Kass Leon R
University of Chicago, IL, USA.
Kennedy Inst Ethics J. 2005 Sep;15(3):221-50. doi: 10.1353/ken.2005.0018.
For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President's Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of that attention and controversy has been informed by knowledge of the Council's mission, its ways of working, and, most importantly, its actual work. This essay describes the Council's mission, discusses its public ways of working, and reviews the five major works produced during the Council's first term. In all its activities, the Council has sought to develop a richer bioethics, one that recognizes and tries to do justice to the deep issues of our humanity raised by the age of biotechnology. Believing that these issues are properly matters to be discussed and governed by the polity as a whole, the Council also has sought to contribute to a genuinely public or political bioethics, beyond the rule of "experts," scientific and bioethical.
出于诸多原因，而且比其前任更甚，总统生物伦理委员会一直备受公众关注并引发激烈争议。但这些关注和争议很少基于对该委员会使命、工作方式以及最重要的实际工作的了解。本文描述了该委员会的使命，讨论了其公开的工作方式，并回顾了委员会第一任期内完成的五项主要工作。在其所有活动中，该委员会一直致力于发展更丰富的生物伦理学，即一种承认并努力公正对待生物技术时代引发的有关我们人性的深层次问题的生物伦理学。由于相信这些问题应由整个政体进行讨论和管理才是恰当的，该委员会还一直致力于推动超越“专家”（科学和生物伦理方面的专家）规则的真正的公共或政治生物伦理学。
