Must we clone him?

"One longs for the political candidate who is willing to say, more than three decades after John Kennedy's assassination: 'Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.' "

—Stephen L. Carter, Integrity

Stephen L. Carter is a whirlwind. William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale; author of seven books for the general reader on race, religion, the judiciary, and civil society; member of the President's Council on Bioethics; public intellectual (Richard Posner counted 254 media mentions between 1995 and 2000); and now the author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling novel. How does he get it all done? Apparently, by blowing off the bioethics panel. When the council released its report last week (click here to read it, and here to read Slate's William Saletan on the politics behind its proposed moratorium on cloning), the chairman, Leon Kass, was asked why Carter had abstained from voting on the panel's recommendations. Here is how Kass answered:

Professor Carter has not been able to make any meetings since, I believe—I think he was there part of the February meeting. He was not present with us in April. He was not present with us in June, and he has been unable to comment and, therefore, has chosen not to participate in this report. It's not correct to say that he's abstained. It is, I think, more correct to say that he has just not participated in this report. We regret that very much.

Chatterbox detects in Kass' words some genuine and justifiable pique. Reviewing transcripts of the four meetings prior to the report's release, Chatterbox observes that Carter attended the first two-day meeting in January and half of the second two-day meeting in February, then skipped the two subsequent two-day meetings in April and June. Kass is correct in remembering that Carter left the Feb. 13 meeting early. (About three-quarters of the way through the transcript, Carter says, "I have to leave and I want to apologize to the fellow counselors for that.") Carter was also AWOL at last week's two-day meeting, which followed the report's release.

Ordinarily, it is not Chatterbox's habit to take attendance at meetings of government-appointed blue-ribbon commissions. He does so in this instance for two reasons:

1) This is no ordinary blue-ribbon commission. The President's Council on Bioethics was created to guide policymaking on important but difficult ethical questions about which there is simultaneously great uncertainty and an urgent need for resolution. The physical health of people in need of certain experimental therapies hangs in the balance, and it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that some of them will live or die based on what this panel has decided and will decide in the future. Consequently, skipping a few meetings of the President's Council on Bioethics is a much more serious offense than, say, skipping a few meetings of the Amtrak Reform Council.

2) Stephen Carter is no ordinary panel-sitter. He is a tireless social critic who writes and speaks ad nauseam about the need to bring more civic virtue into American life. ("He has no discernible vices," David Owen marveled in the June 3 New Yorker.) Chatterbox is not aware that Carter has ever addressed explicitly the morality of playing hooky from prestigious government panels. But in his 1996 book Integrity, Carter has this to say about responsibility:

When we make commitments, the world assumes that we have thought them through, that we are not just running our mouths. For a commitment is not merely a statement, an exercise of the faculty of speech; it is quintessentially an act, and one on which others rely. If we did not believe that words that form a commitment are as much an act as they are speech, the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech would make it impossible to enforce, for example, the law of contracts. … Our respect for contracts, as for other forms of commitment, surely rests on the belief that a person of integrity will do what she has promised, because it is her responsibility to weigh the risks before making the promise.

It's possible, of course, that Carter warned Kass up front that he might have to miss a few meetings. But if Chatterbox reads Integrity right, Carter believes that honesty about one's intention not to fulfill a particular duty is basically worthless: