Will President Obama Listen to Conservative Bioethicists?
Robert P. George, former member of the President's Council on Bioethics appointed by former President George Bush, has raised precisely this question in an online essay entitled, "A Diverse Bioethics Council?". The article published at Public Discourse, recounts his experience serving on the Kass Council.
However, his account, as reported on CatholicNewsAgency.com, is not only reminiscent but also forward-looking to the upcoming administration under President Obama. George, fairly certain that another presidential bioethics commission is soon to follow the President's Council on Bioethics, says:
"When he does, will he favor the country with a council as diverse as his predecessor's? ... Will nearly half hold strong pro-life views that contradict the President's own beliefs about the moral status of the human embryo and related questions? Will Obama be as open to differing perspectives and ideas as Bush was?"
The idea that President Bush's bioethics council was open to "differing perspectives" is an incredibly tough sell. Yet, George fails to elaborate on what that phrase really means. Would Elizabeth Blackburn agree? Or does openness really mean that a wide range of scholars were invited to speak at the "bioethics seminars" held by the Council and that in those sessions no voices were excluded. But when a report was actually written only a few voices were included in the discussion?
In this article, however, one does not find George slamming bioethicists who may be selected to serve on an Obama bioethics council for being social liberals, he instead blames the media for portraying such a new council as being "diverse" rather than "stacked" with bioethicists who all agree with President Obama's policies. Essentially, he is making a fairness argument for bioethics commissions from one administration to the next.
"If Obama stacks his council with social liberals, will the contrast with the Bush council be noted? Or will the media implicitly adopt the view that a council stacked with liberals isn't really 'stacked'?"George asked.In George's view, the definition of a "diverse counsel, would mean "entirely noble way" of "using bioethics advisory councils to enhance the overall quality of deliberation and debate."
Whatever that means.
Perhaps it would mean not holding ever single meeting in a stuffy inside the Beltway hotel so that voices more diverse than just the counsel members could be heard during public comment periods. Perhaps it would mean including persons from industry or the general public who have credentials in bioethics. Perhaps it would mean putting the most conservative bioethicists and the most liberal on the same counsel. What kind of diversity, specifically, are we seeking?
But we all know that we are talking about a political world, not an ideal one. Professor George, a jurisprudential scholar from Princeton, can dream of a world where deliberation and diversity is possible. But inside the Beltway, presidents choose the advisors whom they believe will give them the best advice that is consistent with their own administration's views.
Depending on one's own political affiliation, we may or may not like any given bioethics councils composition or conclusions, but so long as there is transparency, opportunity for public comment, the use of the best available scientific data, and a President who will listen, I do not think one could expect bioethics counsels or commissions to ask for much more than that.
Summer Johnson, PhD
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Summer, why do you think 'it is an incredibly tough sell' that the Bush bioethics council was open to diverse perspectives? Several liberals were on the council. From the personal statements alone it seems that every document let many different kinds of voices be heard...and even in the actual report the minority voice was always given its say. Indeed, its latest document came to a conclusion that I suspect many of us thought it would not...an upholding of a neurological criteria for death. This was clearly an open-minded and diverse body.
I have little doubt Obama's will be as well...but what's wrong with George saying what he's saying?
- by Charles Camosy, PhD on Jan 27, 2009 at 7:58 AM | link
Thank you for your comment. If the liberals you are pointing to on the Kass Council are William May and Elizabeth Blackburn, neither of whom were asked to serve a second term on the Council, then you could say that there were "liberals" on the Council. If you want to count Janet Rowley, perhaps one could do so. But to say that three out of dozens of members held views that were not conservative hardly makes a commission diverse. Moreover, to claim that because the most recent commission report produced under the leadership of Edmund Pellegrino came to a conclusion that was unexpected demonstrates that the group is diverse is hardly conclusive evidence. If a commission or council were truly diverse, it would rarely come to a consensus at all and in fact be much better suited to presenting a range of policy alternatives from which a president could choose because a truly diverse council, full of persons of differing ideologies and political views, would never actually be able to agree on anything. Would a president ever create such a group? I'm not betting on it. The problem with Professor George's argument is to say that the Council was diverse because they came from different disciplines, religions, or might have varied slightly from the conservative to moderate scale--does not make a council truly diverse.
