From Obama’s Bioethics Commission: Providing Practical Policy Options:
People largely have defined the first chair of the Bush commission, Leon Kass, and that commission as a whole, by their relative conservatism compared to previous commissions. But what Kass should be more famous for is his vision that bioethics should define societal goals or ends before we decide whether to pursue various types of biotechnology. I think it is this conversation that is considered “philosophical.”
Read the whole thing. Please.
none
As you may have heard by now, President Obama has disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics. As usual, my buddy Joe says it better than I could:
To the electoral victor goes the electoral spoils, so Obama’s disbanding is neither surprising nor unprecedented. It is, however, lamentable, if for no other reason than that they will no longer be producing rich, nuanced works of philosophical reflection. Bioethics commissions have been around since the mid-1970s but under Leon Kass and later Edmund Pellegrino the council created a new literary genre of government documents: pythonic guides to policy.
none
My friend Jared Bridges recently attended a lecture by Leon Kass entitled “Searching for an Honest Man: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist.” Jared provides an excellent summary at True Pravda, and you can read the entire lecture on the National Endowment for the Humanities website.
From Jared’s summary:
Like Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson lecture two years before, Kass noted that modern science has — to its fault — abdicated the humanities. No longer does medicine look at health, but to emerging technologies. Modern science looks intricately at the parts, but often fails to observe the whole. It can describe what chemical processes take place in the eye for vision to occur, but it cannot explain “seeing.” The humanities are needed for such endeavors — and they are likewise needed when dealing with decisions that involve whole human beings.
none
