The US President's Council on Bioethics: modeling a thicker knowledge politics

Abstract

This article argues that the “thicker” moral inquiry modeled by the US President's Council on Bioethics is a significant and valuable innovation in knowledge politics. It first distinguishes two kinds of knowledge politics – active deciding vs. thinking and talking. The focus here is on the latter. The article then introduces some relevant historical background. Next, it indicates how prior bioethics committees in the US practised a “thin” version of knowledge politics that both reflected and consolidated typical ways of thinking and talking about biomedical technology. The article then argues that, because of the non-neutrality of technology, a thin knowledge politics is neither sufficient nor necessary for liberal democratic governments concerned to understand and manage emerging technologies. The last section uses a Council report to illustrate the benefits of a thicker knowledge politics.

Keywords:

• bioethics
• US Council
• biomedical technology
• knowledge politics

Notes

1. Kass stepped down as chair just prior to the second executive order renewal on 9 September 2005. Dr Edmund Pellegrino took over as chair and Kass remained on the Council as a regular member

2. The phrase “public bioethics” was coined by John Fletcher (1993) to denote “inquiry supported by government to identify the major ethical considerations and public policy implications of controversial issues in biomedicine” (p. 84)

3. Examples of communities provided by Engelhardt include Orthodox Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Maoist communists.

4. This is the case because ‘in secular philosophical reasoning, ultimate questions cannot be answered” (p. 11). Secularization (like historicism) is the temporalization of the eternal or the understanding that the eternal is no longer eternal

5. True, the creation of ethics advisory bodies requires tax dollars, so in this minimal sense it is a coercive act to use taxpayer money to support a kind of inquiry not everyone likes. However, this is utterly trivial when compared with other controversial uses of taxpayer dollars, including those that go to the conduct of war

6. There is an interesting ontological distinction here between the Council's Aristotelian analysis and this point about equity and autonomy. The Council primarily focuses on human nature as defined by intrinsic qualities and capacities. The point about assemblages views humans as socially defined by extrinsic circumstances. Both ways of looking provide important insights. Unfortunately, many proponents of the social-constructivist approach dismiss human nature as mere myth

7. This insight is developed in profound detail in Jonas's ontological investigation of life and the living organism (1966). Far from being the achievement of a disembodied will, identity is made possible as a self only through the metabolic workings of the body. The metabolic process signals not just new patterns of material exchange. It is also already and always the essence of identity and interiority that comprise consciousness or selfhood.