THE PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON Bioethics began its first public session on January 17, in a dreary ballroom of the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, a pre-postmodern pile of orange stucco set astride an expressway off-ramp in southwest Washington, D.C. Leon Kass, the University of Chicago bioethicist selected by President Bush to be the council’s chairman, opened the session with a brief assessment of the country’s change in mood since September 11. “In numerous if subtle ways,” Kass said, “one feels a palpable increase in America’s moral seriousness, . . . a fresh breeze of sensible moral judgment, clearing away the fog of unthinking and easy-going relativism. . . . “It has been a long time,” he continued, “since the climate and mood of the country was this hospitable for serious moral reflection.” Kass is blessed with a somber baritone that carries an unmistakable authority quite apart from his well-deserved reputation as a thinker. And as I sat in the ballroom audience I might have been moved to agree with him, almost, had someone not slipped me a story from that morning’s Washington Post. It was what the trade calls a “walk-up,” a story alerting readers to the council’s debut and offering them a sense of the subject’s “complexity.” The reporter drew deep from the wellsprings of philosophy, sociology, geopolitics–all that stuff. “The council,” wrote the reporter, “will be navigating a scientific and ethical landscape significantly more complex than the one that existed [a few months ago]. In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives [my italics] and others that science is no longer serving the nation’s moral will. At the same time, the United States was fighting a war to free a faraway nation from the grip of religious conservatives . . .” The story gave a good sense of how easy it is for Washington reporters to get bogged down in complexity–Taliban abroad, Taliban at home, who can tell which is which?–but it also served as a standing rebuke to Kass’s optimism. Moral seriousness? Tell it to the Post, professor. And it’s not just the Post, of course. Bioethics–falling at the point where the oldest questions of philosophy intersect with the most recent advances of biological research–has brought all of political Washington out of its depth. Politicians and bureaucrats who came to town with no grander goal than snatching a few more nonrecourse rural electrification loans at accelerated submarket depreciation levels for the gang back home–not to mention the staffers who help them do that and the reporters who write about them when they do–are suddenly being asked, thanks to cloning and stem-cell research and the galloping progress of genetics, to wrestle with definitions of personhood, the boundaries of human aspiration, and the purpose of life. None of these was in the job description. Kass and his council are supposed to help. The executive order authorizing the council, signed in the wake of Bush’s televised stem-cell research speech to the nation last August, gives it two overriding tasks. The first is pragmatic and Washington-like. In light of the House of Representatives’ unanimous vote last summer to ban all human cloning, and in anticipation of the Senate’s coming consideration of the House ban, the council is to examine the public policy implications of recent advances in genetic science. Over the past twenty years at least a half dozen federal commissions have been impaneled for similar purposes; in all cases their recommendations have been written up, published, admired, and forgotten. The council’s second charge, however, is unique: “to undertake fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance” of the same issues–to move beyond the narrow domain of public policy and make these issues the subject, as Kass says, of serious moral reflection. This makes the council a body without precedent in Washington’s history, our first National Endowment for Rumination. Conferring with Kass, the White House selected members from most of the thinking professions: four law professors, four research scientists, three philosophers, a sociologist, two political scientists, a theologian, a psychiatrist, and even a newspaper columnist, albeit one with psychiatric training, a Pulitzer Prize, and a medical degree (Charles Krauthammer). The panel will meet publicly six to eight times a year, for two days at a stretch. The January sessions fairly flew by, particularly judged against the pace of Commerce committee hearings. They began on a suitably odd note, with a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” a short story written in 1846. “I WANTED to begin with a short story for several reasons,” Kass told reporters before the session began. “I want to show that on these questions there are resources available to us that go far beyond the articles I or other commission members may write in the specialized journals. These are fundamental human questions that are being addressed. “And I wanted the story to force us out of our respective disciplines, and begin conversing with one another, not in our professional identities as scientists or humanists, but as human beings.” And it worked, sort of. The ensuing discussion showed, at the very least, that the council members are divided in their approach to bioethical problems not merely in their professional roles but in their personal dispositions. “The Birthmark” is a gothic parable, one of several cautionary tales Hawthorne wrote about scientific arrogance and amorality. It tells of a “man of science,” called Aylmer, who marries a beautiful woman, Georgiana, who carries on her left cheek an almost imperceptible birthmark. “Seeing her otherwise so perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable. . . . It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.” Aylmer retreats to his laboratory and prepares a treatment that will remove the birthmark. Georgiana submits, and dies from his attempt to render her flawless. Hawthorne’s point, and Kass’s, isn’t hard to discern: Our birth, our entry