Chaput rhymes with 'slap you'

 and here he is laying the smackdown and hitting the nail on the head in his review of a book by Professor Snead:

Our "false vision" of human identity stems from an expressive (and excessive) individualism that privileges personal autonomy, the individual will, and strong cognitive abilities.  It undervalues the network of mutual obligation that constitutes real life.  It thus subtly threatens anyone who is especially dependent on others: the disabled, the sick, the elderly, and most obviously the unborn child.  In Snead's words,

expressive individualism does not recognize unchosen obligations.  The self is bound only to those commitments freely assumed.  And the expressive individual self only accepts commitments that facilitate the overarching goal of pursuing its own, original, unique, and freely chosen quest for meaning . . . [As a result,] expressive individualism fails because it is, to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre, "forgetful of the body."  Its vision of the human person does not reflect and thus cannot make sense of the full lived reality of human embodiment with all that it entails.

This results in an approach to bioethics that is subtly anti-teleological.  Or to put it more plainly, at the heart of our public bioethics is the assumption that there is no shared meaning to human life beyond that which we freely create for ourselves.  This has the unintended effect of undermining our ideas about community and human rights

I have said all along that the problem from our founding was when personal autonomy was weighted equally with the obligation to protect the Common Good. It will prove our downfall, because it ultimately derives from Deist-Protestantism instead of Judao-Christian magisterial truth.