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Can We Talk?: About the moral dimensions of science.: In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology by Eric Cohen (Andrew Ferguson, 9/08/08, Weekly Standard)

[S]teven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a suave and gifted writer of popular science books. Pinker is rightly admired for his quick wit and light touch, yet even he has lately succumbed to the grinding, pitiless tone of the politico-cultural debate.

In a much-noticed, less-read article in the New Republic not long ago, called "The Stupidity of Dignity," he told a dark story of the reactionaries who would restrict the ability of scientists to do the research they want to do. The reactionaries form a "powerful" movement, Pinker said, that has its origin in such Christian strongholds as Georgetown University. The leader of this movement of Christian theocrats is--couldn't you just guess--a Jewish philosopher, Leon Kass. Like the Christian soldiers he captains, Kass is "pro-death [and] anti-freedom." His position as Maximum Leader was confirmed in 2001 when President Bush appointed him chairman of a government advisory council on bioethics. Kass proceeded to fill it with his theocratic allies. The council was stacked! When two commission members dared to oppose Kass on the issue of embryonic stem-cell research--he's against it--the chairman fired them. Just like that. As thugs do.

The thugs are philosophically shabby, too, according to Pinker. (This was the intellectual rather than the ad hominem part of his article.) Kass and his allies have fixated on this idea of "human dignity." Anytime a scientist wants to do something interesting with a human being, like harvest its stem cells or make an itty-bitty clone of it, Kass complains that the research violates something called human dignity. But the word "dignity" has too many meanings to be useful in describing reality, Pinker wrote. Much better, he said, to use the idea of "autonomy" as a guide to making judgments in bioethics. Autonomy is what makes human beings worthy of respect. Dignity, by contrast, is a "squishy, subjective notion," "slippery and ambiguous," "a mess."

Speaking of messes--Pinker's article not only lacked his usual humor and lightness of touch, it was unaccountably shot through with factual inaccuracies and clumsy thinking. Of the dozen blue-ribbon bioethics councils convened over the last 20 years, Kass's alone was genuinely diverse, as Pinker must know. It was the first not to be stacked with members of the research establishment, especially bioethicists in the employ of hospitals and corporations who all pretty much agree with each other. On Kass's panel there were researchers, philosophers, theologians, physicians, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists--even, God help us, a journalist.

In contrast to previous councils, Kass took care that his panel represented the full range of views on hot subjects like cloning and stem cells, from full-speed-ahead to whoa-nelly. And Pinker should have known the easily findable truth about those two "dismissed panelists." One was asked to leave because she attended fewer than half the council's meetings, and the other denied he was dismissed at all, in a public letter that praised Kass and the council's work. Other panelists who disagreed with Kass were never dismissed.

Along with the canards and the tone of paranoia, Pinker's piece was full of unintentional ironies. Shall we talk about "powerful movements"? Kass's band of skeptical bioethicists is dwarfed by the movement that Pinker is a member of, the one that aims to remove as many barriers to biomedical research as possible. This movement is lavishly funded by high-tech corporations, not-for-profit foundations, free-floating venture capitalists, and massively endowed research universities like that school in Cambridge where Pinker works.

The movement hires highly paid lobbyists, showers politicians in campaign money, and trumpets its message through most of the opinion-generating organs in the country, including a large majority of science reporters and newspaper editorial boards. In opposition to this roaring freight train is a little ragtag band of pro-lifers, Christers, biblical scholars, theologians, professors of philosophy at schools you've never heard of, and two or three magazines with circulations in the four figures. And Pinker pretends to find them ominous. It's odd how some big guys always complain they're being picked on by the little guys.

Oddest of all, though, was Pinker's own fixation on what he thinks is Kass's fixation. Surely Pinker's autonomy is just as slippery and subjective as Kass's dignity. That's the thing about ethics talk. Most of these phrases are slippery in one way or another, relying heavily on the context in which they're used and a certain good-faith assumption of shared understanding. Besides, autonomy is a strange idea for Pinker to champion as an ethical lodestar. Though he's always denied he's a "genetic determinist"--another slippery phrase--he has nonetheless been explicit in his belief that a person's sense of his own autonomy, also known as free will, is ultimately illusory. Pinker doesn't explain how an illusion can be a sound basis for thinking about what's ethical and what isn't.

And thinking, of course, is what bioethicists are supposed to do. It's nice work if you can get it, and no one approaches the task more carefully, more painstakingly than Eric Cohen (you thought I'd forgotten?). In the Shadow of Progress is a testament not only to his care but also to his stout heart. Cohen is a protégé of Kass (as well as an acquaintance of mine and occasional contributor to these pages). He knows that thinking long thoughts about technology's moral consequences and cultural effects is not something many of us are inclined to do, especially when it comes to questioning the riches that technological progress has brought us: Start with indoor plumbing and dental floss and work your way up to the polio vaccine and quadruple bypass surgery, and you've got a sense of what we owe to science and technology. And it simply doesn't occur to most people to think that material advances might come at a spiritual or moral cost. We assume the wonders of technology arrive no-strings-attached.

But what if they don't?

...that when someone claims a term is hard to define they invariably mean they dislike the commonly accepted definition?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 11, 2008 6:57 AM