I think transhumanist goals would be advanced better if the list paid more
attention to the radical bioconservativism's progress via the Bush
administration, for instance in the case of bioethicist in chief Leon
Kass. - J. Hughes
Volume 12, Issue 17. September 24 - October 8 2001
American Prospect
Irrationalist in Chief
by Chris Mooney
We, on the other hand, with our dissection of cadavers, organ
transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization,
surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery, "wanted" children, "rights over our
bodies," sexual liberation, and other practices and beliefs that insist on
our independence and autonomy, live more and more wholly for the here and
now, subjugating everything we can to the exercise of our wills, with little
respect for the nature and meaning of bodily life.
--Leon R. Kass, Toward a More Natural Science
It's probably a lucky thing for Leon Kass, the conservative University of
Chicago ethics philosopher appointed to head George W. Bush's new Council on
Bioethics, that his position doesn't require Senate confirmation. Last
April, the neocon Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer effused that
Kass should be named surgeon general, a post that does require confirmation,
but that might have backfired: Kass has a paper trail that would put any
quotation-hunting opposition researcher in hack heaven. Virginia Postrel,
editor-at-large of Reason magazine, has already bloodied Kass considerably
by drawing attention to a passage from his 1985 book Toward a More Natural
Science in which Kass complains about "our dissection of cadavers." Writing
in the Los Angeles Times, Postrel observed: "This isn't about the 21st
century. It's about the 16th."
In the same book, Kass--who over the years has opposed or at least fretted
about virtually every new reproductive technology, from in vitro
fertilization to cloning--refers to abortion as "feticide." Indeed, in his
writings Kass frequently sounds more like a partisan culture warrior than a
philosopher king, as in his 1997 New Republic anticloning article "The
Wisdom of Repugnance":
Thanks to feminism and the gay rights movement, we are increasingly
encouraged to treat the natural heterosexual difference and its preeminence
as a matter of "cultural construction."
At times, he can even recall a Moral Majority theocrat like Jerry Falwell.
In a 1990 speech at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, Kass
wondered:
Could it be that something like piety--familial, civil, religious--is a
crucial ingredient in the most responsive moral souls? And what of the
others? Do we not need the development of laws and customs with proper
sanctions--logoi with teeth--to help guide those not amenable to persuasion?
Kass can't be simply reduced to his more extreme side, but it's remarkable
that despite this background, his philosophical outlook has been deeply
misunderstood or altogether missed by many commentators. On a mid-August
installment of CBS's Face the Nation, for example, host Bob Schieffer
introduced Kass as a "scientist." Kass does have a Ph.D. in biochemistry,
along with an M.D., but he doesn't do research or see patients. Instead,
he's long been ensconced as a rather arch classics buff at the University of
Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, with stints at the American
Enterprise Institute. "He's not a scientist," says Arthur Caplan, a longtime
Kass acquaintance and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University
of Pennsylvania. "He hasn't gone near a lab in 20 years." (Kass was
contacted by the Prospect but isn't granting interviews.)
In fact, Kass's explicit turn away from a life of research links his
cultural conservatism to his deep distrust of new technologies. Kass was
disturbed not only by the alleged moral promiscuity of the 1960s but also by
the decade's great advances in human biological research. In her 1998 book
Clone, New York Times science writer Gina Kolata singles out Kass as a rare
figure who "actually stopped doing biology and became a philosopher and
ethicist because of cloning." His conversion began in 1967, after he read a
Washington Post column by the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Joshua
Lederberg that, as Kass complained in a letter to the editor, took a "casual
and cavalier" approach to the topic. Soon, a morally queasy Kass quit his
job as a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health, teaming up with
the anticloning theologian Paul Ramsey and with Daniel Callahan and Willard
Gaylin, the founders of the Hastings Center. Rebels with a cause, Kass and
company cast themselves in direct opposition to biologists like Lederberg.
Much of their work was suffused with "mad scientist" innuendos. "There were
a lot of scientists who thought that the bioethicists hated them," observes
Caplan.
