May 27, 2004, 8:47 a.m.
Bioethics Bestseller
A government council revives the humanities.

By Claire Burgess

Recently, controversy over the President's Council on Bioethics has focused on its composition and the presumed ideologies of its members — on whether politics is subverting what should be a rigorous assessment of new scientific technologies. From the council transcripts and publications, there's little evidence for that view, though the charge of politicization has obscured the truly revolutionary aspect of the council's work: its use of the humanities alongside science and philosophy in tackling questions of human dignity.

Why the humanities? According to Council Chairman Leon Kass, bioethics must address more than patient harm, consent, and equal access to new procedures. It should consider what qualities of human life these biotechnologies advance — and threaten. And, he argues, there is no better guide to fundamental questions about human nature than the writers and thinkers who've been contemplating it since the dawn of language.

Hence the release last January of Being Human, a 600-page anthology of essays, short stories, and poems spanning the last few millennia of human existence. Taking a cue from Aristotle, its selections and accompanying questions assume a profound relationship between literature and ethics. In a few short months, the volume has emerged as a wildly popular government publication, as well as a radical project for a bioethics council. Though hundreds of hospital and university ethics committees now address everything from the fate of frozen embryos to the debate over assisted suicide, they typically don't consult the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh or Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for guidance.

Most council members say these stories put flesh on their theoretical concepts of human personality and ethical obligations — they "embody" their ideas. Kass, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, says literature can "capture real life, and it is real life after all that we are trying to defend." Washington University law professor Rebecca Dresser finds "the greatest value in literature's ability to trigger empathy...to give the best sense of what it is like to be in a particular position." In Being Human's chapter on "Vulnerability and Suffering," for instance, Flannery O'Connor compellingly writes of a disfigured little girl whose grotesqueness became the opportunity for her goodness. The essay's introduction prompts the reader, "Would the world be a better place if there were no deformed children? If we could prevent their being born?"

Debate has followed this effort toward a "richer bioethics" from the beginning; it swims against powerful currents not only in scientific circles, but — oddly — in the literary world. In the council's first meeting, members discussed Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Birth-Mark," a tale about a scientist who kills his beautiful wife while removing the birthmark marring her face. The New Yorker soon ran a piece mocking the council for analyzing fiction in a government meeting, caustically presuming literature had nothing to say to the subject of science. One might expect the editors of Nature to grouse about injecting the humanities into a science-policy debate. But "what was so fascinating," says council member and Valparaiso ethicist Gilbert Meilaender, "was that this happened in The New Yorker — a literary magazine."

Other critics, including The American Prospect's Chris Mooney, confuse reading for insights about human nature with reading for policy recommendations. He excoriates Kass for assuming that 19th-century stories would offer "the be-all and end-all of wisdom about 21th [sic] century conundrums" when they "simply aren't parallel to current cloning or stem cell research debates." Council member Janet Rowley, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, dismisses readings like the Hawthorne story "because no modern scientist would do such an experiment" without adequate safety precautions.

From the transcripts, though, it's clear that mad scientists weren't the aim of the "Birth-Mark" discussion. Instead, there was a lively debate about the limits of the struggle for perfection in imperfect bodies, whether the way we are marked at birth is important to our identity, and why one recoils when reading the tale. The essay spawned no policy directives. As William May, Southern Methodist University's emeritus medical ethicist, explained: "Novelists do not bake bread or write legislation."

Neither is there any sign yet that the council intends to supplant scientific knowledge with literature. Paul McHugh, Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins, says the council "wouldn't want to run on the story method alone," and Kass cautions that one "must check up on literature through argument and self-scrutiny." As Princeton politics professor Robert George describes the balance, "We've been strict about the science, vigorous about the philosophy, but at the same time open to learning from the humanities."

The public response to Being Human has taken the council completely by surprise. The volume first became available in January, announced only by a tiny notice in the Washington Post. When staff arrived at work the next morning, they found hundreds of e-mails requesting the book. Most were from ordinary citizens — critical care nurses and grief counselors, clergymen and teachers of every kind. One university sought 800 copies for their incoming freshmen. The council then required that requests be sent by regular mail, only to be deluged with letters. They quickly ran out of all 5,000 copies. Though copyright restrictions prevent the council from reprinting the book, commercial publishers are now showing interest.

So, what to make of all this? As Paul Cantor, an English professor at the University of Virginia, recently told the council, "I think the last time a government body produced an anthology of literature, it was under the orders of the Emperor Augustus." It certainly seems that the council's project has struck a nerve with the American public — not many government reports fly off the shelves. Something rings true in Kass's underlying theory: To adequately debate particular methods of cloning, we must understand why it matters if babies are manufactured rather than created, and scientific treatises can't touch that. So from Rousseau to the Bible, from Plutarch to E. O. Wilson, Kass says the council is "willing to get help from wherever we find it." In the process, he's insisting that literature play a role not only on the periphery of our most important public debates, but right at the center. Perhaps Aristotle was on to something after all.

— Claire Burgess is a research assistant at the Heritage Foundation.

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!