Prof. Fr. Michael Baggot, LC, at the Fall Conference at the University of Notre Dame

Prof. Fr. Michael Baggot, LC, participated in the Fall Conference "'And It Was Very Good': On Creation" at the University of Notre Dame. The de Nicola Center's 22nd annual Fall Conference explored the many facets of the created world and the act of creation, including questions of cosmology, teleology, natural ends, natural law, the Imago Dei, creaturely status, ecology, stewardship, cocreation, recreation, redemption, and more. The de Nicola Center's annual Fall Conference brought together the world’s leading Catholic thinkers, as well as those from other traditions, in fruitful discourse and exchange on the most pressing and vexed questions of ethics, culture, and public policy today. The Fall Conference convened more than 100 speakers and 800 guests annually for wide-ranging conversations that engage the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition from a variety of disciplinary points of departure, including theology, philosophy, political theory, law, history, economics, and the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, literature, and the arts. Abstract “The Thomistic Metaphysics of Creation as a Corrective to Transhumanism’s Technocratic Paradigm” The philosophical insights of the virtue ethics tradition on the wise use of emergent technologies risk distortion if not ultimately metaphysically grounded. This article examines the Creator as the rationally knowable author of the natural moral law and the end of the creature’s striving for perfection through biotechnological enhancement. It advocates for an appreciation for creaturely finitude and finality as a corrective to transhumanism’s technocratic paradigm. While secular transhumanism correctly encourages individuals to seek a higher form of life beyond mediocrity, its project will achieve only a partial improvement of humanity so long as it excludes the person’s transcendent dimension.