Anticipatory Gratitude and Human Dignity
Joshua Schulz, PhD, HEC-C, DeSales University
This paper seeks to recover a theological vision of human dignity in contrast to the prevailing liberal tendency to reduce it to autonomy, productivity, or cognitive capacity. The dominant anthropology of expressive individualism, described by Robert Bellah and criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre, imagines the human being as an isolated will, free to invent its own ends without reference to nature, community, or God. On this view, the body is treated as a mere instrument, social ties are reduced to contracts, and dignity itself becomes nothing more than the demand that others respect our asserted desires. Against this amnesia of the body,
MacIntyre reminds us that we are dependent rational animals: created beings whose lives are bounded by birth and death, and whose flourishing is inseparable from our vulnerability, our need for others, and our call to live in community. In this light, justice cannot be understood simply as fairness or contractual exchange; it must be understood as gift. To be just is to practice what MacIntyre calls just generosity: a willingness to give freely to others in recognition of our common dependence and shared destiny.
Parenthood, and most especially the care of profoundly disabled children, reveals this truth in a striking way. Here we encounter care that is asymmetrical, given without hope of repayment, and rooted not in calculation but in love. Yet MacIntyre has been faulted for grounding such care in social utility: he sometimes appears to justify it because it sustains the moral tradition upon which communal flourishing depends. Such reasoning risks instrumentalizing persons—treating the profoundly disabled, for example, as valuable only insofar as they contribute to a shared moral project—rather than affirming their intrinsic worth. To answer this concern, I argue that a theological supplement is needed. Every child, every person, is not merely a bearer of instrumental value for the continuation of a moral tradition, but an image of God whose worth is inviolable and not contingent upon capacity or autonomy.
O. Carter Snead’s reflections on gratitude illuminate how this truth is disclosed. He argues that we recognize dignity through remembering: the healthy remembering their own childhood dependence, the strong anticipating their future weakness, the living foreseeing their mortality. Such memory generates not pity but gratitude—retrospective and anticipatory—which grounds solidarity. Gratitude in this sense is not a passing sentiment but a virtue. As Aquinas teaches, its proper object is not the gift in abstraction but the giver, for true gratitude acknowledges the personal love that animates the gift. Because the gifts of life and care are freely given, our gratitude can never be satisfied by exact repayment. It must always be excessive, overflowing, mirroring the love that first gave to us.
From this perspective, dignity should not be imagined as a possession that can wax or wane, but as a vocation. It is the call we receive in the face of the other—the child, the elderly, the disabled—to remember what we have been given and to respond with penitent and grateful love. Vulnerability and finitude, far from being defects, are the very conditions that make solidarity possible. They remind us of our creatureliness, of the gifts we have received from God and neighbor, and of our destiny to be perfected not in isolation but in communion. The neighbor in need is not a burden or an obstacle, but a summons to conversion, and in this summons the neighbor becomes a teacher, revealing to us both the mercy by which we live and the love to which we are called.
The paper concludes that secular accounts of dignity, tethered to autonomy, cannot sustain a coherent ethic of care. A theological account, by contrast, discloses dignity as gift, memory, and call. To see the other as a gift is to recall the Giver, to anticipate our own need, and to recognize that our lives are bound together in gratitude and love. Human dignity, then, is not created by self-assertion but revealed through dependence and solidarity. It is nothing less than the shape of the imago Dei in us, calling each of us into communion with God and with one another.
MacIntyre reminds us that we are dependent rational animals: created beings whose lives are bounded by birth and death, and whose flourishing is inseparable from our vulnerability, our need for others, and our call to live in community. In this light, justice cannot be understood simply as fairness or contractual exchange; it must be understood as gift. To be just is to practice what MacIntyre calls just generosity: a willingness to give freely to others in recognition of our common dependence and shared destiny.
Parenthood, and most especially the care of profoundly disabled children, reveals this truth in a striking way. Here we encounter care that is asymmetrical, given without hope of repayment, and rooted not in calculation but in love. Yet MacIntyre has been faulted for grounding such care in social utility: he sometimes appears to justify it because it sustains the moral tradition upon which communal flourishing depends. Such reasoning risks instrumentalizing persons—treating the profoundly disabled, for example, as valuable only insofar as they contribute to a shared moral project—rather than affirming their intrinsic worth. To answer this concern, I argue that a theological supplement is needed. Every child, every person, is not merely a bearer of instrumental value for the continuation of a moral tradition, but an image of God whose worth is inviolable and not contingent upon capacity or autonomy.
O. Carter Snead’s reflections on gratitude illuminate how this truth is disclosed. He argues that we recognize dignity through remembering: the healthy remembering their own childhood dependence, the strong anticipating their future weakness, the living foreseeing their mortality. Such memory generates not pity but gratitude—retrospective and anticipatory—which grounds solidarity. Gratitude in this sense is not a passing sentiment but a virtue. As Aquinas teaches, its proper object is not the gift in abstraction but the giver, for true gratitude acknowledges the personal love that animates the gift. Because the gifts of life and care are freely given, our gratitude can never be satisfied by exact repayment. It must always be excessive, overflowing, mirroring the love that first gave to us.
From this perspective, dignity should not be imagined as a possession that can wax or wane, but as a vocation. It is the call we receive in the face of the other—the child, the elderly, the disabled—to remember what we have been given and to respond with penitent and grateful love. Vulnerability and finitude, far from being defects, are the very conditions that make solidarity possible. They remind us of our creatureliness, of the gifts we have received from God and neighbor, and of our destiny to be perfected not in isolation but in communion. The neighbor in need is not a burden or an obstacle, but a summons to conversion, and in this summons the neighbor becomes a teacher, revealing to us both the mercy by which we live and the love to which we are called.
The paper concludes that secular accounts of dignity, tethered to autonomy, cannot sustain a coherent ethic of care. A theological account, by contrast, discloses dignity as gift, memory, and call. To see the other as a gift is to recall the Giver, to anticipate our own need, and to recognize that our lives are bound together in gratitude and love. Human dignity, then, is not created by self-assertion but revealed through dependence and solidarity. It is nothing less than the shape of the imago Dei in us, calling each of us into communion with God and with one another.