Earlier this week, members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were told by the White House that their services were no longer needed. President Obama’s decision was made and implemented in his typical style—gracious, pragmatic, and imprudent. According to the New York Times, the council was disbanded because it was designed by the Bush administration to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group” that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus. The new bioethics commission appointed by Obama will have a new mandate to offer “practical policy options.”
In other words, the Obama administration already knows where it stands on all those pesky moral issues like human cloning, chimeras, and euthanasia, and just needs a group to provide advice on how to implement its preferred policies. Whereas the previous councils wrestled with such questions as “What is the nature of human dignity?” the new one will most likely be addressing more practical policy options, such as “How much should we pay women to harvest their eggs for cloning?”
The previous councils appointed by President Bush were accused of being ideologically biased. And so they were. Most of the members appeared to have a bias in favor of dignity and against giving free reign to technological innovations that alter our identity as humans.* The new council, of course, will also be ideologically biased, though likely in a more narrow way that is in line with progressive bioethics. (To predict where the new council will stand you merely have to ask, “What would Art Caplan do?”)
To the electoral victor goes the electoral spoils, so Obama’s disbanding is neither surprising nor unprecedented. It is, however, lamentable, if for no other reason than that they will no longer be producing rich, nuanced works of philosophical reflection. Bioethics commissions have been around since the mid-1970s but under Leon Kass and later Edmund Pellegrino the council created a new literary genre of government documents: pythonic guides to policy.
Take, for example, their report Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. For such a work of high literary and philosophical quality to come from a government body is nothing sort of miraculous. Even those critical of President Bush were able to recognize its uniqueness. As bioethicist Carl Eliot wrote in Slate in 2004,
The truly striking thing about Beyond Therapy is how just radically at odds it is with mainstream American culture, right and left alike. The report is skeptical of America’s faith in technology, worried about America’s radical individualism, alarmed at the transformation of medicine from a profession into a business, and deeply concerned about the role of the market in driving the demand for new medical technologies. Beyond Therapy may not please many bioethicists, but neither will it please the libertarian or the business-conservative wings of the Republican Party. When was the last time you heard a Republican complain, as the council does, that the pharmaceutical industry is expanding diagnostic categories as a way of selling drugs or express concern that it “can manufacture desire as readily as it can manufacture pills”? As much as it pains me to admit that anything worthwhile could come from a council appointed by the Bush administration, Beyond Therapy is a remarkable document: gracefully written, thoroughly researched, ideologically balanced, and philosophically astute. It will be a benchmark for all future work on the topic.
Such works are not produced under a mandate to create a shared consensus around practical policy options. That is why we can expect the Obama council to produce government reports that read like . . . well, like government reports. After all, if you want people to blindly follow your lead on policy the last thing you want them to do is to think deeply about the issues involved.
Though the Kass and Pellegrino councils exist no more, we can still hold out hope that they will carry on with their work. Perhaps they will form a council-in-exile that will continue to think and write about these issues. What they’ve produced is invaluable but much more is needed still. We need them to help prepare for a future age when the American people decide to let human dignity, rather than progressive-minded pragmatism, be our guide on matters of bioethics.
*You might call this the First Things bias since out of the twenty-seven council members, five have a close association with this journal. Four of our editorial board advisers—Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon, Gilbert Meilaender— are current or former members of the council as was Peter Lawler, one of our bloggers. Another board member—Eric Cohen—was a senior consultant, while a contributing writer—Yuval Levin—was the council’s executive director from 2003 to 2005.
June 18th, 2009 | 7:26 pm
Aging is a bio-engineering problem, nothing more.
June 18th, 2009 | 9:24 pm
I would call it bias simply because the commentary provides numerous outlandish claims which are hopelessly unsupported by facts.
It seems fairly obvious that any committee established by the President is going to be inherently supportive of his general policy platform. That goes for Obama and Bush alike. Going to extremes in assuming what a new panel is going to focus its time on does nothing to establish a reasonable critique, however.
June 18th, 2009 | 10:49 pm
I would call it bias simply because the commentary provides numerous outlandish claims which are hopelessly unsupported by facts.
Are you referring to the council’s work or to my post? (I readily admit I’m biased.)
