Ironic, but not surprising -- that's how I'd sum up recent events relating to the the President's Council on Bioethics. The rate of religious doctrine's intrusion into the realm of scientific truths has steadily worsened since Bush's questionable election in 2000, and doesn't appear likely to improve during the remainder of his term.
I generally spend my lunchhour perusing my favorite news sites, foreign and domestic; straight news, quirky news, science and technology news, they're all fascinating. It's not unusual for one news story to lead me through a dozen different sites as my curiosity is kicked into gear. Foraging off the beaten trail is a lot more interesting than eating pablum. So, when I start from different sites, on different continents, and via completely different stories and routes, wind up at sources with a common theme, I generally figure that the Universe is trying to make a point.
The two sources I came across today are titled:
They're not redundant, but complementary, touching on some core themes from different angles.
The first article describes a concept called 'the wisdom of repugnance':
"In other words, the feeling you get in your bones that something is wrong is a reliable guide to what really is wrong. The Council on Bioethics [has] declared that happiness exists to let us recognize what is good in life, while real anger and sadness reveal to us what is evil and unjust. "Emotional flourishing of human beings in this world requires that feelings jibe with the truth of things, both as effect and as cause," they write. By extension, repugnance is a good guide for making decisions about bioethics. If cloning gives you the creeps, it?s wrong.But what exactly produces those creeps? In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have made huge strides in understanding both emotions and moral judgments. They've scanned people's brains as they decide whether things are right or wrong; they've looked at the brain's neurochemistry, and they've gotten insights from the brains of animals and the fossils of ancient hominids as well. And their conclusions seriously undermine the philosophy of the council.
[...] one of the leaders in this new field of "neuro-morality," [is] a philospher-neuroscientist named Joshua Greene at Princeton University. Greene argues that feeling that something is right or wrong isn't the same as recognizing that two and two make four, or that the sky is blue. It feels the same only because our brains respond to certain situations with emotional reactions that happen so fast we aren't aware of them. We are wired to get angry at deception and cruelty; even the thought of harming another person can trigger intense emotional reactions. These "moral intuitions" are ancient evolutionary adaptations, which exist in simpler versions in our primate relatives.
When our ancestors stood upright and got big brains, Greene argues, these moral intuitions became more elaborate. They probably helped hominids survive, by preventing violence and deception from destroying small bands of hunter-gatherers who depended on each other to find food and raise children. But evolution is not a reliable guide for figuring out how to lead our lives today. Just because moral intuitions may be the product of natural selection doesn't mean they are right or wrong, any more than feathers or tails are right or wrong."
The latter article has a broader scope, but is nonetheless a biting indictment of the current administration's pathetic performance in the science and bioethics arenas. In particular, it contains a pointed quote from John Kerry, who in addition to being the opposing candidate in the current presidential race, is a member of the US Senate's Science Policy Committe:
"there have always been the few with a distaste for progress and a fundamental distrust of the American people to have the morality and strength to handle the consequences. Unfortunately, today some of that deep distrust of new discoveries and of the American people has found a home in George Bush's White House. George Bush has proved a ready ally for those who seek to impose their private moral vision on the American people. Over and over again, this President has put partisan politics above scientific and medical advancement. Whether it is global warming or stem cell research, President Bush has appeased his party's right wing by ignoring scientific fact and slowing medical progress..."
I'm sure the President is a legitimate man of faith. I only wish he were also someone who valued truth above doctrine. We need, and require, a moral compass for the country, a leadership that governs by ethics rather than politics. What we're getting instead is an executive who thinks that ethics and religion are the same thing. And there is no surer path to Hell than that fallacy.