Since then, Kass has cornered the market on Revelations-style
prognostications about the threat of "dehumanization" through assisted
reproduction. Like any prophet, he has frequently been dead wrong. But when
it comes to his new public role, his particular stances on issues matter
less than how he conducts himself as the ostensibly fair-minded leader of a
national debate. Here's where Kass's record becomes truly alarming. In his
various crusades, Kass not only has recommended protecting life's "most
magnificent mysteries" from scientific research but has resorted to a
variety of anti-intellectual techniques, ranging from scare-mongering to
downright obscurantism. He also hasn't always been willing to engage
viewpoints radically different from his own. It's this combination of
dogmatism and intellectually propped-up irrationalism--with its distrust of
modern science and frequent appeals to a religiously based morality that not
all Americans can feel and access--that makes Kass such a troubling choice
to guide a pluralistic discussion of bioethics.
To understand Leon Kass, it helps to delve into the past few decades of
internecine struggles in the burbling field of bioethics. The term bioethics
itself was coined only in the early 1970s. Originally, the field grew in
response to shocking revelations of exploitive human-subject research--most
notoriously the Tuskegee, Alabama, syphilis study, in which black men over a
period of four decades were denied penicillin so that researchers could
observe the disease's advanced effects.
>From the outset, however, bioethics' public face was also intimately linked
to in vitro fertilization and to Kass's obsession, the cloning issue. This
was in part thanks to a much-hyped 1972 New York Times Magazine cover story
by Hastings Center co-founder Willard Gaylin titled "The Frankenstein Myth
Becomes a Reality--We Have the Awful Knowledge to Make Exact Copies of Human
Beings." In Kolata's Clone, Gaylin and Daniel Callahan more or less admit
that the article (published fully 25 years before the unprecedented birth of
Dolly, the cloned sheep) was a publicity stunt for the newly launched
Hastings Center.
In the early days, bioethics and religion commingled frequently: Indeed,
they merged seamlessly in the towering figure of the Princeton theologian
Paul Ramsey. Gaylin's attempt to stoke Frankensteinian fears of mad
scientists "playing God" fit this tenor well. But since then, the field has
diversified and become captured, to a large extent, by secular academic
philosophy, which has relegated such flimsy "playing God" arguments to films
like Jurassic Park. This transformation is one that Kass--an observant Jew
with a deep scholarly interest in the Book of Genesis--has railed against
repeatedly. Indeed, in his 1990 Hastings Center speech, Kass complained:
Most religious ethicists entering the public practice of ethics leave their
special religious insights at the door and talk about "deontological vs.
consequentialist," "autonomy vs. paternalism," "justice vs. utility," just
like everybody else.
He concluded by exhorting his peers to
return to what animated the enterprise: The fears, the hopes, the
repugnances, the moral concern, and above all, the recognition that beneath
the distinctive issues of bioethics lie the deepest matters of our humanity.
But there's a strong case to be made that bioethics is moving in the right
direction, though it's still a hodgepodge that generally lacks the
professional training standards and academic-peer-review processes
characteristic of more long-standing disciplines. After all, though the
members of the original Hastings Center crowd were visionaries, they were at
times also less devoted to reasoned persuasion than to stirring up the
public's emotional response. Decades later, Kass still employs this
technique. "There's a certain political use of bioethics that's about
legitimating fundamental 'yuck' reactions that some people have," observes
Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and public policy at Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government. "That's why the whole idea of
making bioethics into an expert field is problematic. It elevates some
people's 'yuck' reactions into an expert viewpoint that others can't easily
challenge."
Kass has actually gone further: He has crafted and promulgated, as a core
aspect of his philosophy, an entire pseudo-intellectual defense of "yuck"
reactions, which he terms "the wisdom of repugnance." Kass's eponymous 1997
anticloning article in the New Republic is a grand piece of
anti-intellectualism, complete with digs at "philosophical cleverness" and
"philosophisms." To a large degree, this was a way of covering up the fact
that Kass didn't have a rational argument. "Repugnance," he contended, "is
the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power to express
it." And again: "We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not
because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we
intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things
that we rightfully hold dear."
