Saletan Likes Questions Better Than Answers

I really like Will Saletan’s writing on biotechnology in Slate. I don’t always agree with him. Heck, I often don’t agree with him. But he has a healthy skepticism about the political debate we are having on cloning/stem cells, and he unleashes it without fear or favor, including against those with whom he agrees.

This is a good example of Saletan’s approach: He rakes my very good friend William Hurlbut over the coals, but is no less testy about Hurlbut’s debating opponent, Laurie Zoloth.

One of the points Saletan makes in the article that I find troublesome is that he likes questions better than answers. Questions can certainly be interesting. And answers are not always readily attainable. It takes work and often, quite a bit of soul searching. But at some point, we have to come up with answers if we are to have a stable and orderly society based on the rule of law. This is not to say, of course, that once an answer is obtained, the question can never again be asked. I believe very deeply in the value of challenging orthodoxies. But my experience in the biotech debates is that the scientist/bioethicists are the ones who have become the most dogmatic, and Saletan’s reporting on the Hurlbut/Zoloth debate demonstrates this point quite vividly.

(Example, Saletan reports Zoloth dismissing the moral value of the embryo as an uninteresting question. Perhaps to her. But the success of Hurlbut’s ANT advocacy internationally demonstrates that Zoloth doesn’t speak for the millions of people who do find it interesting. This means that the issue should still be debated and pondered, not shrugged off because you think you have a winning political hand.)