Former provost Gutmann to chair bioethics commission

The commission has been charged with advising the president on the bioethical issues that emerge with the continuing developments in biomedicine. According to a White House press release, the commission’s assignment is to “ensure [that] scientific research, health care delivery and technological innovation are conducted in an ethically responsible manner.”

Obama’s advisory panel will replace George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, which some scientists said was politically biased. Bush’s council, in turn, replaced Bill Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

Emory University president James Wagner was named the commission’s vice chair. The other members of the commission have not yet been announced.

“I am confident that Amy and Jim will use their decades of experience in both ethics and science to guide the new Commission in this work,” Obama said in the release.

She taught political philosophy at Princeton from 1976 to 2004, serving as the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She was dean of the faculty from 1995 to 1997, and in her final three years at Princeton, she was the provost. She also founded Princeton’s Center for Human Values, which promotes the interdisciplinary instruction and discussion of ethics. In 2000, she won the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Gutmann has dealt with ethical issues in her academic work, dating back to her 1990 founding of the Center for Human Values.

“What gives value to our life? What makes life meaningful?” she said in a 2000 interview with The Daily Princetonian about her interest in ethics. “Are there any good answers to these questions? That’s always fascinated me — for as long as I have memories that have to do with issues of good and evil.”

In her research, Gutmann has focused largely on democratic philosophy, and in particular on the relationship between theory and policy, which may intersect with her role on Obama’s commission. She has written on issues of education, deliberative democracy and cultural identity.

The appointment is not the first of its kind for Gutmann. She belongs to a small group of university presidents across the globe that advises the U.N. Secretary-General on a variety of world issues. In 1991, she helped found the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics, which aims to foster the teaching of ethics in the academic and business spheres.

Gutmann is not the first person to examine bioethics in both a Princeton classroom and in the White House. Politics professor Robert George served on President Bush’s Commission on Bioethics from 2002 to 2009.