- by Summer Johnson, PhD on Jan 27, 2009 at 5:02 PM | link
I don't agree with Summer Johnson. A coherent liberal should be open minded and favour discent and discussion in moral matters. If not, liberalism is false.
- by Mariano Morelli on Jan 27, 2009 at 8:20 PM | link
Summer, what do you make of this quote from the PCB white paper on stem cells in light the criticisms you make above?
"Among these several proposals, the Council has no unanimous recommendation to make. Different Council members are drawn more to one or less to another of the four proposals. Each of us weighs the ethical issues differently. And we have differing views on which approach is likely to succeed technically or to be useful practically. A few of us may suspect that the quest for alternative sources of stem cells is misguided, and that we should continue using the embryos we have (or can produce directly) in order to get any new stem cell lines we need."
This is a council that is not only diverse in perspective, but let all voices be heard...especially dissenting ones. Take the personal statements, for instance, from the same document:
http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/white_paper/personal_statements.html
Two of the five explicitly took a dissenting opinion from that of the President. It seems the rash stereotypes about the Bush administration--which are borderline dogma in some circles today--just can't be reconciled with the facts in this instance.
P.S. I probably shouldn't have said 'liberals' because maybe you and I will disagree about what a liberal is. But Bush appointed several people to his council which he knew didn't share his view on embryo-destructive stem cell research. And their opinions were heard and made known in the white paper.
- by Charles Camosy, PhD on Jan 27, 2009 at 9:51 PM | link
Here is a quote from George's aticle (I just found it on Google):
"The Bush council included six members (Michael Sandel, Janet Rowley, William F. May, James Q. Wilson, Michael Gazzaniga, and Elizabeth Blackburn) who favored the production of human embryos for biomedical research in which they would be destroyed in the effort to obtain pluripotent stem cells. At least three additional members (Paul McHugh, Rebecca Dresser, and Francis Fukuyama) were not in principle opposed to “therapeutic cloning,” though they were willing to support a four year moratorium on the practice in the hope alternatives not involving cloning could be developed. At least one additional member (Charles Krauthammer), though opposed to the deliberate creation by cloning of embryos for research in which they would be destroyed, supported the revocation of President Bush’s funding restrictions on the use of embryos that had been produced by in vitro fertilization for reproductive purposes, but were left unused in cryopreservation units in assisted reproduction facilities."
I think he does not "fail to elaborate" on what he means by a council "open to differing perspectives". Of course, it is always possible to disagree with his statements. But I think that to do so properly you should have consulted the article and not an indirect source.
- by Ricardo Nuñez on Jan 28, 2009 at 6:30 AM | link
To Dr. Camosy, publishing a white paper of personal statements is hardly the same as actually incorporating them into the final report that was written by the Council. Allowing Council members to voice their views in written footnotes that appear on PCB letterhead may serve some symbolic value but is not the same as working to write a report that reflects a true diversity of opinion or that reflects anything but the already articulated Bush doctrine regarding stem cell research that was voiced on August 9th, 2001 and which gave rise to the Council itself. As for Mr Nunez's comment, I do believe that Professor George fails to elaborate on what "diversity" really means in a theoretical sense--rather than to simply describe how certain Council members about embryonic stem cell research. In any case, when push came to shove, these members, even if these were their strongly held convictions, did not "vote" this way in the final writing of the report, in any case. If diversity simply means that persons hold different views on an given issues at any given time, one could argue that if one gathered 12 of the most liberal members of the ACLU in a room that group could be diverse if they held slightly different views on what it means to "torture". Somehow this doesn't seem right to me. Perhaps Professor George would have done better to argue for diversity on the Council in the Pellegrino term. As for where the Council members actually stood on embryonic stem cell research, this is not where the report actually came out. Commissions are judged by the reports they write. If there was diversity to be found, the report that was written had very little to show for it.
- by Summer Johnson, PhD on Jan 28, 2009 at 4:49 PM | link