Health and Human Flourishing: Religion, Medicine, and Moral Anthropology

10 Gender and Human Relationality

c h a p t e r c h a p t e r 10 Gender and Human Relationality Christine E. Gudorf Humans are adaptive. If we accept the theory of evolution, we understand adaptation as an aspect of all forms of life, most especially of the human species. One indication of human adaptability is our ability to live anywhere on Earth, in contrast to other animals that are limited to particular environments. This adaptability in human beings has created great cultural diversity among humans. One central element of human adaptivity is relationality. Humans become who we are in relationship to God, to other persons, to animals, and to the environment. Morality is an aspect of our relationality—it is the quality of our response to encounters with other persons and the larger environment. The most powerful moral responses in humans are to other humans, for a number of reasons. It is other humans who make the most urgent demands on us. It is other humans who reflect back to us most 186 christine e. gudorf clearly who we are and who we can become; they are our fullest source of knowledge of ourselves. We find it easiest to identify with other humans; such ability is the foundation of empathy, which plays a major role in moral choices and behavior. The adaptability of humans to new situations is not a positive moral value in itself. Human adaptability has frequently ignored moral limits, which are often obscured under particular historical circumstances and only become clear in new situations characterized by greater freedom. For example, it took many centuries for human societies to recognize that slavery was not moral. Only changes in economic, social, and political circumstances allowed people to see in increasing numbers the inhumanity of owning other human beings. Today such a transformation in the status of women is slowly taking place around the world, as generation after generation of women move from situations of subjection toward situations of equality with men, due again to shifts in the economic, social, and political configurations of late modernity. One part of this shift is the gradual disappearance of polygamy as polygamy’s social benefits (maximal fertility, rapid population growth, symbol of wealth and status) gradually become obscured by its incompatibilities with late modern life. In late modernity marriage becomes an exclusive relationship of interpersonal intimacy because traditional sources of intimacy disappear; children are more expensive in urban settings than they were on the farm and are dependent for longer and longer periods; and the environment can no longer sustain population growth in many areas of the world. All of these trends mitigate against polygamy. The big debates today about sexual morality are rooted in questions about human anthropology—an understanding of human nature. There is increased agreement that the human person is not only more than simply physicality and rationality but also that the human person is relational. We have come to see that, in a broad way, human persons are constructed and that rationality is fundamental in the construction process. But there are various ways of understanding the construction process. The Catholic natural law position has generally been understood as anticonstructionist, or at least only weakly constructionist, in that it argues for human nature as given in creation. This givenness has almost always been understood in static terms, though there have been strains—most notably in the work of Teilhard du Chardin—that have argued for dynamism as a central aspect of the human nature God created. It seems to me that the increasing shift in Catholic moral theology toward environmental consciousness is influencing natural law thought, moving it toward more Gender and Human Relationality 187 openness in human nature, toward understanding adaptability, especially relationality, as central human traits that indicate/create some degree of plasticity and diversity in human nature itself. Modern thought has had great influence on contemporary Catholic moral theology’s understanding of the human person. The very term “the human person” reflects modern universalism in that it assumes there is one model, one nature for human persons. Just as feminists have rejected speech about “woman” as excluding the possibility of diversity among women, today more people are becoming uncomfortable with the concept of “the human person” and insisting on plural language that recognizes difference. We are brought to this point in part by recognition of another aspect of modern thought—developmentalism, the recognition of historical...