This leaves Pinker in the peculiar position of denying the grounds for even his own standards of ethics, though he is blissfully blind to the difficulty. Rather than human dignity, he wants to lean for support upon “personal autonomy — the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another.” But why not? Why should minimum capacities demand maximal protections if not for reasons rooted in the very traditions and sources he declares out of bounds, or a Popish cabal?

But Pinker will not wait to hear the answer. He rushes on to paint the bioethics council as a committee of pious executioners, arguing that “this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing,” and asserting without basis that the council (which, more than all of its predecessors in previous administrations, was designed to provide a diversity of opinion and not merely support for the positions of the president who appointed it) was “packed” with “conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative).” Pinker might have examined the record of the council’s discussions (including its devastating grilling of him in 2003, which may help explain some of his vehemence), its reports, and the backgrounds of its members, especially the scientist members, for a sense of how absurdly misinformed is this diatribe.

He is not much better informed about the book he claims to have read, asserting, for instance, that no one was given an opportunity to defend the view that dignity means essentially nothing more than autonomy or is a useless or pernicious concept, though several of the essays in the volume (most notably Patricia Churchland’s contribution, and elements of Daniel Dennett’s, among others) do just that.

But Pinker saves his most brazenly venomous and disingenuous assault for one of the volume’s contributors in particular: Leon Kass, the council’s former chairman. He begins with a sweepingly inaccurate survey of Kass’s views and works, and misleadingly implies that a passage he quotes from Kass’s 1994 book about eating is from Kass’s essay on dignity in the volume being reviewed, later referring again to the passage while never offering any context. He says Kass has “pro-death anti-freedom views,” and asserts that Kass is a “vociferous advocate of a central role for religion in morality and public life.” A vociferous person is publicly insistent — can Pinker point to a single instance of Kass calling for a central role for religion in public life? Pinker concludes by repeating the scurrilous lie that Kass “fired” two members of the bioethics council who disagreed with him “on embryonic stem-cell research, on therapeutic cloning (which Kass was in favor of criminalizing), and on the distortions of science that kept finding their way into Council reports.” Disagreement on stem cell research and therapeutic cloning were an intentional function of the original design of the council’s membership, as about half its members disagreed with President Bush’s views on one or another of those issues, and were chosen with that disagreement in mind. Neither of the two members Pinker has in mind was by any means the most vocal or active of these opponents, their departures had nothing to do with their substantive views, and several of the members named to the council since their departure have also opposed the President’s views on these issues. Scientific content in all of the council’s reports, meanwhile, was carefully vetted with outside experts before publication, and it is no surprise that Pinker offers no specific instances of “distortions of science” — there are none he could offer.

Loath to rest easy with religious bigotry and slander, however, Pinker concludes with a stunning display of confusion, managing to mystify himself with simple questions and to dismiss centuries of debate with a shrug. He then informs us that dignity is relative and fungible, and — at last, the punch line — that it is in any case just a phenomenon of human perception. He says those who disagree with him have blood on their hands (“even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die”) and so, by implication, that no limit on scientific research could be justified on any grounds other than safety.

It would be hard to answer the bioethics council’s thoughtful and varied collection with a less appropriate rejoinder than Pinker’s insulting, ill-informed, and anti-intellectual tirade. He misrepresents the most elementary facts about the council’s work and intentions, repeating baseless charges and engaging in crude character assassination; and his assertion that the council is intolerant of dissenting opinion is belied by the fact that his rant is based on remarks he actually delivered at a council meeting, by invitation. His fears of a religious, and especially a Catholic, plot to overthrow democracy are absurd. And his insistence on filtering out of American life any hint of religious influence is badly misguided.

Even if dignity remains difficult to define, undignified public discourse is easy to discern, and Pinker has offered an obvious example.

— Yuval Levin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and senior editor of The New Atlantis magazine. He is a former executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

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