A sampling of what some academic ethicists think of this "reasoning" shows
how far afield Kass really is. "In my view, it doesn't have any intellectual
content," comments Brown University bioethics philosopher Dan Brock. The
medical ethicist and former Syracuse University dean of arts and sciences
Samuel Gorovitz, who debated Kass as early as the 1970s, elaborates:
"Feelings are signals, they are signals worthy of respect. But what one then
must do is ask in what the repugnance is rooted, and is it something that
one might be well advised to overcome?" After all, lots of people feel
repugnance toward, say, interracial marriage. But we don't automatically
condone their repugnance, much less cite it as a basis for public policy,
the way Kass does with cloning.
Kass does attempt to make some arguments in "The Wisdom of Repugnance" but
candidly admits that cloning "is finally one of those instances about which
the heart has its reasons that reason cannot entirely know." This Pascalian
statement, coupled with Kass's frequent dogmatic pronouncements about what
constitutes "natural" reproduction, show him to be essentially more preacher
than thinker. Kass happily puts forward an anticloning argument that has no
justification and by definition can't have any--it's rooted only in deeply
set emotion, or, if you will, faith. Furthermore, says Kass, if you don't
feel that emotion then there's something wrong with you: "Shallow are the
souls that have forgotten how to shudder."
Passages like this have led the Princeton molecular biologist Lee Silver,
author of Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World and another
frequent Kass debater, to accuse him of sectarian reasoning (and Silver's
far from the only accuser). "When I give ['The Wisdom of Repugnance'] to my
students to read in my course here at Princeton," notes Silver, "I say,
'This is a paper in which Kass claims to be giving his secular point of
view.' And the students all read it and say, 'This is thinly veiled
religion.'" Silver points out that Bush could never have gotten away with
appointing a Catholic bishop to head his Council on Bioethics; yet in Kass
he gets more or less the same thing, down to the natural law-style
theorizing--but with an M.D. and Ph.D. conveniently included to throw
everyone off the trail.
It's important to note that the objection is not that Kass has religious
views, but that he thinks it's fine to base his arguments on them when
making policy recommendations for a pluralistic society. Contrast this, as
Virginia Postrel does, with the noted Rice University bioethicist Tristram
Engelhardt, Jr. Engelhardt is an Orthodox Christian who edits the journal
Christian Bioethics. But he also knows what it means to advance bioethical
theories that must suit a nation composed of diverse viewpoints, arguing:
"If all do not listen to God so as to be united in one religion ... , the
only source of common moral authority among moral strangers will be
consent."
That's not the course Kass takes; nor is he guilty only of masking religious
premises in argument. He's guilty as well of cultivating public phobias
about new technologies. One of Kass's primary intellectual influences is the
rather obscure German philosopher Hans Jonas, who's perhaps best known for
his early denunciation of Martin Heidegger, his former teacher, for
supporting Hitler. But Jonas was also one of the first bioethicists, who
advocated a "heuristics of fear" to help stave off biomedical advance.
According to Jonas, bioethicists ought to employ a "comparative futurology"
of possible sci-fi horror stories, because we humans need "a threat to the
image of man to assure ourselves of his true image by the very recoil from
these threats."
Jonas considered this demagoguery "bioethical"--though whether it's just
plain ethical is dubious. Yet fear-mongering has been one of Kass's favored
techniques. While at times he quotes Plato and Aristotle, Kass has more
frequently argued on the basis of Brave New World, threatening that in vitro
fertilization and human cloning will lead to a world of Aldous Huxley's
"hatcheries" and genetic underclasses. In his 1998 book Frankenstein's
Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture, Jon Turney, chair of
science and technology studies at the University College of London, remarks
that Kass and Paul Ramsey both borrowed ideas from Brave New World to
challenge in vitro fertilization in the early 1970s--Kass in the New England
Journal of Medicine and Ramsey in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. "Both these bioethicists, writing in the two leading American
medical journals, drew on fictional associations of external fertilisation
to reinforce a slippery slope argument against the technique," writes
Turney. But fiction is just that--fiction. It's questionable whether Kass's
speculative futurism counts as a responsible, or even helpful, approach to
bioethical dilemmas.
