Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
Many had (somewhat) higher hopes than in the past when Dr. Edmund Pellegrino was recently named to take over the chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics from the execrable Leon Kass. And early returns suggested a freer sense of intellectualism within that body: more-open dissent, in distinction to the persecution dissenters faced under Kass, and a broader range of opinion flowing out of the Council under Pellegrino. But it was too much to expect that the overwhelmingly conservative membership would now incline to any higher sense of purpose, or more-inclusive understanding of what bioethics should be, than in the past. Today, Council member Robert P. George has disgraced himself - while acting in his personal capacity, not within the Council, it should be noted - by not merely endorsing but campaigning for anti-gay discrimination in company with conservative religious bigots.
George, I emphasize again, was acting outside the Council, in a private capacity. And the position he takes - for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting civil rights (marriage) for gay citizens nationwide - is not outside the range of common opinion in these degraded times, though it is certainly an ugly and shameful one. His conduct does not strictly reflect upon the Council, and certainly not its Chair, who, to his credit, has reversed the policy of retaliation upon holders of unapproved opinions that had been pursued by Kass. As a mere exercise of the right of opinion, or of personal political prerogative, George’s action is immune to reproach. So I am not arguing that the Council is implicated in this action, or that George’s endorsement of official discrimination directly incriminates anyone but himself. However, I cannot overlook what this says about the kind and quality of Council membership, and its ramifications for public bioethics in what it is increasingly hard to regard as a liberal democracy.
The President’s Council is the only official bioethics advisory body operating under the aegis of the federal government and charged with a broad mandate to provide a voice for moral input into high-level policy-making across the board. (There are bioethics review committees in various federal biomedical agencies, but only one with an open mandate at the top of the Executive Branch.) It is the voice of bioethics, generally, within the government of the United States. Although charged by the President with service to the President, it is also understood to be a voice of and for the people. And so, though it is unsurprising that a President who ran on an extremist-conservative platform would appoint an extremely conservative Council (an expectation reinforced the the President’s expulsion of most of the few dissenting members after only two years), it is a reasonable expectation that that Council would recognize an obligation to speak for all the members of the American community.
George has taken sides with an extremist and reactionary minority faction of religious Americans who have it as their explicit agenda to deny or restrict, to other groups of Americans, civil rights that are expressly protected for all other Americans, and on no grounds other than personal animus. (I take arguments about “the breakdown of marriage as an institution” to be contentless, as “marriage as an institution” is indefinable, and the imputation of that argument is either unproven, unprovable, or nonsensical.) I take it as obvious that no decent person can hold this position, but my concern goes beyond that. Aside from the fact that the Council harbors at least one member who apparently qualifies as “no decent person”, the President’s Council on Bioethics - a body charged with stating moral positions on public policy issues in the name of the nation itself - harbors a member who has set himself against an entire subset of Americans.
I believe George’s position on this issue unfits him for membership on the President’s Council. I am aware of the dangers of punishing people for uncomfortable or unpopular opinions - I have complained of it in the context of the Council just above - but I am not suggesting punishing George simply because his position is offensive. The problem is that his position is legally discriminatory against a sub-population of American citizens and residents. And I take it that no person who holds such a belief can hold a position of influence in the United States Government, particularly not one of the nature of membership on this Council.
I hope it goes without saying that anyone who openly advocated racial segregation, or the elimination of voting rights for women, would instantly be written out of candidacy for any position such as the one in question. I also hope that anyone who was clearly and openly racist or sexist would also not be appointed to such positions, but for a different reason. It is morally wrong to be racist or sexist, and no President should appoint people with such views to a public policy body - but it is contrary to the civil and Constitutional rights of Americans to advocate segregation or recision of voting rights, and I contend that no President can appoint advocates of such policies to an influential body, and still be in conformity with the President’s duty to the country. Simply put, it is not a question of holding immoral opinions that is the decisive matter; rather the President cannot, as a matter of the obligations of office, set him- or herself against the civil rights of the American people without justification, and cannot appoint to influential positions people who have done so. It is not a violation of any duty other than basic morality to be a racist or sexist, but it is a violation of one’s duty to advocate racist or sexist policies while in public service. And, to conclude the argument, there is no moral distinction between homophobia and anti-gay discrimination, and racially- or gender-based discrimination of similar kinds. Advocates of homophobic discrimination have no more place on the President’s Council on Bioethics than do advocates of racial segregation or non-suffrage for women. Robert George has chosen to ally himself with the former - and should now take his place on the dustheap of history with the latter.
