Next Debate Opponent: Richard Doerflinger

Just kidding...I'm not debating him, but I am appearing on a panel with the famous deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, this Friday at the "Bioethics and Politics" conference in Albany, New York. The panel set-up could lead to debate-like exchanges, certainly. Guess I'd better brush up on stem cells; I've been focused on climate for so long I suspect I'm a bit rusty. So anyway, here's a set of Google links on Doerflinger. Just like we've done with Ron Bailey and Tom Bethell in the past, I'd appreciate your reactions...

Tags
Categories

More like this

Hmmm. I would definitely steer clear of the ethical fray. Looks like there will be enough Ethics Phd's in the room to beat that subject to death... I would make the point that separation of church and state and freedom of conscience are core principles for US democracy, and that citizens' and policymakers' consciences are at a disadvantage if they're given the wrong information. Then you could detail the kinds of distortions you've seen, and what you think is behind those distortions...

By Jon Winsor (not verified) on 12 Jul 2006 #permalink

This is the old "No God, no good", as Dostojewskij used to say (o maybe not). How can you "debate" ethics, regarding stem cells or anything else? By definition, ethics are personal, or different for every religion, denomination and sect. If roman catholics don't agree with secular humanists on the use of an embryo, the answer is pretty cose to "So what?". Do we have to obey the ten commandments just because an old palestinian shepard saw a burning bush? C'mon.
Well, good luck Chris, but I wouldn't mess with bioethics. Or priest, for that matter.

Marco
(from Italy, the land of the pope. And the world soccer champions...)

By Marco Ferrari (not verified) on 12 Jul 2006 #permalink

Stick to what you know.

You've seen how politicians distort science to suit their issues and pander to their constituents.

In the same way, there is plenty of pander-room in bio-ethics. You can pander to the "criminalize abortion" crowd or to those who deliberately over-estimate the results showing medical potential of embryonic stem cell research because they have a personal connection with a particular illness.

I'm with those who believe that surplus IVF embryos can and should be used respectfully in research; but I understand the religious objections of others. In the end, the decision ought to be left to the parents of those embryos. I support scientists who choose to do that research and those who choose not to, as long as they have searched their own consciences.

But the problem comes from the demands of earning a living. It really isn't all that different from the need to have hope about a medical problem. It's not easy to know your own conscience under duress.

Having a rich literature of bioethics can help in making difficult choices at such times.

In the same way, bioethical literature can help decent politicians to avoid pander-monium in public discourse and to treat difficult topics with the proper respect.

Yes, there are many decent politicians, but they are often drowned out by the rhetoric of extremists with axes to grind and constituents' behinds to kiss.

I would like a scientist in the ES debate to finally point out that many of the "life begins" arguments that these discussions devolve into are misinformed.

Someone needs to point out that life doesn't "begin" but is instead continuous, it began once, billions of years ago, and has been rolling along unstopped ever since. There is no "dead" stage in reproduction. Sperm are alive, eggs are alive, the fusion of the two is alive, therefore the embryo is alive, etc. Life doesn't "begin" anywhere in the process. The real question is, when should we care? We don't name our sperm or eggs, we don't name every conceived embryo that is washed out (something like 50% of them), the belief that embryos from IVF deserve human rights is as ridiculous as saying sperm or eggs deserve human rights, none is more alive than another, and the fusion of an egg and sperm isn't a sentient or even remotely developed life form.

Once you acknowledge the idea that life begins is scientifically untenable, it exposes the idea of protecting pre-implantation embryos as "people" as really quite absurd, and the idea of life beginning at conception as a purely religious point of view. Since we shouldn't be deciding bioethics on the point of view of a purely religious belief in "ensoulment" at conception, the arguments against the research can be readily dismissed.

Hi Chris,

Having read that NRO piece, two issues stand out. One is his apparent concern for women being exploited, and the other his issue with the use of the term "theraputic cloning." Let's take them one at a time.

