Defender of Dignity

President George W. Bush made two announcements in his televised speech on August 9, 2001. First, he would permit federal funding for experiments on stem cells derived from human embryos, but only on cells derived from embryos already killed by August 9. Second, he would appoint a Presidential Advisory Council on Bioethics, led by Leon Kass, to review this and other issues.

Longtime professor on the University of Chicago's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, Kass is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in biochemistry who has a background in National Institutes of Health research. He was a founding member of the board of the Hastings Center, the nation's premier bioethics think tank. I met with Kass at his American Enterprise Institute office in Washington. (Kass noted that his comments do not reflect the position of the federal government.)

Last August, before that fateful day September 11, the biggest issue in American public and political life was bioethics. And people were saying that the defining issue of the Bush presidency would be the President's view on embryo stem cell experiments. It's hard now to remember the context in which the President's televised speech to the nation, on August 9, was focused not on Al Qaeda but on embryos. In that speech he said he would establish an advisory council on bioethics, and he named you as its chair. That raised huge expectations for many of us, as we see these issues as the most important challenges facing the human race. Tell me how you see the potential of the council, its task, and your own opportunity as the one who was named to lead it.

I do think that the biological revolution, of which we have seen only the very earliest stages, is a matter of momentous and lasting importance. Extraordinary powers are being gathered to intervene in the bodies and minds of human beings. These powers were sought initially for the laudable purposes of healing disease and relieving suffering. But they also force us to consider, in the most profound way, the basic elements of our humanity and what it means to live a human life. They can make inheritable changes in human nature. They can intervene in all manner of human activities, they touch birth, they touch death, they touch questions of bodily integrity as one moves organs around or implants other things in the human body.

And it seems to me we stand at a critical point. In a way, it is given to this generation to decide whether we can use these powers for their limited goods and shape them to ends that contribute to human flourishing, or whether these powers will be used increasingly to push us down the road to a "Brave New World" in which certain humanitarian goals are realized but only at the cost of the things that make human life really worth living?

"I also learned gradually that what I thought had been the socialism of my home was, in fact, a secularized version of prophetic Judaism. It was the prophets without the Law. This was true for my parents' whole generation. Many of these people who fell for Marxism did so, I think, out of a longing for justice and a belief that one didn't have to wait for the messianic age, one could build it here and now."

Consider this quote an innoculation.

Brave New World will never happen. You'd realize that if you actually read the book. It would require a war that nearly exterminates the entire human species to shock the public into supporting anything that even smells like that kind of government. With communism, on paper people had the belief that they would have personal freedom. With a genetic slave state, they would be created for one purpose only. People will only enhance themselves.

Cloning, I think, is important because it represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture, sometimes referred to as "designer babies," in which parents and scientists work their private eugenic visions on the child-to-be and impose it on members of the next generation.
A child, therefore, ceases to be welcomed as a gift, as a mysterious stranger whose genetic independence from the parents is an emblem of the kind of independence that all of our children are raised to acquire and instead becomes a being to work out the particular vision that the parents have.
And so, it seems to me, part of the reason that this bothers people is that it strikes them as a kind of degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

Thoughts?

Missed the last half of the response, sorry:

There are also questions about identity and individuality that come really from the fact that the clone, while not a perfect copy of the original, is at least brought into being out of a desire to produce something like a replica of the original.
Our natural genetic distinctiveness is also a kind of emblem of the unique, never before to have lived and never to be repeated again trajectory of an individuated human life from birth to death.
But in cloning, a blueprint of a life that has already lived is somehow supposed to be reenacted once again. People find it hard to articulate their concerns in these ways, but they sense that what we're really talking about are efforts to redesign what a human being shall be.

Or, "reconstruction" as the callow Hillary called it.

It's a short step from the belief that "every child should be a wanted child," the slogan that defends abortion, to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants and that if the child doesn't measure up to our wants, we go to genetic engineering to improve him . . . to get the features we want, in the perfect product

...

I think the technical is not just the machinery. The technical is at bottom a disposition to all of life. Jacques Ellul, I think, had it right. It is fundamentally a mentality that formulates all of life's questions as problems, and problems demand solutions, not a quest or longing for answers. This technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good, but instead is trying to solve various kinds of problems so we can go on to the next problem.

...

He does have many great things to say but also gives the game away with this:

The net effect of this approach has so often been that the ethicists wring their hands as they confront the dilemmas raised by the scientists, but ultimately they pronounce blessings on whatever it is the scientists want to do.

whatever it is the scientists want to do.

Or politicians ... he blesses Bush's decision, after all.

The Politics of Stem Cells

Thanks very much for the flag.

People find it hard to articulate their concerns in these ways, but they sense that what we're really talking about are efforts to redesign what a human being shall be.

Trying to wield the power of God is quite possibly the most disastrous thing a created being can do--both because our wisdom does not equal such power, and because how can one conceive of a pride more heinous than that?

By the way, the neuroscience area, now absolutely in its infancy, is, I think, much more important than genetics. Genetics offers only crude and indirect control over the activities that really make us human, but the powers coming from the neurosciences will go directly to work on the brain and changes in the mind will follow. And we know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 years, 50 years and so on.

So, at the moment, we have on one side scientists with prestige, knowledge and power backed by powerful economic interests. And on the other side there are those of us equipped only with our ability to raise hard questions about human values. How many divisions does the pope have? In this discussion, not very many.

The former hurrying toward tyranny the likes of which have been heretofore impossible (and conceived of only by a few), and one half of the latter struggling bitterly with the latter over which fork in the road to take.

Thanks for the post. Kass, from the article:

The Greek word bios didn't simply mean life in the sense of animal life. Bios was a human life, the human life that is lived humanly. It finds its place really in the word biography, the writing of a human life. Biology meaning the science of all life is a late notion.

Here lurks the major divide. The bio-sciences cannot be merely a science of matter, or even the highly complex motion of matter, if there is going to be any authentic bio-ethics. This late notion Kass speaks of is, I think, while posing as the science of all ife, the abstraction of these sciences from the context of life which gives rise to them. As long we consider ethics legitimate only apart from that context, the human part of life will be have to suffer more and more.

My biology text book said that there are only 8 Trillion known unique genetic combinations for homo sapien. Therefore it is not impossible that combinations won't repeat themselves. The DNA is not as important as the experiences of the individual. A clone that is loved and cared for in an upper class environment will probably be a much different person than the "original" person who is beaten periodically in a trailor or raised in the inner city

The segments that you quoted, Askel5, were also the parts of the interview that I found most thought provoking, reaching the crux of the issue (except for the last bit accusing an intellectual postering prior to appliying the rubber stamp, a bit of Askel's own rubber stamp -- GUILTY -- in action :)> ... didn't get to the link yet). Creating a human life for a purpose is fraught with the dangers of a predetermined hierarchy, leaving some to be created for the purposes of others. An issue like this has situations that are so close to the line, like the parents who have a child because of a high probability that its DNA will produce some healing abilities to a suffering sibling, as Kass recognizes, they must be examined so closely that the black of the line reveals that it has white areas in it. Confusion abounds as an almost Talmudic arcania is bandied about -- which is what we humans do, as much in public as in very formal institutions like the Catholic Church, other religions, philosophy, and now the formal opinions of "Bioethicists". Kass seems to me to be well qualified.

I think that differences do emerge in these debates. The parents who have a child to help another in itself has fine grains to it. Whether the purpose is deemed just there is still the issue of whether they intervene to have the genes actually selected by a technologically advanced conception.

Sat. afternoon bump... more later. Thanks for all the replies and bumps.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.