blog.bioethics.net

Around from what? The Council has written a string of sterling, well reasoned, and eloquent reports.

- by Wesley J. Smith on Oct 16, 2005 at 4:49 PM | link

If you say so. I would say that the Council's reports read as though they are discovering bioethics for the first time and are preposterously smug about their lack of familiarity with the past 10 years of peer-reviewed literature in bioethics.
More to the point, it is easy to see why those who love the beautiful abstrations of the Council do. In Saletan's case it is because he is also totally unfamiliar with the literature of bioethics, so he takes the Council at its word when in its reports on problems as though it has discovered them for the first time. There are others who love these reports, but it is telling that almost to a person they are either attached to the neocon think tanks or new to the field.
There are two facts about these reports that are particularly annoying to me: the fact that the reports by the Council under Kass were sold for profit by the American Enterprise Institute without a shred of apology for the obvious appearance of conflict of interest that is presented. Akin to that the payment by AEI to publish Kass' address to ASBH in Kennedy Institute Journal of Ethics - because it was too long - is equally odious. The second fact that is bothersome is that none of these reports make any real effort to create measures whereby their impact could be judged, an obvious oversight that should have been prevented given that the NBAC committed it as well.
It would be a lot more persuasive that the Council's reports were useful reading if even one commentator on them spoke of them in the context of the literature in which their comments have meaning. This is most obvious in the case of the most recent report, which appears almost idiotic given that it "discovers" nothing that has not been in the literature on aging and end-of-life care for five years. Were it not for the love of someone in the editorial offices of the Washington Post for the Council, the report would have quietly dropped into a solumn slumber without any notice at all. I await word from anyone of consequence in end-of-life care that there is a single claim in the report that is either unique or reasoned and argued in a new or particularly important way.
Alas, quietly, the end of the era dawns, as a major scholar of bioethics takes the helm. Time to bid adieu, perhaps, to the brief and exciting experiment with "neocon" bioethics.

- by eds on Oct 16, 2005 at 5:24 PM | link

You wish!
Your elitist claptrap should get more "airtime" and "inches" in subsequent reports with a "serious scholar" in charge, but unlikely to budge viewpoints in this administration or in fact anytime in the future as long as the people of this country are becoming more and more aware of the importance of "old-fashioned" bioethics.
I hope the scholars and doctors and researchers will respect the laws and public opinion of the American people and take seriously their pledges to the Hippocratic oath and the Nuremberg code and not slide towards their own exciting experiments with the transhumanist future!

