Liberty, Equality, Dignity

...The success of the Human Genome Project has raised the prospect of "genetic profiling"— assessing a person on the basis of his genetic predisposition to certain kinds of behavior or disease...

...Experts work this way, but real people, in real life, don't, and shouldn't...

...How will we prevent employers from discriminating against applicants on the basis of their profile...

...He considers the purposes of the technology itself and its unforeseen consequences...

...Kass approaches the issue of genetic profiling entirely differently...

...Its original purpose was to place proper limits on the uses we make of science...

...Are the choices that we are making . . . better than they were thirty years ago and better than they would have been in the absence of the work of bioethicists...

...Last year, President Bush appointed him chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, which made news this summer when it publicly recommended a national three-year ban on the cloning of human embryos...

...It's little wonder that the profession tumbles down into either corruption or irrelevance...

...Following the depredations of modernism and postmodernism, and maybe even post-postmodernism, our contemporary culture is uniquely impoverished...

...Yet its silence is taken as affirmative evidence: What science can't account for, doesn't exist...

...We call ethicists in to solve specific problems...

...The herbologist and the golf pro, the pollster and the journalism professor, the Feng Shui counselor and the aroma therapist: In a country less indulgent, less able to tolerate excess baggage, less rolling in dough, the labors of these men and women would be regarded as frivolous at best, freeloading at worst...

...It is a view that undercuts even itself...

...taken seriously, they might even stand in the way of "progress...

...The problem is that on the big questions of who we are, why we are here, what we are for, science has nothing to say...

...they are not the questions that might point us toward restoring the moral narrative...

...If biochemistry shows thoughts and emotions to be endlessly manipulable, then free will is a lie...

...Kass's answer, as you might have guessed, is no...

...To paraphrase the cultural critic Edwin Starr: absolutely nothing—in most cases...

...the stories were instructive because, in Kass's reading, they touched on "the deepest human questions...

...It will have an ethi-cist on retainer, who has studied the procedure in all its particulars and can reassure the public (and the shareholders...

...Is there sometimes a wisdom in not knowing certain things...

...The job title "bioethicist" is only about thirty years old, and the first bioethicists had already led lives of distinction in other fields by the time the tag attached to them...

...The paradoxical consequence was probably unavoidable...

...What are the implications for the "right to privacy...

...Just as schools of education now specialize in producing bad teachers and graduate programs in creative writing train novelists to be unreadable, the professionalization of bioethics produced very few moral philosophers and very many academic careerists and commercial hacks...

...Have these been substantial improvements in the practices or moral sensibilities of physicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, or the general public in bioethical matters...

...Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies were eager to hire you to "do" bioethics, under their auspices, at generous salaries...

...The field is in bad shape...

...Two of its sessions have been given over to long and rambling discussions of short stories...

...If Darwinian theory shows evolution to be a series of chance events, then the universe itself must lack larger purpose...

...A physician by training, he was one of the founders of Hastings and one of the first medical doctors to make bioethics his main occupation...

...Moral understanding, in other words, is built into a man, not laid on top of him...

...Speech and philosophy have a role to play here," Kass writes, "but we should not exaggerate their power...

...Has grandma had a stroke...

...In his new collection of essays, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, Leon Kass frames the problem this way: "The rise of professional bioethics may have been good for bioethicists, but how good has it been for our ethics...

...Is a biotech firm about to clone the CEO...

...Owing partly to the high standards these men brought to their work, bioethics grew in prestige among the thinking classes and in time became a profession...

...What brought them together in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a desire to explore the moral significance of advances in medicine and biotechnology, which had just then set off at a galloping pace...

...Science works...

...When grandma takes sick, the discussions of the hospital ethics board will be very different from the ones that her family, together with friends and clergy and doctors, undertake at bedside...

...It was not always so...

...He points to "the hazards and the deformations in living your life that will attach to knowing in advance your likely or possible medical future...

...Among the assortment of thinkers who coalesced to form the Hastings Center, the first research institution devoted to bioethics, there were lawyers (Paul Freund), theologians (Paul Ramsey), philosophers (Daniel Callahan), and biologists (Ernst Mayr), each of them capable, in his chosen line, of throwing the long ball...

...And who can blame them...

...But they are not the important questions...

...The nihilistic implications of this view, now so widely shared, are pretty thoroughgoing...

...But this process, as Kass knows, has it exactly backwards...

...The questions Kass poses will strike most current bioethicists, and perhaps most of the rest of us too, as fussy and grandiose...

...In an earlier age we might have turned to religion to guide our responses...

...Its method has brought us undreamed-of successes—marvels of technology, cures and treatments for disease, a lifespan nearly twice what it was a century ago...

...Andrew Ferguson is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a national-affairs columnist for Bloomberg News...

...As Kass puts it, we now lack "a master cultural and moral narrative that can guide us through the minefields of the biotech-nological revolution"—a revolution that presents us with questions of selfhood, identity, and mortality...

...He could not be more out of step with his times...

...Unlike the messy accumulations of tradition, science seems surefooted and hardheaded...

...Bioethics has become an instrument of the enterprise it was meant to police...

...It is their job to abstract problems from the specific human situation before them and apply rationally developed theories toward their resolution...

...Kass quotes a manifesto released in 1997, signed by an army of well-known biologists and ethicists, in support of cloning human embryos for research...

...The very scheme of truth versus error—defined in any sense beyond "what works" versus "what doesn't"—becomes unsustainable...

...The ethicist," Kass writes in one of these essays, has become "another technical expert like the ophthalmologist or the cardiologist...

