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| Morally Unserious in the Extreme |
| 2009-03-13 |
| By Charles Krauthammer WASHINGTON -- Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics. I declined to attend. Once you show your face at these things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. My caution was vindicated. Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts. I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research -- a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end. On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom. That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part -- the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- would have made me walk out. Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics. What an outrage. George Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out. Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction." Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it. Is he so obtuse not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike President Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not. This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics. Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific." Dr. James Thomson, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells, said "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." Obama clearly has not. |
| Posted by:Omoter Speaking for Boskone7794 |
| #3 Good to see this from CK. "Outrage" is right. As is the whole preposterous, arrogant shtick about "restoring" science - even as a discredited wacko is made science advisor and the "administration" (I believe those quote marks are now reasonable) embraces the absurd "climate change" mythology as a basis for (further) wrecking modern economies. I don't follow this stuff much, but I couldn't help but notice how thorough, serious, and thoughtful Bush's stem-cell thinggy was. Actually, like many other things he did. Yet the MSM and the opposition and the brain-dead populace just wratcheted up their bizarre anti-Bush hysteria by the month. He had enough idiotic policies to make my blood boil and confound me - rule of law, er, illegal immigration, federal spending, deepening rather than fixing the educational morass, and finally the economic panic last fall - but the extreme and near-hallucinogenic hatred and hysteria towards him has changed my feeling about my fellow citizens forever. Lysenkoism has a death-grip on the corrupt "scientists" and the illiterate power-mad statists. This "restore" crap is a platonically perfect Orwellianism. Sickening. |
| Posted by: Verlaine 2009-03-13 12:27 |
| #2 his "superb", expensive education There. Fixed it for you, Dr. Steve. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-03-13 12:08 |
| #1 For all his superb education, Obama clearly has never read Brave New World. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-03-13 11:46 |