2 Responses to “Another Disgrace from a President’s Council Member”
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April 24th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Hmm. To start with, I’d like to make clear that I am very much in favour of legal gay marriage, so any objection I have to your post is not based on opposing ideology. Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with the tone of your post.
“it is a reasonable expectation that that Council would recognize an obligation to speak for all the members of the American community.”
Surely there is only a problem where George’s views are impeding his ability to do his job? Since you accept that he “was acting outside the Council, in a private capacity” then I’m not sure that this is a problem. Even if he was a racist or mysogynist or a Communist or whatever, I’m not sure that this should be an issue as long as it is not impeding his ability to do his job.
“George has taken sides with an extremist and reactionary minority faction of religious Americans who have it as their explicit agenda to deny or restrict, to other groups of Americans, civil rights that are expressly protected for all other Americans, and on no grounds other than personal animus.”
Yes, yes he has. That is his right to do so. Even if their beliefs are loopy, this must not prevent him from being appointed to positions which will not be affected. This is different from judges, for example. There, a prejudice might well prevent one from administering fair and equal justice.
“I take it as obvious that no decent person can hold this position”
This worries me, because I *know* decent people who hold this position. I consider them misguided, but that is because I have a different opinion.
“The problem is that his position is legally discriminatory against a sub-population of American citizens and residents.”
True, but that could be said about pretty much any policy one has. An anti-illegal immigrant position is discriminatory, as is progressive taxation. It’s a not an easy question of identifying discrimination, but explaining when it is wrong. And decent people may have conflicting views on that.
“but it is a violation of one’s duty to advocate racist or sexist policies while in public service”
Really? If that is true then there really are bars on freedom of expression…
To summarise, I’m not arguing that he is right, or a nice guy or anything like that. Just that if you want to argue that he is breaching his duty, you need something more than just ‘he holds this view I disagree with.’ You need to show that he is the wrong man for the job.
April 24th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
you want to argue that he is breaching his duty, you need something more than just ‘he holds this view I disagree with.’ You need to show that he is the wrong man for the job.
I have attempted to do so. I may have slightly misstated my position above, where I attempted to establish that the President cannot appoint certain people to public posts, and then claimed that the person who is thus appointed is in breach of a duty. This, I think, is not quite right, and was sloppy of me.
My argument is essentially that there are some people who must not be appointed to public office: namely, those whose opinions on public policy embrace the withholding of civil rights from some part of the population on prejudicial grounds. And I further argue that George has revealed himself to be one such person, and therefore he has no business on the President’s Council on Bioethics. In other words, the President erred in appointing him - or Leon Kass erred in recommending him for appointment, whichever. This is not exactly the same as saying that he has breached a duty in accepting the appointment; instead, he has allowed himself to assume a position which he ought not to be in, which is not quite the same thing. The conclusion is that he should not be there, or at the least that his membership on the Council disgraces that body.
The reason he should not have been appointed, or that his appointment is disgraceful, is, again, that he holds policy views incompatible with liberal democracy. This I think is different from merely holding policy views that are “bad” or wrong. However, to state that some people are politically untouchable simply because of their private views is to flirt with a very dangerous kind of blacklisting, I admit. Your reference to Communists is telling, because it invokes the witch-hunts of America’s McCarthy years, in which law-abiding people were hounded out of government service, and in many cases blacklisted from any employment, over membership in a controversial but legal political organization. The argument used was similar to the one I have offered above: that it was not merely Communist Party membership that was the problem, but that CP membership implied devotion to the destruction of “the American way of life”, or devotion to a political system incompatible with American democracy, that was the problem - thus, while it was nominally legal to be a Communist, you could not reasonably be a Communist and a US government employee.
The blacklists were manifestly unfair, not only in their reach into private lives and non-governmental service (the movie industry was ransacked on the basis of an extremely strained version of the same argument: that Communists should not be allowed to “influence” American society), but because they punished people who had shown no disloyalty and had broken no law. Certainly any similar policy today would be equally unfair, and to the extent that the policy I have advocated smacks of McCarthyism, it should be distingquished from it.
And I think it can be. The reason is not the falsity of the basic logical implication of McCarthyism - that there are people who should not be entrusted with influence - but with the falsity of the particular cases to which it was applied. Virtually none of the people caught up in the dragnets were actually disloyal, and devotion to Communism as such is not necessarily equivalent to devotion to the destruction of the American government. The Communist witch-hunts were based on fear-mongering, laughably thin evidence, and in many cases simple innuendo or rumors - as well as a basic falsehood in their assumptions about what being a Communist meant.
