Split Decision

The reckless conservatism of the President's Council on Bioethics

The decision reached last week by the President's Council on Bioethics was 10 against research cloning, seven for it. As for reproductive cloning, the vote was a unanimous thumbs-down. The council's deliberations and policy recommendations were released in the report Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry.

Chairman Leon Kass should be commended for allowing the expression of some moral diversity on the council. Earlier national bioethics commissions generally have been composed of like-minded members carefully selected so that they reached the "consensus" desired by their political patrons. Such commissions failed to reflect the country's diversity of opinion. Kass didn't completely resist the temptation to salt the panel with his cronies, but he did include some members who were likely to disagree with him.

All council members who voted chose to "recommend a congressionally enacted ban on all attempts at cloning-to-produce-children." (Curiously, one council member, Yale law professor Stephen Carter, did not vote on any proposal.) The council rejected a "mere moratorium" on the grounds that "we might lose what may be our society's best chance to get a permanent ban on this practice before it occurs and to declare our opposition to the idea of designing and manufacturing our children." I would argue that a moratorium, rather than a permanent ban, is the morally appropriate stand, but let us set that debate aside for another time.

With regard to cloning for biomedical research, the 10 conservative members of the panel favor a four-year moratorium, while seven more moderate members argue that research should proceed with proper safeguards. Cloning research is aimed at producing stem cells that can be transformed into tissues and organs that would be perfect transplants for patients. The conservatives argued that there should be a moratorium on therapeutic cloning research because "the implications of proceeding or not proceeding are not clear." Consequently, "the proper attitude is modesty, caution, and moderation, expressed in a temporary ban to be revisited when time and democratic argumentation have clarified the matter."

Actually, the way to make things clearer is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of the technology through research. Asking citizens to decide an issue while they are still ignorant of its practicalities, benefits, and costs will not "clarify the matter"; only the additional knowledge gained from research can do that. As the council's seven dissenters concluded, "Uncertainty over the potential of this research can only be overcome by doing the research." Council member Janet D. Rowley also noted, "The effect of extending and expanding this moratorium will be to maintain our ignorance by preventing any research for four more years." Caution in this case could condemn millions of people to suffering and death that could have been avoided had medical research been allowed to proceed.

The conservatives' call for democracy is disingenuous. It is at best a delaying tactic and at worst demagoguery–an appeal to the prejudices and emotions of an uniformed populace. Why should ethical decisions as personal as those involved in reproduction and medical care be decided by democratic vote?

The problem with establishing "a national agency…with broad oversight, advisory, and decision-making authority" to regulate biomedical research, as envisioned by the council, is that such an agency would necessarily turn differences over morality into win/lose propositions, with minority views overridden by the majority. To the extent that we need regulation, agencies can decide scientific questions such as safety and efficacy. Agencies can also appropriately protect research subjects and patients from force and fraud by requiring that researchers obtain their informed consent. But when people of good will deeply disagree on moral issues that do not involve the prevention of force or fraud, it is not appropriate to submit their disagreement to a government agency.

The genius of a free society is that its citizens have wide scope to pursue their own visions of the good without excessive hindrance by their fellow citizens. In America we honor the free expression of moral diversity. Consequently, the federal government does not force Roman Catholic hospitals to provide abortions or contraception to their patients. Similarly, we recognize the right of adult Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse blood products and of Christian Scientists to refuse all medical treatments.

Another flaw in the idea of a "national discourse" on cloning is that humans have terrible foresight. We are so constituted psychologically that we tend to imagine monsters lurking just over the horizon of technological progress, while failing to see that in reality the Promised Land lies close at hand. Therefore, if given the chance, "society" will often choose to block change. "Better the devil you know than the one you don't know," is the adage preferred by most people.

Yet the public's view of new technologies shifts as researchers and entrepreneurs make their benefits more widely known. If the public had been allowed to vote on organ transplants or assisted reproduction at a stage of development comparable to where cloning stands today, they would have outlawed those biomedical advances, which today are widely approved. If researchers are correct about the benefits of cloning research, then the public will one day applaud those advances too. One cannot help but suspect that this is exactly what the conservatives on the council fear and want to forestall by establishing a moratorium they hope will become permanent.

The council's cautious majority declared, "Our society needs more time to explore the full moral significance of taking such a step, to debate the moral and practical issues involved, and to seek a national consensus—about all research on early human embryonic (and fetal) life (not just that formed through cloning techniques)." All research? Is this an effort to turn back the clock on such beneficial technologies as assisted reproduction or pre-implantation diagnosis of genetic diseases in embryos? Does this debate include another fruitless and contentious effort to force a national consensus on the morality of abortion and contraception? Kass lost the debate on assisted reproduction in the 1970s. Is this a way for him to reopen that debate for a second round in which he hopes to fare better?

The council's conservatives claim they want "wise public policy" to guide decisions about cloning. History has shown that truly wise public policy allows people, including biomedical researchers, maximum scope to pursue the good and the true in their own ways, in conformity with the dictates of their own consciences.