And if Kass can't be expected to lead a hysteria-free debate on bioethics,
there are also grounds for doubting whether he'll lead an intellectually
balanced one. He told CBS's Schieffer that his council will "most
emphatically contain people of different voices"; and Kass's friend William
Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, attests that Kass "is serious when
he says he wants a diversity of opinions." But there's diversity, and then
there's diversity. Consider the much publicized July 9 meeting between Bush,
Kass, and Daniel Callahan to discuss stem cells--a meeting that Bush's
handlers now say crucially shaped the president's decision. Kass was asked
to tap another bioethicist as his counterpoint, so the president would hear
a range of views. He chose Callahan. The media approved of the choice
because Callahan is a Democrat and (before founding the Hastings Center)
edited the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal.
What no one noticed is that party lines blur beyond recognition on
bioethical issues, and several bioethicists say that they knew as soon as
Callahan's name was mentioned that Bush wouldn't hear any real dissent.
"Callahan on these issues is fairly close to Kass," comments Syracuse's
Gorovitz, "and everybody who knows the field would have expected that."
Callahan counters that he and Kass had not compared notes before meeting
with Bush and that when it comes to stem cells, "having written nothing on
the subject, nobody can say I went in there with a well-known position." In
fact, Callahan told me that he opposes embryonic-stem-cell experimentation
even more strenuously than Kass does--which means that at the allegedly
pivotal Bush stem cell meeting, the president didn't hear a single defender
of the research.
Kass engineered this supposedly "diverse" debate--one possible reason for
his claiming lately that he has no position on stem cells. That may be
officially true, but it's pretty easy to figure out where he is headed. As
far back as 1979, Kass wrote that "it is difficult to justify submitting [an
early-stage embryo] to invasive experiments, and especially difficult to
justify creating it solely for the purpose of experimentation [his
emphasis]." Predicts Arthur Caplan: "I'm willing to say, as a matter of
inference, that you're going to have to prove to him why stem cell research
might be ethical. That I absolutely believe--and I hate to say it, but I
don't care what Leon says."
Another anecdote would also seem to belie the claim that Kass's council will
seek out radically different viewpoints--particularly secular or utilitarian
ones. Jack Hitt, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, recounts a
run-in with Kass back when Hitt was a senior editor of Harper's magazine.
Hitt invited Kass to participate in a "Harper's Forum" on assisted suicide;
another participant was to be Jack Kevorkian. When Kass heard this, he told
Hitt he would never discuss the right to die with Kevorkian or even sit at
the same table with him. Hitt elaborates by e-mail: "When I tried to
convince [Kass] that Kevorkian's actions were defining the debate far more
powerfully than the ethicists' theories precisely because the twain had not
met, he snorted and told me I was part of the problem. The Madisonian idea
... of a marketplace in which good ideas will eventually chase off bad ones
is lost on him."
That's not a great recommendation for someone who's supposed to help a
diverse nation navigate the tricky ethical waters of issues like stem cell
research and human cloning. At bottom, Kass's appointment raises the
question of whether we can expect a national bioethics debate or a national
bioethics sermon. Granted, the "field" of bioethics itself hasn't really
resolved its own identity yet, and for every Samuel Gorovitz or Tristram
Engelhardt there's a Carrie Gordon Earll--the "bioethics analyst" for Focus
on the Family, who begins a typical article: "After more than a dozen years
working around bioethical or life issues, one of my favorite Scripture
verses... ." In Leon Kass, bioethics has put forward a minority figure who
comes down, like Earll, on the side of sermons--a sixteenth-century
sensibility to guide us through twenty-first-century conundrums.
Chris Mooney
----------------------------
James J. Hughes Ph.D.
jhughes@changesurfer.com
Producer, Changesurfer Radio
www.changesurfer.com
Associate Editor
Journal of Evolution and Technology
www.transhumanist.com
71 Vernon St.
Public Policy Studies, Trinity College
Hartford CT 06106
860-297-2376
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