I think I can make a distinction between being a run-of-the-mill Communist and being explicitly devoted to the withholding of basic civil rights from a class of Americans. It may be that a violent Communist revolution and one-party-state would have been the worst thing America has ever been threatened with, arguably worse than racial segregation, voting rights discrimination, or marriage-law discrimination - but hardly any CPUSA members actually wanted that, and there was never any real threat of it. Those other policies were things that actually did happen, and in regard to marriage laws for gays are still happening. They were a far greater actual threat to American democracy, then and now, than Communism was in the 50s. And the people who advocated them were a disgrace to America; to the extent they held and acted in official government positions, they were a blight on the government, again far more so than that of the many regular party-member Communists who never did anything wrong.
So, the difference between Communism and homophobic discrimination is this: the blacklisted Communists were in almost all cases not advocates of the destruction of American civil liberties or Constitutional prerogatives, and the ‘phobes explicitly are so, by their own description. To take another analogy: anti-gay marriage laws today differ in no morally significant way from racial anti-miscegenation laws of the recent past. I think it is obvious that no one who advocated a return of the latter could be allowed to hold a government policy-level position; it should be equally obvious that no one who advocates the former should either. (Another difference between these cases is that most of the blacklist victims were either civilians who held no governmental position, or low-level workers without policy jobs - who were hounded out of office without due process. But Robert George serves “at the pleasure of the President” in a direct Presidential policy advisory capacity. The President has already fired two members of the Council simply for disagreeing with the majority’s position; he not only can but should remove members who are actually explicitly politically committed to a campaign to prohibit ordinary civil liberties for a minority group of Americans. It is incumbent upon him as President not to allow himself to be “pleased” by the presence of someone like that in his advisory circle.) George’s position is unacceptable in a democracy; no advocate of such a position can hold a role such as his on the Council. The same claim cannot be made of the 50s-era Communists (and if it could, then the blacklist would be on firmer footing than it in historical fact actually is).
[Y]es he has [taken a position against civil rights for all]. That is his right to do so. Even if their beliefs are loopy, this must not prevent him from being appointed to positions which will not be affected. This is different from judges, for example.
I have several objections to all this. For one, I am not suggesting he does not have a right to hold the positions he does. After all, die Gedanken sind frei and all that. I am not even advocating that he should not be permitted to work in the movie industry if he chooses (I am not a McCarthyite, you see). I am only suggesting that no one who thinks as he does should be on a governmental policy body - and that for reasons not of the morality of his beliefs, but of their logical incompatibility with the liberal-democratic foundation of the country. (Perhaps he’d be qualified to sit on the South African bioethics council - and they’re welcome to him.) As for whether these views will affect his policy positions, how can they not? Gay marriage itself is unlikely to come before the President’s Council, but civil rights issues are an important component of bioethics policymaking (recall the early days of the AIDS epidemic), and to have a member of the Council who believes that part of the population simply doesn’t deserve the same civil liberties as everyone else, for reasons of religious bigotry alone, is unthinkable. Finally, it seems to me that your line about judges undermines your case. I thought you were taking a strong freedom-of-conscience position - that nobody can be penalized for holding private views of whatever kind, even in political-appointment positions - but you now say that there are some cases in which private opinions are germane to employment. I agree, but am merely suggesting that President’s Council on Bioethics membership is at least as important, in that respect, as a judgeship.
[P]retty much any policy one has [results in some form of discrimination].
Almost any policy results in “disparate impact”, but in the US we tend to reserve the term “discrimination” for unfair and unjustifiable discrimination such as racial segregation and so forth. (In fact, the sure sign that you’re talking to a self-important bigot in American is that they offer you the “sophisticated” defense of bigotry, by proving that there’s no such thing as “discrimination”: “The word ‘discriminate’ simply means ‘perceive a difference’ - and we perceive differences all the time, don’t we? School examinations discriminate, and so do sports leagues . . . .”) George and his ilk are not just advocating a policy that would affect different people in different ways, as the result of some higher-priority principle of good government. They’re advocating a change to the Constitutional basis of our entire system of government itself, specifically to prohibit recognition, for one stigmatized social group, of Constitutional liberties all other Americans have, and for reasons of religious prejudice. That’s despicable - and it’s my position, simply, that no government agent can take a position of prejudicial preference for or against any member(s) of society - that government officials, particularly at the policy level, must be as neutral as judges in a courtroom.
I recognize the difficulties and dangers in this position, and I know it is very hard to make distinctions between allowable and disallowable positions that does not amount to “viewpoint discrimination” (judgment on basis of personal opinions, as opposed to actual fitness for the task at hand). But I think it’s at least possible, and I know that a government of Robert Georges would be impossible.