Dr. Alta Charo, an ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said that much of the Bush council’s work “seemed more like a public debating society” and that a new commission should focus on helping the government form ethically defensible policy.
A commission of this kind, Dr. Charo said, “lets the president react judiciously to rapid and often startling changes in the scientific landscape.”
This is truly frightening.
I have not read the article, but I suspect that a new ethics panel is more likely to move the stance of government decisions towards Peter Singer of Princeton and away from the position that all human beings are created equal and have the inherent “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (“The pursuit of happiness” had, as I read somewhere and wish I could remember, at the time of the American Revolution the meaning of seeking the good and doing it. It was a term from philosophy and not a statement that would endorse hedonism.)
It’s a terrible thing to debate bioethics – we should just rubber stamp whatever Mr. Obama wants.
Like the scientists did when they approved the Tuskegee experiments.
Much remains to be seen, as the makeup of the new panel is not herein announced. However, it is interesting that, according to the article, the Bush administration’s problem is that it was apparently too intellectually freighted and insufficiently focused on giving the administration ideological cover for doing its thing. I recently spent a marvelous day visiting with Dr. Paul McHugh of Johs Hopkins, who was on the Bush Panel (and principal speaker for the upcoming Mere Anglicanism conference). He said that you can do one of two things on a Panel like this: carry on a meaningful conversation and offer guidance to the public based on it, or figure out how to do stuff the politicians want to do. Surprise, surprise, to intellectuals of Dr. McHugh’s heft, the first is interesting, the second isn’t – which says something about the quality of the people Obama is likely to wind up with. Ironic to see the Left complain that the Bush Administration was too smart and insufficiently ideological.