdoc fellowship or certificate programs in bioethics or more specific areas like clinical ethics or research ethics, but very few doctoral programs in bioethics. And we're all a little bit different. And the particular charism of our program is while we make sure to teach our students about
how to do a clinical ethics consultation at the bedside, what it means to serve what we call an IRB, the Institutional Review Board that oversees research involving human subjects. Ever since the pandemic now, we make sure our students know some things about public health ethics. But then we also want them to have a strong grounding in a foundational academic discipline, right? Bioethics has kind of become its own field in academia, but it's only like 50 years old.
Jason Eberl (34:46.19)
the term bioethics, it was first used way back in 1927, but it didn't really catch on as a term of art until 1971. And that was right at the cusp of all these different bioethical issues coming up, some of which we still talk about today, like how we define death and things of that nature. So the point being is that, yeah, yeah.
PJ (35:06.132)
Forgive me, real quick. When you say 1971, is there a specific event tied to that? Or...
Jason Eberl (35:11.95)
Well, so this scholar named Van Rensselaer Potter published a book called Bio -Ethics. So that was the first time since 1927 that someone had used this term bioethics. What's interesting about that book, I know there's a little quick tangent here is what Potter meant by bioethics is he meant the combination of science and human values.
with respect to both what we today call the life sciences and clean medicine, but also things like the biosphere. So we talk about ecology and environmentalism. And so it's kind of interesting that at the beginning of bioethics, there was, yeah, this kind of, it was a wider concept of what bioethics is than how we often think of it today, where it's really more about medicine, biotechnology, things of that nature. Yeah.
PJ (36:09.272)
Forgive me, do you think of that narrowing as a good thing or do you think that broader contextualization, putting human beings inside these systems, do you think it'd be good to perhaps recover that or to broaden that again?
Jason Eberl (36:24.11)
I very much think we need to recover that. Yeah. I think it was kind of natural that there was this narrowing. I think there was definitely very specific things in areas like clinical ethics and research ethics. We kind of had to figure out and not that we haven't all figured out where we're still discussing the painting these things. But I think the narrowness was appropriate and natural, but the field is kind of naturally now.
PJ (36:26.616)
Okay.
Jason Eberl (36:52.526)
re -expanding. So I'm saying like an hourglass, like it started like this and narrowed out, expanding back out. And especially as we think about something like the COVID -19 pandemic, right? You know, what we saw was how things like, you know, there's a lot of theories about how the pandemic started, you know, and I don't have an educated opinion about exactly which of those theories is correct. But one of the theories and, you know, a very
reasonable likely explanation, if not for COVID -19, but probably for some pandemic, are wet markets, right? These are markets very common in various parts of Asia where you have, you know, fresh, you know, you have, you know, animals, you have seafood, you have all these things kind of, you know, mixed and you think like a big farmers market. But there's a lot of...
opportunities for, you know, an animal with a certain type of infectious disease to, you know, that disease to leap over, right, into another animal or to become transmissible to humans, right? Again, I'm not an expert on how the, how the bacteriology of wet markets function, but that's my understanding is that there is, like I said, that may not be how COVID -19 actually started. I don't want to blame Asian wet markets for COVID -19, but that does seem like a reasonable, you know,
theory, if it's not COVID -19, it could be something else. But the point is, is that why do these wet markets exist? Well, there's all sorts of social, cultural, and economic reasons why they exist, right? You can't simply say, well, shut down the wet markets. No, that's not going to happen. That can't happen. So we need to understand the social aspects, the economic aspects, the political aspects, the ecological aspects. We have to bring all that together as we're to understand, you know,
pandemic outbreaks.
PJ (38:52.344)
I'd love to give another example that I think is less politicized. I appreciate you saying this is very possible. You're not trying to make some political point with that. I think that has sometimes been not the most useful way to talk about COVID, is to make it this political weapon. But to make sure I'm tracking with you and clarify what you're saying, I think it's...
you know, and I haven't looked at it for a while, but something like 40 to 50 % increase in obesity in Northern America. Right? And that seems to be not just like, when it first started, people were like, people lack self control, all these sorts of things. But there seems to be a number of social, cultural and like, as you talk about bioethics, it covered things like agriculture, if I'm understanding you correctly. And agriculture seems to play a very large role.
