The earlier post Bio-Squick, which linked Pinker's critique of using dignity, whatever that means, as an argument for some set of values that advocates wish to make the law of the land, blithely skipped past the main discussion of Leon Kass and a report from the President's Council on Bioethics: Human Dignity and Bioethics. Regime change is near, this stuff is history.

But conservatives are outraged.

• Steven Pinker's assault on the President's Council on Bioethics and its recently-released of batch of essays is just as shoddy and bizarre as Yuval Levin says it is.

• Pinker wants scientists, like himself, to be the social arbiters of morals. How’s he doing so far?

• Pinker’s essay is a striking exhibit of a set of attitudes toward religion and the West’s moral tradition that has become surprisingly common among America’s intellectual elite. It is a mix of fear, suspicion, and disgust that has a lot to do, for instance, with the Left’s intense paranoia about the Bush administration, and with the peculiar notion that American conservatives have declared a “war on science”; and it involves more generally an inclination to reject any idea drawn in any way from a religiously inspired tradition — which unfortunately includes just about everything in the humanities.

• consider this a “one cheer for Pinker even if he is being a jerk” post.

The last one is worth further comment.

if the question being asked is: what should we consider an affront to dignity, as opposed to what do we consider an affront to dignity, there’s no obvious grounds for an argument. . .

Pinker does nothing to ground his own appeal to autonomy in anything. But he’s still on reasonably strong ground. Whether or not we know why we believe in individual autonomy, we manifestly do believe it (as a society, I mean). . .

So Pinker doesn’t need to ground a belief in autonomy, because he’s not trying to create a consensus around a new belief; he’s just reflecting his society’s beliefs. More specifically, autonomy is the ground on which contemporary mainstream bioethics stands, so Pinker can very legitimately say, simply, I’m standing on the shoulders of those who do this for a living, and leave it at that. . .

I’m not really disagreeing with the critics on Pinker’s tone, but I really think a focus on tone is a dodge. There is a real substantive argument in his piece, and it’s not a specious one. Why not engage it?

I can agree with much of this. Pinker is a jerk, but this is true of all most all academics I've encountered. Academics are jerks, so what, that's not what we value them for. That's like saying that techies are geeks or nerds or something. So what. They come from different cultures, behave oddly, and have some disgusting customs. But what about their arguments?

Conservative critics of the reigning bioethics paradigm should be making the same kind of argument as “deep” environmentalist critics of things like genetically-modified food: three parts precautionary principle to one part stubborn affection for the way things are. Indeed, I think that’s the argument they are making: that we should fear the consequences of too radical change simply because fearing the consequences of too radical change is the right way to approach potentially radical change. But I think they (rightly) worry that such arguments are not going to be terribly persuasive to Americans, hence the (to my mind unpersuasive) attempt to ground these arguments in some kind of natural rights/natural law theory.

Indeed, indeed. And Pinker did address this very issue: "Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change". The attempt to turn bio-squick into a reasoned argument fails on all sides. They are welcome to their customs and taboos, but I suggest that society ought not let them determine policy and so impose their hang-ups on all of us.