“Our Culture Worships Autonomy. What If We’re Wrong?” with Leah Libresco Sargeant | Ep. 47

Our culture prizes autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency. But what happens when we inevitably need someone else?

From the preborn child who is completely dependent on his or her mother, to the person living with profound disability, to the elderly patient who can no longer care for himself, some of the most vulnerable human beings are also the most dependent.

So if we equate dignity with autonomy, what happens to human dignity when autonomy disappears?

In this episode of Bioethics Babe, Arina Grossu Agnew sits down with Leah Libresco Sargeant, author of The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, to challenge one of the most powerful assumptions in modern culture: that human flourishing means needing other people as little as possible.

We discuss:

• Leah’s journey from atheism to Catholicism and the search for objective moral truth
• Why Alasdair MacIntyre and virtue ethics challenged her atheist worldview
• Why Leah rejects autonomy as the ideal of human flourishing
• The difference between autonomy, agency, and stewardship
• Why dependence does not diminish human dignity
• What feminism gets wrong when it confuses equality with sameness
• Why pregnancy poses such a profound challenge to the autonomous model of the human person
• Abortion, the dependence of the preborn child, and the real vulnerability of mothers
• Why a truly pro-life society must support women, children, families, and caregivers
• Disability, aging, and what happens when independence becomes a measure of human worth
• The connection between our fear of dependence and the cultural push for assisted suicide and euthanasia
• The real costs of caregiving and who should bear them
• Whether technology is helping us heal the body or tempting us to escape its limits
• Why needing others, and being needed by others, is part of the human condition
•  How our dependence on one another ultimately points toward our deeper dependence on God

If dignity depends on being strong, productive, rational, and independent, then all of us are only one illness, accident, disability, or season of life away from losing it.

But what if we have it backwards?

What if dependence isn’t the opposite of human flourishing, but part of what it means to be human?