The changes and the massive changes in agriculture play a significant role in human medicine because of course a jump in, whether it's even as low as 30 % in obesity is going to make a huge difference in medical outcomes. Is that another, is that an example of kind of what we're talking about here?
Jason Eberl (40:05.646)
Mm -hmm.
yeah, very much so. And like you said, there's a very sort of simplistic take on all this where, you know, someone sees a mother with her four kids going through the McDonald's drive -through and buying them all chicken McNuggets and Big Macs. And they're like judgmental, like, gosh, she's feeding her kids McDonald's and they're going to be obese. Well.
they might not know that she's a single mom working two jobs and this is her one hour between the two jobs that she has to like run her kids to get feed them and spend time with them. She doesn't have time to cook a healthy organic meal or afford the more expensive organic produce, right? You know, we've all seen the price differences between different, you know, different types of grocery stores, right? And so, you know, her feeding herself and her kids fast food isn't necessarily a choice she's making.
I believe humans have free will, but our free will is constrained in all sorts of ways by socioeconomic conditions. I want to give one other example. One of my colleagues here at our center, Harold Broswell, he's working on a book right now on how it's called Inhospitable, How Housing Discrimination Shapes the Way We Die.
PJ (41:27.672)
Mmm.
Jason Eberl (41:28.462)
And St. Louis, you and your listeners, probably a lot of you are redlining this history of going back to the 1940s and 50s, even before that even, of carving up parts of the urban areas based on credit risk and so on, and where people get housing loans and so on from banks. And St. Louis is almost a poster child for that. I mean,
This city is very geographically segregated in all sorts of ways. And so it's kind of an ideal place to do sort of a case study on this notion where you can have differences in life expectancies of 15 to 20 years between two adjacent zip codes. And not only how long people live, but also what is going to kill them.
PJ (42:20.056)
Wow.
Jason Eberl (42:27.342)
How are they going to die? And what access are they gonna have to say good end of life medical care? Not just like access to curative treatments, but also just access to what we call palliative care or hospice care. How to help people to die a dignified death, by which I'm not talking about like euthanasia or assisted suicide, I'm just saying.
help someone to die well, you know, through the natural course. And that can change radically based on one's geography. And there's all sorts of social, you know, economic conditions, almost all of which can be traced to some sort of political decision, right? There's a great book by a scholar named Daniel Dawes called The Political Determinants of Health. We often talk, especially in public health, about the social determinants of health.
And Dawson's point is that most of what we call these social determinants are direct results of specific political decisions that have been made at some point. And we might not even see the effects for decades, but the effects will eventually hit. Yeah.
PJ (43:30.424)
Right.
PJ (43:34.392)
Which makes the analysis of them difficult, right? Like, I mean, there's kind of this classic at the surface level. I remember, depending on who I talked to, you know, it was either the previous president or the current president who was like the economy was their fault. And it just depended on if the economy is doing well, it was the president of your choice. And if the economy was doing poorly, it was surely the other president. Nothing like a little confirmation bias in the middle of everything.
Jason Eberl (43:57.806)
Yep. Indeed.
PJ (44:04.824)
So we kind of dwell on the...
foundational stuff earlier. And what I would like to dwell on here, kind of at the end, I want to be respectful of your time. You have some, the issues that you deal with, the beginning of human persons, the death of human persons. I would like to, if you don't mind, can we talk about post -mortem persons? And of course, if someone wants to answer those other questions, they have to read your excellent book. So, you know, that's on them. But post -mortem persons, and I, I had, the reason I asked about that one is I just saw,
Jason Eberl (44:32.846)
Hahaha.
PJ (44:40.312)
I'm very blessed with a very inquisitive six -year -old. He loves watching these little shorts about optimistic science. And there is now a legal issue surrounding this new company that wants to compost human bodies so that they...
Jason Eberl (44:47.918)
Mmm.
Jason Eberl (44:56.59)
yeah.
PJ (44:59.704)
so that they... Good.
Jason Eberl (45:00.014)
Full disclosure, I'm an investor in that company.
Haha.
PJ (45:11.768)
I did not know that. That is awesome. Well, let me ask you about postmortem persons.
Jason Eberl (45:12.782)
Hahaha!
