We can have that philosophical discussion of ethics and who we are if we keep in mind that survival comes first. On the very day that the president and the ex-veep dueled, Leon Kass, a professor of the humanities and the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, cut to the ethical core in the 38th annual Thomas Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, at a former movie theater within sight of the White House.
Kass spoke to the issues of human distinctiveness and dignity that underlie those identifying values, offering arguments that the Founding Fathers would certainly have recognized as seminal to the complexity of the American experiment. He speaks to the political process that is the be all and end all in Washington, but accompanied by the philosophical reflections crucial to engaging the Washington wonkery that often passes for considered judgment.
"For most Americans, ethical matters are usually discussed either in utilitarian terms of weighing competing goods or balancing benefits and harms," he said, "looking to the greatest good for the greatest number, or in the moralist terms of rules, rights and duties, 'thou shalts' and 'thou shalt nots.'" The focus must be on the larger picture before anyone can condemn or correct policy.
The language is lofty and above the fray in the war against the terrorists who would kill us, but the words appeal to that ethical core derived from knowledge of the best that has been said and thought by those who have gone before, "not because they are old and not because they are ours, but because they might help us discover vital truths that we would otherwise not see on our own."
He offers no judgments on the competing moral claims of either Obama or Cheney, but identifies the human dilemmas he first examined as a bioethicist. The good citizen, being human, must reflect deeply on how to find cures for disease, at the same time paying homage and respect to life itself, where the evils to avoid are thoroughly intertwined with the good the prudent citizen ardently pursues. Nothing glib about that.