- by Robert Blundell on Oct 17, 2005 at 5:01 PM | link

You AJOB editors truly are beyond belief. Do you have any examples of Bill Clinton's NBAC having anyone as far to the right as Janet Rowley is to the left? Can you even try to answer that question instead of spouting out the word "neocon" like someone with tourette's syndrome?
I take it from your writings that everything done on NBAC from 1996 to 2001 was totally new and groundbreaking, and none of it was designed to advance leftist causes. Of course, you all have a place calling the American Enterprise Institute "neocon" when you shamelessly advertise the radical left Center for American Progress on this site. Another question: in the last few years both Norman Ornstein and Bill Schneider have been fellows at AEI. Both are undoubtedly liberals-Ornstein is even thanked by Al Frankin for help in writing his last book. Is there anyone as far to the right as Ornstien is to the left on the payroll of Podesta's group? Anyone at the UPenn Bioethics center many of you work at? Anyone that far to the right who was on NBAC?
Are you going to even try to answer the question?
Your statements on "peer reviewed journals" is laughable as well. Your peer reviewed philosophy journals and books have let Lance Stell, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress and Margaret Battin all tell outright falsehoods about Immanuel Kant's, non-theocratic, totally secular, inalienable rights-based arguments against suicide and suicide assistance in the Lectures on Ethics, the Metaphysics of Morals and the Grounding. Do you care that Battin wrote in the Least Worst Death that Kant approved of Cato's suicide, when he clearly did not? Do you care that Ethics published Lance Stell telling outright falsehoods about Kant's mythic support for assisted suicide and dueling (!) in 1979? Have you done anything to correct the record that Beauchamp and Childress falsified in 1994 with the 4th edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics when they wrote that Kant "relies on an external source, such as theology" when he argues against suicide?
I have shown all this and more to be utterly false in my three articles making up the "History 'Lite' in Modern American Bioethics" series published in volumes 19, 20 and 21 of Issues in Law & Medicine. Do you care? Or do you teach your students whatever strawman versions of Kant you want, better to make the more conservative side of the medical ethics debate in this nation look dumb and theocratic?
Your "peer review" stopped none of those falsehoods. I will tell you this, in America, decent, liberal, Anglo-American and European historians, like Larry Kramer, Gordon Wood, Martin Flaherty, Bill Treanor, R.R. Palmer, Bob Kaczorowski and others would never have written what you bioethicists have written about inalienable rights, and they would never have published your falsehoods in peer reviewed *history* journals. For all your not being "new to the field", none of it has made you even remotely reliable on Locke or Kant, or any other important 17th or 18th century philosopher.
You claim that Kass is a laughing stock at you joints, that bioethicists who aren't conservative already don't respect him. I don't doubt it at all. The same you will do to Pelligrino when he doesn't dance to your tune over the next three years. But as historians like me continue to tell the story of the mountain of history lite that you call "scholarship", the Woods and the Treanors, and eventually the Scalias and even the Kennedys will know what hacks this movement is comprised of.
Martin Flaherty is liberal, but that did stop him from calling Cass Sunstein on his liberal history lite. Bill Treanor is liberal, but that didn't stop him from calling Akil Amar on his history lite. I'm a conservative, but that didn't stop me from concluding-and publshing-that John Locke probably didn't believe that embryos had any right to life. Is there anything that disinterested that is written on this blog?
Centrists and conservatives respect you folks as little as you respect Kass, and in your case the disrespect is deserved. And when the decent liberals in this country know what has been going on vis-a-vis inalienable rights in bioethics, you'll have plenty less currency than Leon Kass.
I don't know if this post of mine will be taken down, or whatever. I don't care. To the people interested in medical ethics who view themselves as centrist or liberal, but aren't totally consumed with furor at Leon Kass (who, the last time I checked is Jewish, not Christian), I simply ask you: Don't you think that philosophers havea duty to quote dead philosphers accurately when they teach or write about them? If by so misquoting Kant, the mainstream of bioethics has covered up a secular argument against assisted suicide, isn't that bad for academia in America today? If you hate me for writing this, don't you have some obligation to look at what I'm referring to first?
Don't listen to Glenn McGee or Art Caplan, go to pages 61 and 62 of the 4th edition of Principles (that paragraph may not be in the 5th edition, but it was never retracted, and many of you still use the 4th edition-you know it) and read what is there. Go to pages 278 and 286 of Battin's LWD and read it. Read Stell's Dueling and the Right to Life in volume 90 of Ethics. And then read my "History 'Lite' in Modern American Bioethics", 19 ISSULM 45, "The Healing Philosopher: John Locke's Medical Ethics", 20 ISSULM 103, and "More History 'Lite' in Modern American Bioethics" 21 ISSULM 3. Just read them, and then see how "peer reviewed" and "non-partisan" Beauchamp and Childress were, they who sat on previous bioethics councils without any of the vitriol being lobbed at them that regularly comes at Kass from this site. Ask yourself why Robert George, who is so "new to the field", got this right, while all of bioethics got it wrong. I mean it. Don't believe me. Check every footnote of mine, look for my dishonesty, try to disprove me. I'm not afraid.
Beauchamp and Childress and Battin and Stell owe America answers that Leon Kass will never have to give, because he hasn't done what they've done.
We're waiting, the whole world is waiting.

- by Bradford Short on Oct 17, 2005 at 5:56 PM | link