Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s recent takedown of the President’s Council on Bioethics has earned a response from the Vatican.
Pinker derides the White House panel’s latest report, Human Dignity and Bioethics, for its reliance on the concept of dignity, which he calls a “squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.” The report, he writes, “springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.”
But the top story in tomorrow’s edition of the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano defends the report, citing the distinguished philosophical (and non-religious) tradition associated with the idea of dignity, and crediting the Council with an “important contribution” to that tradition.
(Incidentally, the author of the L’Osservatore article is Laura Palazzani, a law professor at a university in Rome. Women’s bylines have become increasingly common in the paper since editor Giovanni Maria Vian took over last fall-just one of the ways in which he has made the once-stodgy Vatican rag a livelier and increasingly provocative read.)