"A 'Full Range' of Bioethical Views Just Got Narrower"

A 'Full Range' of Bioethical Views Just Got Narrower

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, one of the members of the President's Council on Bioethics whose term of office was not extended, writes this article in today's Washington Post Outlook section.

She states:

"I am convinced that enlightened societies can only make good policy when that policy is based on the broadest possible information and on reasoned, open discussion. Narrowness of views on a federal commission is not conducive to the nation getting the best possible advice. My experience with the debate on embryonic stem cell research, however, suggests to me that a hardening and narrowing of views is exactly what is happening on the President's Council on Bioethics."

I will comment on only one of her statements. She writes, "Leon Kass has suggested that society should make decisions based on what he calls the 'wisdom of repugnance.' I think this is an unreliable kind of wisdom."

"Repugnance" is defined as "strong dislike, distaste, or antagonism." It seems an emotional, rather than an intellectual response. Indeed, in Kass' phrase the word seems to imply a strong distaste for cloning based on moral grounds -- such as the repugnance Renaissance church officials must have felt for Galileo's suggestion that the earth revolves around the sun. In some cases repugnance rules; the infamous Nazi medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates are repugnant, and similar experiments should never be allowed to occur in the future. In some cases, knowledge rules; the church had to overcome its repugnance toward the idea of a heliocentric solar system.

I had hoped that the President's Council on Bioethics would probe American's repugnance toward cloning, and especially towards therapeutic cloning, helping the public to make a good choice on whether to institutionalize or overcome the repugnance.