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So so. So this is the part of the book, I will admit, is like mostly just nerding out for my fellow Thomas and fellow Catholics who already like believe that there's such a thing as as life after death. And I'm sort of cashing out what that means on a get a toistic, hylomorphic framework. I already talked about.
how Aquinas's views are different from Aristotle's. And what's interesting, and I'll link this up to the composting question here in a second. So like I said, Aquinas believes that the soul at death, death is the separation of soul from the body. And in a very real sense, that means it's kind of the end of me. Because on this hylomorphic view, if I, Jason Eberle, am this composite unity of soul and body,
then if I lose my body, right, how can we say there's like really Jason Nubrell there? There's my soul. But is my soul actually me? Plato, again, would say yes, that is actually the true me. But Aristotle and Aquinas would say, no, it's only a part of me. I'm not really there. Or if I am really there, and that's actually what I would say, is that I am there, but it's almost as if like, like here's an analogy that's even more,
fantastical. Let's say you chopped off my head, and you hooked it up to a biomechanical pump that kept blood flowing, you know, and you kept me alive that way. And I'm thinking and so on, we even figure out somebody so I can speak, you know, pump air in. But I'm missing the rest of my body. Right? So you say, well, Jason's there, it's only his head, but it's Jason. But it's not all of Jason, right? There's something essential missing.
Jason Eberl (47:12.686)
And so that's what I think of the soul after death. And so for this reason, for Aquinas, as a Christian, he believes that the resurrection of the body is necessary to fully bring me back into existence. Right. And again, this only happens at the end of time. It's something affected by God. But we still have to kind of give it a philosophical account of how is it that my resurrected body on the Christian understanding is my same body.
And here, again, going back, again, recalling everything I said about, you know, the soul as sort of the form of the body. Another way to understand that, again, it's kind of a crude analogy, but the soul's kind of like the blueprint for the body, right? It's the design plan. Because matter on an aerosol device is just nothing. It's just stuff that can take on a form, right? And so, and so the matter that's used to make my resurrected body is pretty much any matter.
that becomes informed by my soul, and it sort of takes on that design blueprint and becomes my body. So I can't be... So here's my way to think about it, and this will lead directly to the composting question. At the resurrection, the molecules and atoms that make up your body at this moment and my body at this moment could completely swap. But that doesn't mean you'd be resurrected looking...
like me, you'd be resurrected looking like PJ. And people would recognize you as PJ. And same thing for me. Even though all the matter making up my body was matter that was once part of your body. Right? So.
This brings us to the question of, does it matter, no pun intended, what we do with the body of the deceased, of people who are dead? Now there are some Christians, more in the fundamentalist camp, and I don't even know if this is true of all fundamentalist Christians, but at least some fundamentalist Christians believe that you must bury the body intact, not just out of respect for the dead, but...
Jason Eberl (49:27.406)
even in order for that body to be resurrected. And they're also against things like organ donation, because they think you have to keep your body intact. Or if they take your liver out after you're dead and give it to someone else, you're not going to have a liver, it's a resurrection. And I guess that'd be a bad thing. And so, yeah, I'm not going to critique that view, but I was clarifying that that's not Aquinas's view.
PJ (49:47.832)
No.
Jason Eberl (49:57.326)
And therefore that's not the Catholic view, right? The Catholic view is you can donate your organs. And although we do need to respect the bodies of the dead and the Catholic church in its sort of official teachings does prefer whole body burial into the ground. The church ever since the 1960s, since the Second Vatican Council has allowed for cremation. And...
And so the understanding doesn't matter that we've reduced the body to ash. The matter can still be used. Composting is simply another way of reducing the body to a state of basic components that, again, there's things that if we did with the composted remains may be deemed disrespectful. And so maybe...
There's certain things you're not allowed to do with it. But something that I think is perfectly respectful to do would be, you know, instead of just, you know, putting a body in the ground and then just sits there in the ground or putting ashes in an urn and putting the urn on the mantle and just sits there, put my composted remains into the ground. It's become now nutrient rich soil and plant a seed and a tree grows out of it. Right.
I am contributing to new life, right? And it's still identifiable as where I'm buried, like you still put a marker there and my daughter can come visit and if she has kids of her own one day, my grandkids can visit and say, yeah, there's grandpa. You know, it's not as if I become the tree, right? That would be a false way of thinking about my view, but the material remains of my body have contributed to that new growth. And I think that's beautiful.