That goes for Obama and Bush alike.
Except that many members of the Bush appointed council did not agree with him.
Going to extremes in assuming what a new panel is going to focus its time on does nothing to establish a reasonable critique, however.
Although it may seem to be on the far edge, I don’t think I focused on the extremes. In academic bioethics issues like paying egg donors are common and fall under the rubric of the “practical issues” that Obama want to focus on.
June 19th, 2009 | 10:44 am
kurt9,
Jonathon Swift would disagree with you (See the Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels).
Aging has many aspects. It’s not enough to avoid aging, it’s important to age well and to age mortally (e.g. extending my life should not cause another person’s life to be diminished). And even when both criteria are passed, we need to find out how to fit a redefined aging into society. If it’s possible to extend one’s life to 1000 years, but the procedure is so costly that only the elite can undergo it, we will have to deal with tyrants and powerful oligopolists for a long time who will only increase in power as time passes.
Modern society’s current thinking is not “Yes we can, but *should* we”. It’s more in lines with “Should has nothing to do with this. *Somebody* will do it so we might as well endorse it because you can’t stop progress”. Progress towards *what* is never defined, and it’s always assumed that progress is inevitable and ultimately good….even if it’s progress towards the edge of a cliff.
June 19th, 2009 | 11:09 am
Yes I was referring to your bias, which isn’t an inherently problematic position (we’re all biased to a degree) unless you allow that prejudice to exacerbate your opinions.
To use your own example: paying women for donated ovum may be a valid concern, paying women to “harvest their eggs for cloning” is patently ridiculous. Even if (an enormous “if”) this kind of objective were on Obama’s mind, the political potential for implementation of such ideas is less than zero.
June 19th, 2009 | 12:39 pm
Ethos: To use your own example: paying women for donated ovum may be a valid concern, paying women to “harvest their eggs for cloning” is patently ridiculous. Even if (an enormous “if”) this kind of objective were on Obama’s mind, the political potential for implementation of such ideas is less than zero.
How is it patently ridiculous? Both phrases say the same thing, just using different words. For ovum/eggs to be “donated” they must be harvested (oocyte harvesting is the technical term for the process).
Also, there are only two reasons for oocyt harvesting—reproduction and research. I doubt the government takes much interest in IVF so their primary focus will be on research. And one of the main uses of harvested ovum for research would be cloning (so that embyronic stem cells can be derived for the cloned embryos).
…the political potential for implementation of such ideas is less than zero.
I can understand why you might think so but I think you’re exactly wrong for a number of reasons. First, such ideas are always couched in language that attempts to hide what is actually being done. For example, ask most people if they are for “cloning” and they will say, “No.” Ask them if they are for “therapeutic cloning” (implying that such cloning has medically therapeutic uses) and they’ll likely hedge. The problem is that there is no such thing as “therapeutic” cloning because the procedure is not used to produce any therapies. It’s merely a semantic game to get people to support concepts they would otherwise object to.
Second, most people are too ill-informed about the issues involved. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met pro-life people who support embryo-destructive research. They simply didn’t connect the dots. It’s not necessarily their fault—the use of language in these debates is often titled to obscure what it going on. That is why you’ll hear people talk about “egg donation” rather than “ovum harvesting” even though they are the same thing.
June 19th, 2009 | 4:38 pm
[...] Joe Carter comments at First Things on what he believes the Obama administration means by planning a new commission that will offer [...]
June 19th, 2009 | 9:38 pm
[...] also Joe Carter’s Lament for a Bioethics Council (First Things‘ “First Thoughts” June 18, [...]
June 20th, 2009 | 8:11 pm
[...] now, President Obama has disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics. As usual, my buddy Joe says it better than I could: To the electoral victor goes the electoral spoils, so Obama’s [...]
June 22nd, 2009 | 6:00 am
[...] Joe Carter reports that the president has disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics: Earlier this week, members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were told by the White House that their services were no longer needed. President Obama’s decision was made and implemented in his typical style—gracious, pragmatic, and imprudent. According to the New York Times, the council was disbanded because it was designed by the Bush administration to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group” that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus. The new bioethics commission appointed by Obama will have a new mandate to offer “practical policy options.” [...]
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