IAIN MURRAY CALLS FOR LEON KASS’S RESIGNATION:

Recently, I wrote a column here calling on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to resign as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change because he was using his position to push a political agenda. Sadly, I now must bring the same argument against a scientist I otherwise very much admire, Dr. Leon Kass, Chairman of The President’s Council on Bioethics. His recent decision to draft a political strategy aimed at achieving certain policy goals renders his position as an honest broker on the issue untenable. Yet there is a lesson to be learned from these unfortunate incidents: Science and politics cannot be separated as neatly as scientists and policy makers think.

According to The Washington Post, Dr. Kass has teamed up with Eric Cohen, editor of the excellent journal of science, politics and philosophy The New Atlantis, to devise “a bold and plausible ‘offensive’ bioethics agenda…[aimed at] tak[ing] advantage of this rare opportunity to enact significant bans on some of the most egregious biotechnological practices.”

The merits of Dr. Kass’s preferred policies are irrelevant here. The problem is that by hitching his star to a particular set of policies he has breached the trust set in him by the President, whose executive order creating the council asked it to “explore specific ethical and policy questions related to these developments; [and] to provide a forum for a national discussion of bioethical issues.” At the very least, by sheer virtue of his position, his favored policies are more likely to get a hearing than those of other well-qualified bioethicists who do not have the authority of such an office (a point well made by Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado here). Such a prospect would seriously undermine in the principle of “procedural justice” — the right of all sides of a political argument to be heard without fear or favor.

You can read an earlier column of mine on Kass, here.

UPDATE: And read this post by Virginia Postrel, which suggests that Kass is just coming out of the closet, now.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Q. Wilson, who serves on the Kass Council, emails to say that he thinks I, and other Kass critics, are being unfair, and that the Council, while not “objective,” is procedurally fair. So is Wilson a dupe, or am I an idiot? Faced with that choice, you’d be wise to bet on me being an idiot, of course. . . .