PJ (51:52.088)
Yeah, I do. That's when I watched it and they talked about the tree. I was like, that is a beautiful thing. You do talk about the possibilities of disrespectful choices. And I don't know if it's just a cultural thing, but immediately part of me, I have a garden in the back and that does feel like that would be a little weird to like, dad's going to feed the beans this year. Like, right? It's like, like.
I don't think there'd be a health issue, but there does seem to be something really weird about, like, this year's being sponsored by Dad, right? Like, that's...
Jason Eberl (52:27.558)
No, yeah, yeah, I did, you know, when we talk about, you know, the ethics of the treatment of dead bodies, you know, there's a huge aesthetic component to this. On the other hand, there's already all sorts of things we do with dead bodies that are maybe aesthetically displeasing, and maybe they're outright disrespectful, but we do them anyway. So for example, there's so there's this great book, I'll plug someone else's book.
I'm blanking on the author's name, but it's called Stiff, The Curious Lives of Cadavers. There's also another book called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium. Two great books written for a popular audience about, and written by people on the inside of the funeral industry and so on. In the book Stiff, one of the things I learned reading that book is there is a big field.
I believe it's in Kentucky, where if, I mean, I think it's like way off the beaten path. You're not just going to randomly drive by it, but let's say you're driving by it. You would see just a bunch of bodies strewn out across it. Some sitting under a tree, popped up in the shade of a tree. Some buried in the ground, shallowly. Others just kind of laying out right there in the sunlight. And it's a research, it's a forensic research facility. So think about when you watch CSI, right?
and they come across a dead body and the coroner looks down and says, yeah, they've been dead for like three hours. And how did they know that? They know that because forensic scientists study the decay rate of bodies under different conditions. Is the body laying out in the sunlight? Is it in a shady area? Is it in or near water? Yeah.
PJ (54:16.888)
Yeah, no, I was thinking about this. I just read a mystery recently, and I wish I could remember the name, but of the Indian people group, but there's Zoroastrians in India and they believe they have a tower. I think the Tower of Silence, is that correct? Where like they have vultures, they have vultures that come, that's the, for them the proper way is to leave their bodies to be stripped by vultures.
Jason Eberl (54:30.286)
Zoroastrians, yeah.
Jason Eberl (54:37.998)
sure, yeah.
PJ (54:45.752)
And so the aesthetics are going to be that's why I said, you know It doesn't feel right the to have me sponsor beans with my dead body But that might just be a cultural thing. So that's you know, but I feel like that's a whole nother episode. So I won't
Jason Eberl (54:57.934)
Yeah. Well, and I'll give one other example that and, you know, again, hopefully not grossing out any listeners, but something else that we do with bodies quite often is, you know, that we donate them for medical research, which again, can cover everything from, you know, being laid out in the field to see how decomposition happens to to anatomy labs and medical schools.
PJ (55:06.232)
haha
Jason Eberl (55:27.278)
And at my last job, before I came here to SLU, I was teaching medical students directly. Our center teaches medical students here at SLU, but I don't teach them directly. I teach other students. But my last job, I was teaching medical students directly. And normally, the anatomy lab is in the basement. It's locked in security code access for obvious reasons. And I didn't have the code because I didn't teach anatomy. But you know, I have colleagues who did. And
I had this open invitation if I ever want to observe a class, you know, learn something, new experience. I said, sure. So just before I left the job to come here, I'm like, this would be like my last chance to like ever witness this. And it was towards the end of the, it's an eight week course. It was towards the end of the eight weeks. And, and I, so I see these bodies for the first time. And at the end of eight weeks, the best descriptor I can give, and again, apologies to listeners who have an active imagination.
Think of what the turkey looks like at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, right? Yeah, yeah. That's basically what these bodies look like. I mean, there's bits of flesh and stuff just kind of strewn about. And again, I don't think these students or their teachers are doing anything intentionally disrespectful with these bodies. It's just the nature of teaching anatomy requires this level of minute dissection and treating these bodies in this way.
PJ (56:29.208)
yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (56:50.295)
Mmm.
