Bush, the ethicist-in-chief

By Daniel Klein & Thomas Cathcart

IN A BRIEF ceremony in the East Room of the White House on June 2, President Bush vetoed legislation permitting federally funded embryonic stem cell research, declaring, "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical."
The Ethicist-In-Chief's final word on the subject caught our eye right off the bat because we've always had a soft spot in our hearts for The Ethical. In fact, it's right up there with the Red Sox and The Folies Bergere as one of our favorite things.

But unfortunately we went to school way before children were left behind, and that takes all the fun out of the pronouncement made by The Ethicker (as he calls himself). We're thinking particularly of our reading of that 18th-century, German, pronouncement-pooper, Immanuel Kant.

Manny maintained that rational ethical actions must stem from principles or maxims "whose universality as a law you can at the same time will," and further, that this is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself." Now we admit that our German is severely limited ("Salzkartoffel" and "Gerstensaft" pretty much exhaust our vocabulary), and that even in translation Kant is one abstruse kartoffel. But at least one thing he is saying is that if you're going to justify one action by an absolute principle, your other actions need to be consistent with that same principle. Come to think of it, our Cub Scout leader taught us more or less the same thing.

So what are we to make of Principled George's penchant for executing human beings in unparalleled numbers during his term as governor of Texas? He's on record as saying capital punishment serves as a deterrent of possible future murders and rapes, which sounds an awful lot like he's following a principle that says, "It's OK to take a human life in the hope of saving another human life." And that just doesn't seem to gel with his lofty pronouncement that, "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical." Actually, it sounds more like its opposite.

But, hey, maybe we're just quibbling. Going from an abstract principle to a particular action is always a dicey business, as any bioethicist will tell you. Take the doctor in the following story:

A woman is in her doctor's office, and suddenly shouts out, "Doctor, kiss me." The doctor looks at her and says that it would be against his code of ethics to kiss her. About 20 minutes later the woman again shouts out, "Doctor, please, kiss me just once." Again he refuses, apologetically, but says that as a doctor he simply cannot kiss her. Finally another 15 minutes pass, and the woman pleads with the doctor, "Doctor, Doctor, please kiss me just once!!" "Look" he says, "I am sorry. I just cannot kiss you. In fact, I probably shouldn't even be sleeping with you." So maybe we've totally misjudged Mr. Bush. Perhaps he isn't a Kantian after all, but a Marxist, as in Groucho, who famously said, "These are my principles; if you don't like them, I have others."

Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart are authors of "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar -- Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes."

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