...And we certainly can't be argued into it by fine reasoning...

...Further, how will genetic profiles alter the way in which we think about others, about what it means to be human...

...So does much else that should be essential to the bioethical project...

...He's still at it...

...What, you can't help but wonder, are they good for...

...This is not, needless to say, the way that bioethics is usually done nowadays...

...Once a person is decisively characterized by his genotype, it is but a short step to justifying death solely for genetic sins...

...And this human element is what bioethics commonly leaves out...

...Others expend their professional energies on subsidiary questions, or even trivialities...

...Why then have we begun to defer to ethical experts, these hired guns in the rational arts, when it comes to the most intimate matters of life and death...

...But religion and religious premises are no longer deemed suitable for public disputation in a pluralistic society—and certainly not appropriate in the secular hothouse where bioethicists cultivate their theories...

...These bioethicists do their work in a tidy and efficient manner...

...In the same way, Kass has attracted a variety of intellectual types to sit on the president's council: a couple of legal scholars, a clinical psychiatrist, a sociologist, three philosophers, several research scientists, even a journalist...

...Liberty, Equality, Dignity Leon Kass challenges the scientific project By ANDREW FERGUSON We live in a very rich country (in case you hadn't noticed), and from the heaping surplus of our prosperity we have carved a number of professions that—to put it as kindly as possible—are not completely, vitally necessary...

...And now, having followed the recent national debates over cloning, euthanasia, and other issues of biotechnology, I would like to add bioethicists to this list of spongers...

...It is brave, wise, and...

...Kass's commission is a demonstration of how he thinks that bioethics, at its best, should proceed...

...These are interesting questions, perfect for op-ed page chitter chatter, and no doubt in time legislators and regulators will resolve them (probably without much useful participation from bioethicists...

...By the mid-1970s, you could get a degree in it...

...If neuroscience fails to locate a soul in the folds of the brain, then the self must be an illusion...

...The tradition and community that once instilled moral understanding have been corroded...

...He speaks from inside the profession himself...

...Research cloning, genetic therapies, and the rest of the biological revolution have led to a giddiness about the promise of technology and boundless human aspiration— a giddiness that today's bioethicists actively encourage...

...For bioethicists, as for an ever larger segment of the intelligent public, the "master narrative" is today provided by science...

...When science overtakes morality, sooner or later all notions of dignity, freedom, self and soul, purpose and attainment, the very foundations of ethical inquiry, are ploughed under...

...They are certainly inconvenient...

...But the signers were not fooled by such hoary superstitions: "As far as the scientific enterprise can determine, humanity's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seem to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover...

...The Greeks taught that "ignorance of one's own future fate was indispensable to aspiration and achievement...

...The first bioethicists, trained in law, philosophy, medicine, and the life sciences, were amateurs—there being no such thing as a professional bioethicist in those days—who were drawn to the intersection of morality and science by their own intellectual curiosity and moral concern...

...As a profession, then, bioethics finds itself in a pickle...

...None of them has formal training in "bioethics...

...Among bioethi-cists, the discussion has been about politics and employment law...

...What that first generation of bioethi-cists feared is already here...

...Kass, in contrast, is a twenty-first century Jeremiah, trying to revive our appreciation for humility, mystery, and human finitude...

...And moral life, meanwhile, has its origins in tradition, reinforced by a community, where decent conduct and sensibility are rewarded and encouraged by law and custom...

...The hospital has an ethics board that specializes in just such "termination-of-treatment cases...

...Moral life," says Kass, "flows from character— ingrained, concrete, steady, like a second nature"—and not from the bloodless application of theory...

...As Kass notes, no one who holds it could claim any standing to declare the results of his own "electrochemical brain processes" truer than anyone else's...

...How will medical insurance rates be fairly adjusted in light of this genetic knowledge...

...Many of the developments that alarmed them, or in some cases merely intrigued them, have already come to pass or soon will: the generation of human life by nonsexual means, the genetic manipulation of offspring, the widespread harvesting of bodily organs, the use of human embryos for research, and so on...

...Anyone who doubts this should consider the widely popular practice of prenatal genetic screening, after which enormous pressure is brought upon parents to abort any child with a "defect" like Down Syndrome...

...According to some "ancient theological scruples," the manifesto said, "human nature is held to be unique and sacred...

...One of the most worrisome aspects of the godlike power of the new genetics is its tendency to 'redefine' a person in terms of his genes," Kass writes...

...Here's one example...

...His work, and this book especially, is a reminder of the original promise of bioethics...

...Thus does our new master narrative devolve into the crudest materialism...

...The board's discussions "are generalized, remote, highly influenced by the current fashions of bioethics," such as the newly minted "right to die...

...Yet just at the moment when science reaches for new and unimagined powers, bioethics lacks the philosophical wherewithal to provide any guidance at all...

...Because it seems there's nowhere else to turn...

...They meet in public sessions at regular intervals, trade ideas constantly by e-mail, and occasionally, as with their recommendation of a cloning ban, touch earth long enough to issue a bull on a subject of political interest...

...Like so many specialized fields, bioethics has succumbed to the tyranny of expertise...

...Many bioethicists serve as corporate shills, trotted out by biotech companies to certify that whatever new technology their employers pursue for profit is officially "ethical...

...The council, under Kass's direction, treats bioethics as an open-ended inquiry...

...We laymen, on the other hand, will bring to the discussion the sum of our attachments and affections, and our deepest beliefs about what life is and what it's for...