Jason Eberl (56:53.422)
And then eventually when they're all done at the end of the course, the bodies are cremated. And then we actually would do a memorial service with families that they wanted to attend. And the families would bring pictures of their loved one when they were alive. And the students would learn more about who these individuals were as persons when they were alive. Really touching ceremony. So again, at the one level, you do things as respectful as possible. On the other hand, you're also carving them up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Right? So put.
put composting on the spectrum of things we do with bodies after death that we, you know, at the very least we legally allow to happen. It seems like this is not, this is not bad. In fact, it's maybe even better than like embalming and sticking them in a big metal box.
PJ (57:40.024)
Dr. Eberle, it's been, thank you so much for the conversation today. I've enjoyed it. Kind of just as an ending question.
For our audience, what is one thing you'd have them take away this week after listening to this episode? What's one thing you'd have them kind of chew on to meditate on as they go throughout their week?
Jason Eberl (58:01.134)
God, great big question. I guess maybe, I mean, here's the thing. The types of questions I think about that I'm paid to think about, which some people might be like, really? It's not your tax dollars. I used to be at a state funded university. I'm not, I'm at a private school now. It's tuition and donor driven that pays my salary. But these are questions I think we should all be thinking about.
And we don't always take the time to do it. You know, we're busy with our jobs, with our work and everything. Then we come home and, you know, we don't want to read deep books or think about deep things. We want to veg out and watch the Simpsons or, you know, whatever. I'm the same way. I do that as well. But, you know, true leisure, I think, is an opportunity to cultivate our intellects, to cultivate our mind, to think about these deep questions.
even if we don't have the answers to it. Think about it this way. If you go and work out, like the working out you would do to train for a marathon or if you're an Olympian to train to, there's not like a purpose to your working out, a goal you're trying to achieve. But we also just think working out is just good and can be just fun and is exercise for our bodies. Well, our minds need, our intellects need that exercise too.
And just playing Wordle and Sudoku is not enough, right? They help. They help stave off Alzheimer's and so on like that. But it's not enough to really develop that sort of deep reflection on these questions. That again, there might not be a purpose to it. It might not be like, I'm thinking about this in order to come to some conclusion. It's just worth thinking about. And I do think thinking about our shared collective human nature.
not just in the ways I think about it, like soul, body, that type of stuff, but just in general, like what does it mean to be human? I think that's important as we think about, because it leads us to other questions like, what does it mean to be a good citizen? Both within our local communities, in our shared nation, in the global community, you know, as we reflect on, for example, the pandemic, what lessons can we learn to apply to the next pandemic?
Jason Eberl (01:00:25.006)
because there are going to be more, sorry to say. My daughter's an epidemiologist. She's telling me, yeah, there's going to be more. They're going to come faster and they're probably going to be worse. Sorry, the scary one. But just take that time to reflect. I'm a fan of sitting in coffee shops or bars. Again, quintessential philosopher, right? Sit in coffee shops or bars and read a book. And you know,
PJ (01:00:29.688)
haha
Jason Eberl (01:00:52.142)
you'll sometimes have someone sit down at the bar next to you and be like, what are you reading? And, you know, sometimes it's a Star Wars novel, but sometimes it's a, you know, some book on bioethics and they're like, and they engage me in conversation and I, and I enjoy it, you know, sometimes they're like, let me tell you my philosophy of life, you know, it's a little bit off the wall, but you know, but I enjoy just engaging with people like that and not simply to share my views again.
PJ (01:01:10.328)
Right, right.
Jason Eberl (01:01:19.406)
I want to listen to them. I want to hear their view. I want everyone to just be engaged in that thinking. So again, whether or not anyone picks up my book and reads it, I will say this, it's an unfortunately expensive hardcover at $75. There are sales that Notre Dame Press, that public will run. It is cheaper, I think, on Amazon. And there is a paperback edition coming out, I think, this year. So there are cheaper versions. But you know, it's a Mesoteric text that...
PJ (01:01:42.136)
to know.
Jason Eberl (01:01:48.014)
You know, people may or may not be interested in what I'm talking about and those subjects. But so what about my book? Go get a philosophy book. Go, you know, go to your local, let's say Barnes and Nobles are still around, right? Don't go to the metaphysical study section. That's a different thing. I'm not knocking it, but I'm not talking about tarot cards and astrology. That's its own thing. The philosophy, the type of metaphysics I do is a different section of the bookstore. Yeah.
PJ (01:02:05.048)
Ha ha!
PJ (01:02:18.136)
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on.
Jason Eberl (01:02:22.222)
Same here, PJ, thank you again for the invitation.