blog.bioethics.net

Gilbert the Civil

In yet another silly, Hurlbutesque essay about "moral seriousness," in which neocon bioethicists make essentially specious, patronizing ad hominem arguments against any opponent whom they encounter, hiding their own partisanship with the appearance of civility, Gil Meilaender and Robert George hammer away at the argument by Michael Gazzanaga in the New York Times in favor of stem cell research.

We noted earlier that Gazzaniga's publishing such a strong position on the claim would have been near heresy had it happened during the Reign of Kass on the President's Commission on Bioethics - a time when two members of the Commission who disagreed with Kass and Bush were quite vividly fired (all rhetoric to the contrary) and replaced by more partisan members - and to cap the incident, Kass went after one of the two members in interviews and even an editorial in Washington Post. Comments on our post about Gazzaniga's recent editorial said, basically, that we had it all wrong; that the Kass folks were just fine with differences among members of the committee. Yeah right. C.f., The National Review. In the National Review piece the opening is that everyone is a member of the big President's Council.

And from there the attack begins, an attack not so much on Gazzaniga's argument as on his way of talking. It is infuriating and I've spent more words fuming about this stupid, patronizing nonsense employed by the neocons on the PCB that I am thinking of writing a little dictionary to help normal people figure out what these guys mean when they say that someone is blithe, less than serious, or when they charge that someone is "opining" or "fails to engage."

So maybe I shouldn't say that the authors of the National Review piece "hammer" Gazzaniga's claims, because it isn't polite to say so. Eh, actually the reason I shouldn't say "hammer" is that the essay by Gil and Robert is not an argument, it is whining.

I will spare you the effort of reading their essay, ever so worthy of its placement in The National Review. Their points are three.

First, Gazzaniga commits the sin of being too blithe - he isn't "serious" about when life begins. No kidding, that is the first argument. It is pro-life on stilts.

The second is that scientists are not working "in a value-free vacuum." By this the authors mean that anyone who is a scientist and disagrees with the authors is a partisan hack afraid to pursue "the truth," whatever that may be. Uh, ok. Actually this argument would be a great and thoughtful one could the authors produce any evidence whatsoever that the arguments made by Gazzaniga or those in the pieces they criticize in NEJM are false in any respect. But, oops, they can't or at least don't. We're to just trust them. After all, they've got the eminent stem cell biologist William Hurlbut working on the details of their own biology.

What they do say though is that scientists who favor SCNT or for that matter any form of ESCR are susceptible to the sins of the anti-life utilitarian - impolite, blithe and unserious. zzzzz.

The third point of the authors is that Gazanniga is mistaken to "deny creativity" in the pursuit of Hurlbut's ridiculous ideas for how to make "moral" embryonic stem cells. They write, "Gazzaniga is far too confident that he knows in advance which paths will turn out to be fruitless. This is the sort of confidence that is produced not by scholarly caution but by political aims." Ok. The sin is his confidence - which comes from reading and working in the scholarly literature of science (unlike, say, Gilbert or Robert, or for that matter Hurlbut, none of whom works on stem cells at all in their labs - or for that matter have labs).

This article is just one more reason to utter a "thank you" to those who have at long last relegated to the margin the prophets of "seriousness" - a term of neocon bioethics that should be entered into the official lexicon of Orwellian Newspeak for its utterly obvious duplicity.

It was never easy to take talk about the importance of sincerity and "seriousness", uh, seriously when it was uttered by those working on a council whose leader handed out leaflets to members of Congress urging them to implement a "second term Bush bioethics agenda" be taken, um, seriously. (Although we do know that those in Congress who called for an investigation of Kass by the Inspector General of DHHS took that very seriously as a matter of, um, uncivility in the extreme). I know of no one in bioethics who is not very happy to see a thoughtful, fair, intellectually responsible leader at the help of the PCB now - at last there will be real and open debate - this little nonsense in the National Review is just the hangover from what seemed like years of oppressive political sophistry.