When President Bush appointed Leon Kass to lead the President’s Council on Bioethics, the mainstream of the bioethics movement howled. Kass believes in intrinsic human dignity–and that is anathema to the predominate view. “Stacked deck,” they screamed. “Politicized ethics!” It was never true, of course. In fact, if anything, the contrary was true: Kass tried to establish a true discourse to the point that the Council divided almost equally in its first report on the ethical propriety of what is sometimes called therapeutic cloning. Ironically, the New York Times story acknowledges in the report I quote below, that Kass was primarily philosophical.
Now, as expected, President Obama has fired the Council and is ready to appoint a new one that will not be collegial or about true discourse. It will be a political hammer. From the story:
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, said Reid Cherlin, a White House press officer. President Obamawill appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said.
In other words, the fix will be in. The new council, unlike Kass’s, will be entirely populated by utilitarian types, and I predict, headed by the radical Alta Charo (who once called me an advocate for the “endarkenment,” but at least she did it to my face). The “recommendations” we will see are entirely predictable–yes to federal funding of therapeutic cloning; yes to health care rationing; yes to everything radical in bioethics. And then the President, Congress, and the press can say–unlike they did during Bush’s term–”They’re the experts! We should listen to them.” I repeat, the fix is in.
June 19th, 2009 | 9:06 am
No, Wesley, the fix will not “be in.” The fix WAS in during the Bush administration. All the President has done is to clear out the ideologues and try to staff a scientific committee with scientists. I fail to see how that makes his agenda “radical.” As we both know, the term “radical” is one of the more useful ones in the propagandist’s lexicon.Gets the readers’ hackles up. Raises their blood pressure.
June 19th, 2009 | 1:06 pm
Dear HistoryWriter,
The fix will definitely be “in”. A Council on Bioethics is not a scientific Council on Genetics, Medical Science, Biology, etc (which would require scientists). It is a Council on Ethics, as applied to biologial and medical sciences.
Reductio ad absurdum: Should a hypothetical Comitte on the morality of capital punishment (or war, etc..) purge ethicists and philosophers from its ranks?
June 19th, 2009 | 1:51 pm
HW – You’re the one who’s now calling Wesley a “propagandist”. Like you’ve got no agenda of your own.
Riiiiiiight.
June 19th, 2009 | 2:53 pm
We don’t need a federal government bioethics committee anyways. Hopefully, Obama’s bioethics committee will be such a joke that it will end up being dispensed with completely.
June 19th, 2009 | 3:06 pm
No, HistoryWriter. Obama is removing people with balance and replacing them with left-wing hacks, ALL of whom will support the killing of human beings for medical research.
Repeat after me, everyone: “November 2010. November 2010. November 2010.”
June 19th, 2009 | 8:33 pm
HW-that’s because you are a rabid partisan who is happy to demonize the right and extol the left.
June 20th, 2009 | 11:19 am
As a person who is neither “right” nor “left,” I don’t care about who is president when a board like this is being created or revamped. I DO care, deeply, about the fact that philosophical inquiry is been characterized as partisan and/or useless. And that it is being replaced with people who will, by contrast, “get things done.”
It seems to me that the university system in this country has been doing the same thing by eliminating funding and positions in the humanities, while blowing up their business schools.
It seems to me that the only result of treating
“bioethics” as another category of policy, one that is decided by people who “act instead of discussing things”, is the continued progress of turning the human person into a quantifiable collection of data. It means even more of the same materialistic view of people that works out of expediency and utilitarianism rather than an attempt to understand and honr the reality of humanity.
July 6th, 2009 | 7:52 pm
“that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus”
I’m reminded of a quote…something about the absence of leadership (wink).
Consensus is easy when everyone thinks alike.
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