into life itself, marks us with an “imperfection,” our finitude if nothing else, and any attempt to remove us from that limitation will have the unintended consequence of destroying what we hope to perfect. The application of the story to current scientific Utopianism, whose enthusiasts promise the conquest of disease and even mortality, isn’t hard to discern, either. “The Birthmark,” in fact, is a creative summary, in story form, of Kass’s own critique of biogenetics. In the council’s discussion that first morning–studded with the long, uncomfortable silences and bursts of overlapping conversation familiar to anyone who’s attended a graduate seminar–the scientists declined to be led to this easy conclusion about the nature of contemporary science. Janet Rowley, a molecular biologist from the University of Chicago, seemed puzzled, if not quite offended, at the suggestion that the story had any relevance to bioethics. “You can in no way equate what Aylmer does with science,” she said. “He is not a scientist in the way he approaches his problem.” “I hang around with scientists all the time,” said Daniel Foster, a physician-researcher at Texas Southwestern Medical School, “and I can tell you they don’t have grandiose schemes to eliminate imperfections. They don’t talk about perfection at all–they just want to help the community. They’re nice people, you know. “What happens in this story is not a model for bio-scientists. Real scientists set goals that are achievable. They are not trying to take over the world.” For the panel’s scholars, however, most of whom share Kass’s skepticism about the new science, the story was rich in ominous implication. “It’s important,” said Robert George, a Princeton philosopher, “that we not move as a culture to the point where we identify the worth of a human being with his or her lack of defects. . . . Aylmer lost sight of persons as having intrinsic worth.” William May, an ethicist from Southern Methodist University, said that “The Birthmark” is a tale about the tension between a “transforming love” and an “accepting love,” the urge to improve life versus “the desire to savor it.” Amid these colloquies the scientists mostly fell silent. Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor, wondered at the motivation of Georgiana in submitting to Aylmer’s therapy. “Aylmer worships a false god, and she worships Aylmer. I don’t understand her.” “I’m speaking as a psychiatrist,” responded Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Hospital, “and I can tell you, Mary Ann, not only do we understand it, we have a name for it! It’s called ‘identifying with the aggressor.'” McHugh said he had read the story long ago. “When I read it as a teenager, I was horrified. I shuddered. When I read it as a psychiatrist, I began to understand Aylmer. “I think my reaction as a teenager was better. Understanding too much can take away the shudder.” Obliquely, McHugh was the first to raise what in the bioethical debates has come to be known, not very technically, as the “Yuck Factor”–the instinctive revulsion most people feel toward many prospective biomedical innovations, such as the screening of embryos for (say) sex selection or eye color, or the cloning of human beings for reproductive purposes. (The latest Gallup poll found that 88 percent of Americans disapprove of reproductive cloning.) Kass himself has written an anti-cloning manifesto called “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” Skeptics count on this deep-seated, prerational revulsion to serve as a basis for strict government controls over the uses to which genetic science may be put. As the council’s deliberations progressed, however, and as the scientists and the scholars continued to talk past each other, it became clear that the Yuck Factor may be a flimsier reed on which to hang an argument than some anti-cloning skeptics hope. By the final session on the second day, Kass had abandoned for the time being his struggle to tether the conversation to such “fundamental” questions as “What is human about human procreation?” The agenda at last moved to a concrete discussion of cloning and public policy. And here the council reached a quick and unaccustomed unanimity. Every council member objected to cloning human beings for reproduction–“at this time,” as Rowley, the molecular biologist, said. The qualifying phrase is crucial. For the scientists, the Yuck Factor has less to do with moral intuition than simple safety. As the technology now stands, the creation of a human being through cloning would be highly perilous. To proceed with it under these circumstances would be a horror–or yucky, at the very least. For now a ban on reproductive cloning preserves the commonweal and the integrity of science. But, goes the implication, when the safety issues are resolved, the repugnance, on the part of the scientists anyway, will disappear too. Moral intuitions like the Yuck Factor are subject to revision; they can even be overcome altogether. The Yale law professor Stephen Carter pointed out that “repugnance” was once the basis for laws against miscegenation. The repugnance is gone now, and so are the laws. Could a legal ban survive a similar shift in public intuitions about creating clones or designing babies to a parent’s taste? Probably not, which may lead Kass to continue to draw the council’s work back to its second, philosophical task. He wants to see whether there’s an argument lurking under the repugnance–a set of transmittable principles that can still be applied a century from now, when inarticulate disgust at certain kinds of genetic manipulation may no longer be sufficient to stifle the demands of science. It’s an admirable project, brimming with democratic optimism. It assumes, for one thing, that we have indeed entered a new era of moral seriousness (the Washington Post notwithstanding). If Kass is right about that, then the president’s council will continue to be not only the best show in town but the most consequential, too. Andrew Ferguson is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for Bloomberg News.
