I MENTIONED LEON KASS’S WASHINGTON POST OP-ED earlier, but now Ron Bailey is taking him to task for dishonesty in Reason:
Kass simply cannot with a straight face make the claim, as he does in [the] Washington Post, that the “personal views” of Schaub and Lawler are “completely unknown” to him. It’s a shame that the White House has somehow persuaded a man as smart and principled as Leon Kass to deny in public what he must in fact know to be so.
Read the whole thing. As I’ve said below, the people on the Council have good credentials. But to pretend, as Kass does, that there’s no ideological stacking here seems a bit much. And to pretend that he didn’t know the views of the new additions is more than a bit much. Especially for an ethicist.
UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru has comments:
If, on the other hand, the appointment of Lawler is to be condemned because he seems, in general, skeptical of claims that biotechnology should be left unregulated, then perhaps the critics have a point. But my sense is that the vast majority of people do not share Bailey’s almost-anything-goes views on this subject. That doesn’t mean Bailey is wrong, of course. But it does take away a lot of the force behind the stacked-council critique.
Well, I don’t think so. I don’t have anything against any particular appointment. What’s bothered me about it has been the sleight-of-hand that has seemed to mark the process since Kass presented Daniel Callahan as someone who took the other side on these issues. Kass’s claims of ignorance are just another example. And when you’re engaged in a project like this, where the product is hard to measure, process matters.
And while you can characterize Bailey’s views — or, I suppose, mine — as “almost-anything-goes,” I don’t think that they’re necessarily any less mainstream than Kass’s. I want to see sick people healthy, and I want to see people live long lives in which they have a lot of choice about how they live. I’m not threatened by new reproductive technologies. Kass feels differently.
Although he’s apparently mellowed on (or backed away from) the subject since, he was once “bitterly” opposed to in vitro fertilization, a widely-accepted procedure now. (He doesn’t like birth control, either). As Eugene Volokh notes, if he was wrong about that, why listen to him now? Then there’s his opposition to people living longer. I could be wrong, but I think that most Americans believe that living 20-40 more healthy years would be a good thing. (Kass’s views on eating ice cream in public, while not relevant here, aren’t exactly mainstream either, and suggest a more generalized discomfort with the messy, physical side of life — and maybe there is a connection, in light of what he writes here, “as Bacon clearly understood, the successful pursuit of longer life and better health leads—as we have seen in recent decades—to a culture of protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license.” The horror! Judging by Americans’ behavior, most of us aren’t as worried about that as Kass seems to be. In fact, the desire for protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license would seem to be hallmarks of American culture. They may or may not be desirable, but they’re certainly mainstream.) I don’t think that Ponnuru really means to characterize either me or Ron Bailey as fringe types, but I think it’s probably wise not to open that subject up for further discussion, as Kass’s views on gender relations, etc. probably don’t reflect the views, or the practices, of a majority of Americans.
ANOTHER UPDATE: William Sjostrom says via email that Bailey doesn’t give the full context of the Kass quote. I reprinted it below, but here it is again:
Their personal views on the matters to come before the council in the coming term are completely unknown.
Sjostrom’s point is that Kass might know the panelists’ views about therapeutic cloning, but not about the stuff the Council will look at next. I don’t know — if you read Bailey’s piece, it seems to me to be about general attitudes toward advanced biotechnology, not just cloning.
On the other hand, here’s some rather strong evidence in favor of Ramesh Ponnuru’s argument that the problem is Kass’s ham-handedness, not a stacked committee, in the form of an email from council member James Q. Wilson:
The Bioethics Council is NOT stacked. A large minority opposed its first report, and that group is largely intact. Bill May ASKED to be removed from the Council, and the President agreed. The new members include people who support what has been the minority view about therapuetic cloning.
Well, the Post story said “dismissed,” which most people took to mean “fired,” though that wasn’t the centerpiece of my analysis. (Bailey, however, does speculate that May was fired.) The views of the new people, on the other hand, matter, and Bailey seems to make a strong case for a rather anti-technological bent. (And even Ramesh Ponnuru seems to think that the three new members are “antis.”) Still, I regard Wilson’s word as good, and if he says the Council isn’t stacked, then I’m inclined to change my views, and simply regard it as overly narrow, and Kass as ham-handed.