Moral order dictates right and wrong and proceeds from an unimpeachable authority. Man, of course, is no such authority, which is apparent to anyone who has spent five minutes in society. God, real or no, is the only conceptually unimpeachable authority available to man.

But secular relativism can't stand the idea of good and bad -- or God for that matter. For the secularist there are no enduring goods and irremissible evils, the world is a sprawling greyness grading between "all right" and "please do better". Whatever enough people can be brought around to support -- or enough people do not object to -- is permissible. Relativism has no internal order, no internal consistency. It progresses case-by-case-by-case-by-contradictory case with self-serving pronouncements that it may or may not abide by tomorrow. There are no goods, no bads. There are only circumstances and endless discussions.

Which brings us to France:

FRANCE ESTABLISHES MEDICAL BIOETHICS AGENCY

France on Tuesday inaugurated a specialised agency [scil., L'Agence de la biomédecine, displacing the Etablissement français des Greffes] for approving research on embryonic stem cells and vetting organ donations and other bioethics issues.

The new law will enable French researchers to grow lines of stem cells provided tightly-controlled therapeutic and ethical criteria are met and the couple who created the embryo give their consent.

Nothing like a little supplemental income making stem cells.

For the past few months, researchers have been allowed for the first time to import stem cell lines as a stopgap.

Let's see, France passes a law that tarts up an a priori government decree without benefit of the bioethical vetting that necessitated the law. Well, Philippe Douste-Blazy, ministre des Solidarités, de la Santé et de la Famille [scil., Minister for Health ], probably gave the bioethical issues a once-over.

The Agency for Biomedicine will also be in charge of authorising screening of IVF embryos that are selected to be free of inherited disease and which are destined, after birth, for providing bone marrow or other replaceable tissue for sick siblings.

Perhaps you've read this all before. Bioethics, always a good deal for the bioethically privileged.

Let us spell it out: Bioethics is no surety of moral judgement. It offers no moral protections. Modern ethics, gutted of pesky delimiting morals, does not extend beyond the observance of sanctioned acts. Mao Zedong had ethics. Stalin had ethics. The Nazis had ethics. (Here, for example, is Herr Otto Ohlendorf's exposition of Schutzstaffeln and Einsatzgruppe ethics that obligated Herr Otto to murder 90,000 lesser folk.) Bioethics also: Lebensunwertes Lebens, life unworthy of life.

France of course is not alone in supplanting the plain tenets of the Hippocratic Oath with a ginned-up national bureaucracy of bioethicists and clerks. But what oversight can the L'Agence de la biomédecine manage over human inviolability when EU courts render this meaningless?

"The court is convinced that it is neither desirable, nor even possible as matters stand, to answer in the abstract the question whether the unborn child is a person for the purposes of Article 2" of the European convention on human rights, it said.

Hhmmm, so the court recognizes that the fetus is a child, but not that the child is a person.

Don't expect L'Agence de la biomédecine to show too much bioethical angst over the human inviolability of mere stem cells when Europe aborts without the bother of determining whether a who or a what is involved.