I’ve been sitting on a kerfluffle that I found out a couple of months ago via Ross Douthat, involving an attack by Steven Pinker on the work of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Pinker makes some good points, though after reading the contribution of his main target, former council chair Leon Kass, I get the feeling Pinker missed what was really wrong with the project.

Kass’ essay promises “a contribution toward the development of” a “full theoretical account of human dignity,” which will “make clearer what human dignity is and what it rests on.” The trouble is it doesn’t do this. There’s little beyond a laundry list of things Kass thinks are bad: incest, bestiality, cannibalism, prostitution, drug addiction, self-mutilation, slavery, performance enhancement, longevity, anti-depressants. We don’t get a theory of why these judgments are correct, obvious questions like “why have an incest taboo rather than an exogamy taboo” go unanswered. That doesn’t mean Kass is wrong about that particular point, just that he doesn’t have a theory to explain it. And without such a theory, the link between incest and performance enhancement remains specious. The case becomes even more bizarre when you read Pinker’s essay and realize the range of other things Kass considered undignified, such as licking ice cream.

Where Pinker lets himself get tripped up, though, is on the word “dignity.” Reading Kass’ essay reaffirmed my great respect for Georg Orwell, particularly his “Politics and the English Language.” There, Orwell says that one of the great problems in political writing is the use of meaningless words, among which Orwell lists “democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice.” Orwell did call these words meaningless because he was opposed to them in every sense, but because political writers had a habit of giving them whatever meaning was convenient at the moment, robbing them of any real meaning. That’s what happens with “dignity” is Kass’ essay, and Pinker’s failure to recognize it creates a confused situation where Pinker feels he must be simultaneously for and against “dignity.”

As an aside, Pinker’s essay also got him accused of opposing literature. This is a rather dumb comment. From reading Pinker’s books, its obvious he thinks literature is valuable for understanding human nature. What he’s opposing is arguments that take science-fiction portrayals of the future and use them as the taken-for-granted picture of what a technology will result in. This is something I’ve seen outside of science-fiction–the most general form of the argument is “famous novelist X portrayed Y as being like Z, so Y will likely be like Z.” Or maybe even that’s too sophisticated, and what we really get is “famous novelist X /showed/ Y will be like Z.” I see religious apologists do this with Dostoevsky a fair bit. I’m all for using literature to understand the world, but it has to be used judiciously rather than as if a famous novel counts as an authoritative review of the scientific literature on some subject.