Is there a progressive bioethicist in the House?

Center for American Progress ^ | October 3, 2005

[hocndoc]

Just a few quotes, but go to the site to get the flavor (emphasis is mine):

R. Alta Charo:

At the heart of bioethics in a public setting, like a public policy commission in my mind, is political philosophy as opposed to moral philosophy. You could argue from here until Sunday about whether or not it’s right or wrong for me to go forward and have a child with disabilities, whether or not it’s right or wrong for me to tell the truth to my patient – any number of things that are questions of individual morality, but you haven’t answered the question about what the role of the government ought to be once you’ve come to a conclusion. I remember sitting in a meeting with representatives of national bioethics commissions from around the world discussing the ever-important issue of cloning. I’m glad that we all three agreed that this one has gotten so much more play than it’s worth and I was struck by the fact that pretty much everybody agreed on the pros and the cons and the rights and the wrongs, and yet when the next inevitable call came through for harmonization of national policies, I realized that was completely fruitless because if you were in certain European countries, you were in a setting in which government power is presumed as opposed to the U.S. system in which it’s limited unless there is specific constitutional basis. If you are in the European countries, the good of the collective was presumed to outweigh the interests of the eccentric minority, whereas in the United States with regard to many particular activities the eccentric minorities are allowed to have their way even when the collective good or the collective wisdom is not furthered.

Art Caplan:

You’ll remember the lead spokesperson on the Schiavo case was Tom DeLay, ethicist extraordinaire. (Laughter.) Tom DeLay denied that Terri Schiavo was on life support. He also claimed that she talking, singing, dancing, communicating and quite interactive. These views for time were endorsed by Bill Frist. They were endorsed for a time by Bill Bennett. They were endorsed for a time by Charles Krauthammer. I was going to say at least a couple of those are under investigation, but – of those individuals, but the fact was that if you looked at the Schiavo case, it represented one of the worst aspects of conservative bioethics: lack of attention to science; almost a disrespect for what science and medicine are about and imposing instead one’s own personal agenda, one’s own beliefs, I would go so far as to say one’s own fantasies about what should the mind of Terri Schiavo be like and what should be done with her. We had a Congress that was able to move with lightning speed over the Terri Schiavo case: special sessions, attempts to subpoena her permanently vegetative body up from Florida to Washington. Nothing like that was seen around Katrina. Nobody met quickly. Nobody responded quickly. Nobody did anything quickly.

And stem cells, in my view, has been worse. We find during the past year, if you look at this debate that the conservative bioethicist suffers from two kinds of diseases: one is monster phobia; worrying that at any moment a cloned person might move next door, so that nothing can happen with embryos because of this fear that somehow or other this clone being is going to show up in your neighborhood. And we all know what that means: there go the property values when that cloned being arrives. If not there, then the other element they seem unable to get past is embryo vision. They are fighting like crazy to maintain the dignity of embryos, and it’s all embryos: frozen ones, leftover ones, embryos that no one is going to utilize or adopt or put to reproductive purpose ever because they’re too old or too damaged.

.....what I’ll call religious fanaticism, narrow intuitionism from the particular class point of view of the sort that Vanessa was complaining about; an ethic that is basically built on repugnance. I mean, that’s one of the key moral guideposts for our conservative friends. They have yet to see a technology that didn’t repugnate them, I believe, that’s the word.

It seems to me as well that if you looked at bioethics, progressive bioethics is global bioethics. We do care about our relationships to the rest of the world and what’s going on elsewhere. I don’t think conservatives do.

CAPLAN: Embryo-obsessed.

MS. CHARO: Embryo-obsessed, I use to call it fetus fetishism.

Caplan:Do you like the Know- Nothingism of the religious right as reflected in a lot of neocon and conservative bioethics, or do you like the unfettered free markets approaches that are touted on the right?”

[hocndoc]

Let's see, religious slurs, "Know-Nothing," conservatives, "fetus fetish," "Not in My Back Yard," and "global."

Don't forget the bioethics meetings in Cuba.

And complaints that no one was moving fast after Katrina (the Governor delayed, I think, when the President tried). Several comments about Congressman Delay.

What's there not to like?

[hocndoc]

I recommend reading the whole thing - it's rich.

[LibFreeOrDie]

The Center for American Progress is run by Clintonoids: John Podesta, Mort Halperin, Tom Daschle, Eric Alterman, ...

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=36096

[neverdem]

I'm familiar only with Caplan from the LSM, but I was unaware that he was such a bigoted "progressive".

[BCrago66]

Funny how to the left, "progressive" means: One who enjoys killing people.

[MNJohnnie]

Perhaps they should be required to renamed it to accurately reflect what they are, The Center to PREVENT American Progress

[hocndoc]

Yep, he calls himself a "lefty" in the transcript.

I used one of the quotes from Caplan as the title to my blog, yesterday: "Terri . . . difference between progressives and conservatives." And used it as a base to explain the predominance of "progressives" in bioethics. The quote was from a Nature news article on the conference. Saletan covered the "event" for Slate, too.

Yep, he calls himself a "lefty" in the transcript.

[hocndoc]

I'm afraid that the whole purpose of bioethics is/was to justify limiting who is worth protecting. That's why I'm trying to change the focus, in my own way. I'm about 2/3 through the Master's in Bioethics at Trinity International University. There's an opposite assumption there - that we are all bearers of the image of God.

I want to ensure that more humans are considered "us" and that we don't ever divide ourselves into "human" and not "human." No matter what scientists do to our children of the future, they are still our children.

From a believer's view: I don't think you can divide the image of God.

[adam_az]

The reviews are great!

"An orgy of conflation and strawmen!"

"A panopoly of progressive ideologue propagandists!"

"I loved it! I'll read it again and again!"

[GladesGuru]

Don't forget the bioethics meetings in Cuba.

Bio-what? In where?

Please, too much irony isn't good for me.

[MarkL]

And don't forget that bastion of ethics, Peter Singer. Reading some quotes of what he's written, sometimes I get the feeling that he's chanelling Dr. Mengele.

I swear, that it seems in order to get the job title "bio-ethecist," you need to be completely amoral, and have no respect for human life.

It's absolutely Orwellian!

Mark

[MHGinTN]

No thanks ... I'm already too familiar with the haughty freak, Alta Charo.

[RightWhale]

No free silver, no free soil, no Brahmins or bimetallists? Have we forgotten so soon?

[hocndoc]

That's an interesting reply - there must be a story behind it.

But, rarely do leftists come out so clearly to show their true natures and purposes.


I haven't commented much about the third panelist, Vanessa Gamble of Tuskegee, but I can't get over her discussion about working with Black ministers, even though some might not let her speak from the pulpit or speak to the congregation at all because she's a woman. And she is glad that, thanks to her gramdmother, she can quote scripture when needed, but there's no hint she believes it.

I didn't know that Clinton had helped start a bioethics institute as part of his apology to the former victims of Tuskegee.


And then Charo talks about the wrongness of leftists forming alliances with groups who are hierarchical and want to restrict women to old roles. Talk about irony!

[hocndoc]

If you want Brahmins, the current crop of Progressive Bioethicists are for you: the American Journal of Bioethics Blog is about as elitist as you can get. No one is good enough for them exept the members of their own little cohort. No data gets past them except that which feeds their own world view.

But, bioethics does share at least one attribute with so much of ethics and philosophy: No one has a truly elegant theory, there's only a push to publish and a hurry to destroy what came before. No faith, no family, and certainly no limits on what they desire to grasp.