Keynote Address for “In Pursuit of Virtue and Knowledge, Catholic Law’s Center for Law and the Human Person Hosts Inaugural Conference”

Following dinner, Kilpatrick introduced keynote speaker Carter Snead, Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. “The most important thing we do at a Catholic university is help human persons learn who they are,” Kilpatrick remarked. Snead then delivered a lecture entitled, “Anthropology: The Indispensable Tool for Grasping and Shaping Law.” Snead criticized the “vision of human flourishing [that] anchors and animates [much] law and policy” as based on expressive individualism—an anthropological framework that seeks to establish conditions for human flourishing that in reality aid the most privileged. He suggested a corrective anthropology based on mutual dependence and vulnerability, through which human persons may recognize their ultimate purpose as creatures drawn toward love and friendship.