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May
25
Mirabile Dictu posted this entry with a snippet from this article, “The Stupidity of Dignity,” by Harvard Professor Stephen Pinker in The New Republic that exposes a very disturbing likelihood about what has been directing the Bush Administration’s policies related to medical practice.
This spring, the President’s Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called “therapeutic cloning” that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what’s not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?
…
This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable, addressed directly to President Bush. The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.
Some links:
President’s Council on Bioethics
The report: Human Dignity and Bioethics:Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics
Sourcewatch has a good profile with council member names etc.
From Pinker’s conclusion:
A major sin of theocon bioethics is exactly the one that it sees in biomedical research: overweening hubris. In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President’s Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers “taking over” like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.
Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 4:33 pm May 25th, 2008 in Politics
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7 Responses to “The ethics behind Bush’s Council on Bioethics & its report, Human Dignity and Bioethics”
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I was just reading about Leon Kass yesterday – I looked him up after hearing NPR make fun of his eating-ice-cream-in-public-is-shameful comments.
Pinker includes part of the crazy rant from Kass about ice cream and dignity:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone–a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street–even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat–displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
Another great George Bush appointment.
Heckuva Job, Kassy.
Scary stuff, isn’t it? Our taxpayer money being doled out that way? It actually makes me very angry.
See – I admit – I know I don’t know just how many other ways in which our government is doing this kind of thing, not even necessarily this kind of “research” but just, things with which we completely disagree – do not want our money spent on.
With a trillion plus budget, how do we keep tabs? Even with the internet, that has some great resources, we still have to trust the media to pick out what’s really bad (Walter Reed, the attorneys being fired at the AG’s office and so on).
It really does feel like David and Goliath.
[...] has a post up discussing a report from the President’s Council on Bioethics that basically warns about the [...]
I hope you’re not still ill…
This kind of junk is exactly why I do what I do in politics. Because it counts, a lot. And this stuff is opposed from down to up, it doesn’t start at the top and come down.
Great eye to catch this and promote it. If I did an end of week or such I’d link it. I don’t.
…here’s a get better hug…germ free hug
Thanks, Chuck.
I’m getting better but my energy is sapped big time.
Thanks for your link Jill. I’ve had more traffic on this post than any other, ever. That, at least, is of some comfort in an often discomforting world!
Well, I think it’s so hidden – I’m curious to know how it came to your attention. It’s not like there was any great announcement, and I am completely with you – this is really, really disturbing stuff. But in all seriousness, how many people are reading The New Republic? I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more critique out there, aren’t you, sort of?