The Speculist

Leon Kass has an obvious bias against life extension. This is no state secret. So when Kass announced last week that he is abandoning the "tiresome question" (whether a cloned blastocyst is a person) in favor of an offensive strategy, Phil and I jumped on the logical inconsistency:

If the ethical question of "is it a baby or isn't it" is discarded by Kass and company, all the anti-life extension guys have left is an old geezer mumbling, "why in my day we dropped dead at 45 and we were dang proud to do it!"

But we missed (at least I missed) a big political problem that Kass' "coming out" may cause him. He is exceeding his mandate as Chairman of The President's Council on Bioethics.

According to The Washington Post, Dr. Kass has teamed up with Eric Cohen, editor of the excellent journal of science, politics and philosophy The New Atlantis, to devise "a bold and plausible 'offensive' bioethics agenda…[aimed at] tak[ing] advantage of this rare opportunity to enact significant bans on some of the most egregious biotechnological practices."

The merits of Dr. Kass's preferred policies are irrelevant here. The problem is that by hitching his star to a particular set of policies he has breached the trust set in him by the President, whose executive order creating the council asked it to "explore specific ethical and policy questions related to these developments; [and] to provide a forum for a national discussion of bioethical issues."

Tech Central Station via Instapundit

You'll want to read the whole thing.

I'm sure that Kass knows that this policy is exactly what the President wants. But we are a nation of laws, not men. Let's see if we will live up to that ideal in this case. Today is DAY 1 of the Kass Employment Watch.