Praising with Faint Damnation

William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent, and he plays chess with someone on the President's Council for Bioethics, he tells us. This is his new Slate editorial about the Council, and its deliberations about enhancement technologies that aim at extending life. Like those deliberations, Saletan wanders a bit. It isn't entirely clear what he is talking about in his "outsider-looking-in" Op Ed about bioethics, but the aim seems to be identifying why it is that - his words - the "council is a ridiculous paradox: an almost completely ignored and powerless body that happens to be debating the most consequential events of our day."

Don't get the idea that this Slate writer is unhappy about the austerity of the council. He loves their academic demeanor, it's clear. He even pauses to list the florid names of the endowed chairs held by several members of the Council. He just wishes his admiration were shared; he is bowled over by the fact that nobody seems to give a darn about the Council's work. Saletan has a real worry about the deliberations getting lost in the arcane methods of the council, such as the long-standing practice of choosing the least public forums imaginable:

[Human life extension is] an intriguing topic, with enormous—and for many people, possibly fatal—economic and political consequences. But you'd hardly know it from the lifelessness of the proceedings, which achieve a status hitherto unknown in Washington: too boring to televise on C-SPAN. The reason for this is simple: The council consists of, and takes testimony from, the sort of people who have spent enough time probing deep questions to cultivate expertise and esteem. These people used to be called monks. Today we call them nerds.

Why is Pres. Bush's erudite bioethics council irrelevant: that is the question Saletan wants Americans to ask. And it is a good question. Saletan's conclusion is that the President's bioethicists are just too professorial to fit in to this imperfect political world. He points to the fact that during their essentially unattended proceedings, these folks just read papers and seem oddly distant. "Papers can't engage in that debate. Only human beings can. And that's what the council must learn not just to say, but to do." Fair point. The public activity of the council to date has really boiled down to publishing a few anthologies that its chairman himself described as ideal texts for an upper-level undergraduate philosophy class. If there were not already dozens of excellent texts for just that purpose, lots of bioethics people would be happy that the council was helping to educate, even if it only really aimed at those who are already fairly well educated.

But there are dozens of those books. So the question is why can't the council do something for the public? Why isn't half its money and time spent on discussion and actual planning for social debates about the issues of the day in biotechnology? Why can the council not put together at least a half-decent website that anybody who can read will be able to utilize?

The answer is that far too many scholars, when finally given the chance to make a difference in public life, find that they don't like the public very much, or at least not enough to abandon more rigorous conversations with their colleagues. The line is something like this: "our job is to think the deep thoughts about complicated issues; others can figure out how to translate those ideas and engage the public -- why can't the public just come listen to us? We put up a website with links to download our papers!"

It is an interesting editorial and will spark some equally interesting debate about what kind of public commission on bioethics can really be said to make any difference at all. But doubtless the entire debate will be ignored by the council, which is Saletan's point after all. Maybe bioethics doesn't belong on the Presidential seal. Perhaps only things that really do aid and engage the public should be there. - GM