"Exploitation of women." We actually hear this one a lot from the same bunch in reference to egg donation and use of surrogates for infertile couples. While some of the critique of the Korean conscent forms is valid, if you look at the same people leveling critiques at the use of egg donation and surrogacy in infertility, you will see an interesting tendency to require much more than they would for say, sperm donation. An unspoken issue here seems to be that this lot believes women are too stupid or too naive to make informed decisions (also implied in the article when talking about the thosands of Korean women supposedly misled into wanting to donate their eggs by the hope of quick cure). This issue may be a bit bulky/touchy to get into at the panel, although it might be interesting to get him to say what his views are on egg donation and surrogacy for infertility.

Second, the term "theraputic cloning." Now this is just wankery. The reason we say "theraputic cloning," is because there are other kinds. We can, for instance, clone a gene or part of a genome. By which we mean "isolate it away from the rest of the genome and place into accessible form." We do that all the time, even in BL-1 labs, and no one needs an ethincs form for that because this is just a research technique used to conduct studies on functions of various genes, etc.

We can also talk about "whole animal cloning," as in Dolly-- when the nucleus of a differentiated cell is transfered to an enucleated egg, and the resulting diploid embryo is transfered to an adult female, where it implants and gestates to delivery.

"Theraputic cloning" starts out with the nuclear transfer, just like the whole animal cloning, but the embryo is never transfered to the surrogate-- it is used instead to create stem cell lines. Meant to use in research the goal of which is eventally developing therapies for various diseases. The goals along the way usually involve understanding the signals and pathways that lead to differentiation of stem cells into particular types of differentiated cells.

I suspect he knows all this and is just playing word games. But this one I think he needs to be called on.

BTW, there are scientists who are not happy with this term either, but for completely different reasons-- because it sounds too politically charged. I heard Eric Lander say once that this particular term is one of the deepest self-inflicted wounds the scientific community ever sustained. Unfortunately, I forgot the term he suggested instead, but I do remember that I really liked it. I wish I remembered what it was. But I am pretty sure Doerflinger wouldn't like it either. He would claim it to be deceptive, I bet, since it would be harder to work the faithful up into lather over it.

Hope this helps,

Julia (Mozh)

Oh boy is this rich. I love that Mr. Winsor sees fit to inform us that "separation of church and state and freedom of conscience are core principles for US democracy." That is obviously true (depending on how one defines "separation of church and state"). But, of course, that right to decide one's own religion, or lack thereof, in the light of one's own conscience, is an *in*alienable right. One cannot "give it up," because it is part of the inalienable right to life and liberty everyone has that *allows* him to choose to (and be able to) do things like "give up" things. Even John Stuart Mill admitted that "it is not freedom [for a person] to be allowed to alienate his freedom." In this, he followed Kant (though I don't know if he would have had the courage to actually explicitly oppose suicide as his premises called for), who argued against all suicide (just like that horrid Bush Administration does today), and that the absolute value of people's freedom implied that they cannot have a right "to choose to destroy their power of choosing."

If I sold myself into slavery, I'd do such a thing (slaves might continue to choose, but that is all a gratuity given to them by their masters; if masters wanted to lobotomize al their slaves and put microchips in their heads that made the slaves very thoughts subject to the masters' whims, there is nothing in the logic of slavery that would prevent this). If I agreed to become Catholic in a country where such a conversion was never allowed to be reversed by me, I'd have done a part of such a thing. (Thankfully, I live in a nation with a 1st Amendment, and my being a Roman Catholic is entirely by my will, because I can leave the Church at any time.) *And also*, if I killed myself, I'd be doing such a thing, a clear illegal act against the natural inalienable right to life and liberty (the right to the "power of choosing" as Kant said). By killing myself, I'd be "choosing to destroy my power of choosing" for all time. And Kant rightly retorts, "but then, free choice would be in conflict with itself."

This is the case even if I have only six months to live (terminally ill people display liberty too, you know). This theory of inalienable rights and the natural illegality of suicide was openly defended by such radical, Catholic, proto-Bush-religious-right, theocrats as Rousseau (a lapsed Calvinist), John Locke (an Anglican), William Blackstone (another Anglican), and maybe even Diderot (an atheist who fantasized about strangling kings with the entrails of priests).

But outside of this, you're right, the anti-suicide, pro-inalienable liberty Republicans are simply taking orders from the Southern Baptist Convention.

This is such a joke. The most important bioethicists in the world have openly lied about this for DECADES. Margaret Battin, Lance Stell, James Childress, Tom Beauchamp, John Simmons...the list goes on. All have deliberately adulterated quotes from Locke and Kant to make it *look* like either 1) the inalienable rights theory didn't really happen, or 2) (even more laughably) Locke and Kant were *theocrats* in their passages opposing suicide. Well, if it was good enough of a tactic to smear Tom DeLay with...why not?

And yes, Mr. Mooney, this has everything to do with you biased war on the GOP in your "The Republican War on Science". Adult stem cell research might actually *work*-all you are arguing about is Doerflinger's statements concerning probabilities. Meanwhile someone like Margaret Battin-who holds a prestigious named chair in bioethics at the University of Utah-is allowed to publish an insane conspiracy theory about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson *having plotted to kill themselves on the 4th of July, 1826, by Oxford University Press* (!), and no one points out that what she is telling her students is nothing more than a bunch of lies and deranged illusions from someone who has been in the fevered swamps of the left for too long:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDEwMDUxOWUyNTJjOGQxZDY0MTJiMWQ3Nm…

When one of you people write a book about the "Liberal Bioethicists' War on Historiography", instead of just going after Rick Santorum, then I might actually take you seriously.

Bioethics should get *all* the facts right, and understand that even correct ethical theory cannot change "the facts on the ground." They should not do this with only the scientific facts about the successes and failures of embryonic and adult stem cells, but also with the *historiographical* facts about Adams, Jefferson, Kant, Locke, Somers, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Blackstone and others. But the only people even remotely interested in doing the later seem to be conservative Republicans like myself. Gee, I wonder why that is...

Mr. Short, I didn't mean to imply that anyone give up their religious beliefs. I'm just saying that good science should be part of the deliberative process.

Of course, someone making a decision could choose to ignore science entirely and defer to some religious legalism or fundamentalism and disregard any facts. That would be unfortunate, but at least honest and straightforward, as long as they weren't misrepresenting science in the process.

But I would hope that they would make their decisions based at least in part on what their consciences tell them as informed people. They should "dare to know" for themselves. And I'm not saying that this couldn't be informed by values and ethics that they got in a religious context.

I'm afraid I'm out of my depth on bioethicists. I was just giving Chris my two cents on what I thought he could contribute...

By Jon Winsor (not verified) on 18 Jul 2006 #permalink

All right, Mr. Winsor, that is the most civil response I have ever gotten in my life from someone to the left of me on these issues, so I should probably start by apologizing for being so harsh in the last comment.

But, you miss my point, which is certainly valid. First, giving up religious beliefs has nothing to do with anything. People's moral beliefs often call for heavy protection of embryos (or certainly "heavy" compared to the protection they get now). For some people, those moral beliefs are consistent with their religion (e.g. me). But if the reality is that embryo-destructive stem cell research does eventually cure, say, pancreatic cancer, and adult stem cell research never does that, neither my moral beliefs (which do not necessarily flow from my religion), nor my religious beliefs, will be able to wish the fact of that cure away. Slavery was wrong, but if it was still a great boon to early America it does not stop being that if it was wrong. Some people thought alcohol consumption was wrong enough to ban it via constitutional amendment, but even if they were morally right to do so, in economic reality, Prohibition probably hurt America more than it helped it in the 1920's. They had an obligation to admit those facts irrespective of the validity of the Prohibitionists' moral arguments.

My point is that History is like Economics and Science. Whatever Stell, Simmons, Childress, Beauchamp, Nelson, Battin and others thought and still think of, say, Oregon's assisted suicide law (that is, they liked and still like it), it will not change the *fact* that major Western philosophers (philosophers who can in no way be described as tools to the "Christianist religious right"-they being the men who actually created the moral theory behind laws like the First Amendment) created a system of inalienable rights, with the prohibition of suicide, slavery, and tyranny as its keystone, and the First Amendment as a direct outgrowth *of that.*

Now, if we like the First Amendment a lot, we might think that this fact should influence our view of right and wrong, that is, we might go from being pro-right-to-assisted-suicide to anti-assisted suicide thinking that this move is needed to keep in place the whole Enlightenment system of inalienable rights, and religious tolerance with it. We could do this and remain very angry at the Bush Administration for is opposition to gay marriage, to abortion of unborn humans who important men in the Enlightenment did not necessarily consider persons yet, and so had not a right to life to alienate illegally in the first place (e.g. fetuses and embryos before quickening). I am not in this "we" at all, and I don't think a deeper study of the Enlightenment will force one to support gay marriage, and still less abortion (here, I'm just saying these issues are less clear from the Enlightenment standpoint than suicide)-but Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens are in that "we", and yet, they have never uttered a peep in favor of what Ashcroft and Gonzales did regarding Oregon; and the bioethicists who organized this conference and agree with and cite Mr. Mooney on "Science," attacked them for that suit with pure venom, sometimes day in and day out, for a period of months.

But forget that, there might be a way to separate the inalienable rights system's protection of religious toleration from its inalienable right to life, and then get rid of the later and keep the former. I do not think such a way exists, and I think it would be immoral to act like it does (that is, I believe in Locke's argument against suicide and believe it is as immoral to act against that as it would be to buy a slave), but, I cannot order, say, James Childress not to try to construct such a system in his books on philosophy. He can try to write up what theories he wants. What I *can* do, however, is when I see that bioethicists are clearly lying about that history, violating basic rules of historiography, and in the process doing the precise thing with History, that they claim someone like Doerflinger is doing with Science, I can cry foul as loudly and vigorously as is possible.

The science/morality dichotomy is part of a bigger fact/morality dichotomy. "The study of facts" is bigger than "Science," Science is only a part of it. When, year after year, I see people so interested in correcting Doerflinger's, or Kass', or Hurlbut's statements on science (which, fwiw I remain unconvinced are unsound), and never interested in even discussing far more obvious lies about history, and all of this is VERY relevant to Bioethics, I cannot help but conclude that a lot of Bush critics are hypocrites.

Again, I'm out of my depth on bioethics. All I can tell you is what I meant by what I said above.

History can be a tricky thing, particularly because (obviously) historical figures are no longer alive to speak for themselves. It's particularly hard to determine what this or that person would say in every single modern, detailed case. And it seems to me that we don't have to always agree with everything they said, either. We can accept some things and reject others.

So anyway, it would be hard to convince me that a bioethicist would be outright "lying" about history. In general, I try not to assume that kind of thing about a person's motives unless I have a very good reason to. (But again, I don't have a lot of context to judge bioethics in any case.)

By Jon Winsor (not verified) on 18 Jul 2006 #permalink

There is a simple way to confirm that there is real lying going on in Bioethics, all anyone needs to do is get a copy of, let's take, Lance Stell's "Dueling and the Right to Life", published in volume 90, at page 7, of the journal Ethics, which is sadly considered to be one of the two most prestigious philosophy journals in the English-speaking world. Then read pages 20 and 21 of that article. They claim to show that Kant, in Part I of his Metaphysics of Morals (a.k.a. "The Metaphysical Elements of Justice") not only implicitly committed himself to a right to suicide, but that Kant committed himself to supporting a *right to engage in duels.*

O.K., so, just on the face of it, people-at least those remotely familiar with Kant-should have realized that that was bull...but Lance Stell was not reacted to with disbelief and outrage for having written this, but instead he became one of the most important bioethicists in America, the Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Davidson in North Carolina, and was lauded in the pages of the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities' "ASBH Exchange."

If you doubt at all the total mendacity of Stell's rendition of Kant's theory, you should simply read the actual passages from Kant's "Metaphysical Elements of Justice" (that being the title that John Ladd gave Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals when he translated it in the 60's), found on pages 106 and 107 of that edition/translation. You can follow up with my own "More History 'Lite' in Modern American Bioethics", found at volume 21, page 3 (jump cite, pages 17-27), of the law journal Issues in Law & Medicine.

At that point you will realize that my use of the word "lie" is, if anything, too charitable. If this stuff was done in a History Department, the guy would be fired. But in Bioethics, the person is rewarded because, as I said, there is a trend and agenda in Bioethics that has been running roughshod over facts-just it is historiographical facts and not scientific facts-for many, many years now.

Bradford,

Can you send me an electronic version of your "The healing philosopher: John Locke's 'Medical Ethics'" via email? PDF, word, what have you...

I'd like to take a look at it but I don't have access to it.

pharma_bawd at yahoo.com

replace the at with @ and no spaces.

Thanks.