Imagine for a moment that the President convenes an advisory committee to provide guidance on the future of the Hubble Space Telescope. The committee is created by executive order and a chair of the committee is selected based on her extensive experience with NASA. The charge to the committee is not to develop consensus recommendations but to fully and fairly explore a range of options and their consequences.

Consider further that the chair of the committee decided to get together with some of her close friends outside the committee in the aerospace industry to develop a white paper advocating a single approach to dealing with Hubble that would advance the interest of her friends, writing in the white paper “we now have an chance to advance our special interests over others and we should take advantage of this opportunity.”

From where I sit this would be completely inappropriate behavior by the committee chair. She would seeking to exploit her position as an honest broker providing guidance to policy makers by using her role as committee chair to gain advantage in political debate. Honest brokering in support of common interests is simply incompatible with political advocacy in support of special interests. The committee chair has to choose.

Back to the real world. Yesterday’s Washington Post reported a situation exactly parallel to the scenario described above. In the real world case, it is the President’s Council on Bioethics whose chair is Leon Kass. The Post reports,

“Frustrated by Congress’s failure to ban human cloning or place even modest limits on human embryo research, a group of influential conservatives have drafted a broad “bioethics agenda” for President Bush’s second term and have begun the delicate task of building a political coalition to support it. The loose-knit group of about a dozen people — largely spearheaded by Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and Eric Cohen, editor of the New Atlantis, a conservative journal of technology and society — have been meeting since December. Their goal, according to a document circulating among members and others, is to devise “a bold and plausible ‘offensive’ bioethics agenda” to replace a congressional strategy that has been “too narrowly focused and insufficiently ambitious. We have today an administration and a Congress as friendly to human life and human dignity as we are likely to have for many years to come,” reads the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “It would be tragic if we failed to take advantage of this rare opportunity to enact significant bans on some of the most egregious biotechnical practices.””

Irrespective of the pluses or minuses of Kass’ group’s proposal, this is simply unethical and a clear example of the politicization of the bioethics panel. Kaas is clearly trading on his position as chair of the President’s council to advance a narrow political agenda.

The Post reports that Kass tries to excuse this clear conflict of interest in narrow financial terms, “Kass emphasized yesterday that his effort to craft a new legislative agenda on cloning, stem cells and related issues was independent of his role as chairman of Bush’s bioethics council and that no federal resources have been used by the group, which he said has no name.”

For someone with expertise in ethics this is particularly ironic. (On the issue of independence, consider that if it were, say, a philosophy professor from a university in Texas developing a proposal on bioethics, it is unlikely that the proposal would be reported about in the Washington Post.) If Kass wants to be a political advocate, then he should resign his position of the Bioethics Council and join one of the many conservative advocacy groups that are truly independent of the Bioethics Council. If he wants to serve as an honest broker to the nation as chair of the Bioethics Council, then he should recognize that this means deferring his desire to serve as a political advocate advancing special interests. But he does have to choose, because he can’t do both.