[tt] Boston Globe: Michael J. Sandel: Embryo ethics

[Premise Checker]

Michael J. Sandel: Embryo ethics
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/04/08/embryo_ethics?mode=PF
[Linked by Arts & Letters Daily.]
7.4.8

Michael J. Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard. This
article is adapted from his forthcoming book, "The Case Against
Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering," to be
published next month by the Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.

As the debate over stem cell research resumes in Washington this week, the
moral principle on which the White House bases its position remains
largely unexamined


As the Senate prepares to take up stem cell legislation this week,
Congress and the president are at odds over a tangled question at
the boundary of science, ethics, and religion. President Bush has
restricted federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and last
year cast the first veto of his presidency when Congress tried to
ease the restriction. With majorities in both houses of Congress
ready to try again, the president has threatened another veto.

The main arguments are by now familiar. Proponents argue that
embryonic stem cell research holds great promise for understanding
and curing diabetes, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, and
other debilitating conditions. Opponents argue that the research is
unethical, because deriving the stem cells destroys the blastocyst,
an unimplanted human embryo at the sixth to eighth day of
development. As Bush declared when he vetoed last year's stem cell
bill, the federal government should not support "the taking of
innocent human life."

It is surprising that, despite the extensive public debate -- in
Congress, during the 2004 and 2006 election campaigns, and on the
Sunday morning talk shows -- relatively little attention has been
paid to the moral issue at the heart of the controversy: Are the
opponents of stem cell research correct in their claim that the
unimplanted human embryo is already a human being, morally
equivalent to a person?

Perhaps this claim has gone unaddressed because stem cell proponents
and many in the media consider it obviously false, a faith-based
belief that no rational argument could possibly dislodge. If so,
they are making a mistake.

The fact that a moral belief may be rooted in religious conviction
neither exempts it from challenge nor puts it beyond the realm of
public debate. Ignoring the claim that the blastocyst is a person
fails to respect those who oppose embryonic stem cell research on
principled moral grounds. It has also led the media to miss glaring
contradictions in Bush's stem cell policy, which does not actually
live up to the principle it invokes -- that destroying an embryo is
like killing a child.

It is important to be clear, first of all, about the embryo from
which stem cells are extracted. It is not implanted and growing in a
woman's uterus. It is not a fetus. It has no recognizable human
features or form. It is, rather, a blastocyst, a cluster of 180 to
200 cells, growing in a petri dish, barely visible to the naked eye.
Such blastocysts are either cloned in the lab or created in
fertility clinics. The bill pending in Congress would fund stem cell
research only on excess blastocysts left over from infertility
treatments.

The blastocyst represents such an early stage of embryonic
development that the cells it contains have not yet differentiated,
or taken on the properties of particular organs or tissues --
kidneys, muscles, spinal cord, and so on. This is why the stem cells
that are extracted from the blastocyst hold the promise of
developing, with proper coaxing in the lab, into any kind of cell
the researcher wants to study or repair.

The moral and political controversy arises from the fact that
extracting the stem cells destroys the blastocyst. It is important
to grasp the full force of the claim that the embryo is morally
equivalent to a person, a fully developed human being. For those who
hold this view, extracting stem cells from a blastocyst is as
morally abhorrent as harvesting organs from a baby to save other
people's lives. This is the position of Senator Sam Brownback,
Republican of Kansas, a leading advocate of the right-to-life
position. In Brownback's view, "a human embryo . . . is a human
being just like you and me; and it deserves the same respect that
our laws give to us all."

If Brownback is right, then embryonic stem cell research is immoral
because it amounts to killing a person to treat other people's
diseases. But is he right? Is there good reason to believe that the
blastocyst is a person?

Some base this belief on the religious conviction that the soul
enters the body at the moment of conception. Others defend it
without recourse to religion, by the following line of reasoning:

Human beings are not things. Their lives must not be sacrificed
against their will, even for the sake of good ends, like saving
other people's lives. The reason human beings must not be treated as
things is that they are inviolable. At what point do we acquire this
inviolability? The answer cannot depend on the age or developmental
stage of a particular human life. Infants are inviolable, and few
people would countenance harvesting organs for transplantation even
from a fetus. Every human being -- each one of us -- began life as
an embryo. Unless we can point to a definitive moment in the passage
from conception to birth that marks the emergence of the human
person, we must regard embryos as possessing the same inviolability
as fully developed human beings.

This argument can be challenged on a number of grounds. First, it is
undeniable that a human embryo is "human life" in the biological
sense that it is living rather than dead, and human rather than,
say, bovine. But this biological fact does not establish that the
blastocyst is a human being, or a person. Any living human cell (a
skin cell, for example) is "human life" in the sense of being human
rather than bovine and living rather than dead. But no one would
consider a skin cell a person, or deem it inviolable. Showing that a
blastocyst is a human being, or a person, requires further argument.

Some try to base such an argument on the fact that human beings
develop from embryo to fetus to child. Every person was once an
embryo, the argument goes, and there is no clear, non-arbitrary line
between conception and adulthood that can tell us when personhood
begins. Given the lack of such a line, we should regard the
blastocyst as a person, as morally equivalent to a fully developed
human being.

But this argument is not persuasive. Consider an analogy: although
every oak tree was once an acorn, it does not follow that acorns are
oak trees, or that I should treat the loss of an acorn eaten by a
squirrel in my front yard as the same kind of loss as the death of
an oak tree felled by a storm. Despite their developmental
continuity, acorns and oak trees differ. So do human embryos and
human beings, and in the same way. Just as acorns are potential
oaks, human embryos are potential human beings.

The distinction between a potential person and an actual one makes a
moral difference. Sentient creatures make claims on us that
nonsentient ones do not; beings capable of experience and
consciousness make higher claims still. Human life develops by
degrees.

A further reason to be skeptical of the notion that blastocysts are
persons is to notice that many who invoke it do not embrace its full
implications. President Bush is a case in point. In 2001, he
announced a policy that restricted federal funding to already
existing stem cell lines, so that no taxpayer funds would encourage
or support the destruction of embryos. And in 2006, he vetoed a bill
that would have funded new embryonic stem cell research, saying that
he did not want to support "the taking of innocent human life."

But it is a striking feature of the president's position that, while
restricting the funding of embryonic stem cell research, he has made
no effort to ban it. To adapt a slogan from the Clinton
administration, the Bush policy might be summarized as "don't fund,
don't ban." But this policy is at odds with the notion that embryos
are human beings.

If harvesting stem cells from a blastocyst were truly on a par with
harvesting organs from a baby, then the morally responsible policy
would be to ban it, not merely deny it federal funding. If some
doctors made a practice of killing children to get organs for
transplantation, no one would take the position that the infanticide
should be ineligible for federal funding but allowed to continue in
the private sector. In fact, if we were persuaded that embryonic
stem cell research were tantamount to infanticide, we would not only
ban it but treat it as a grisly form of murder and subject
scientists who performed it to criminal punishment.

It might be argued, in defense of the president's policy, that
Congress would be unlikely to enact an outright ban on embryonic
stem cell research. But this does not explain why, if the president
really considers embryos to be human beings, he has not at least
called for such a ban, nor even called upon scientists to stop doing
stem cell research that involves the destruction of embryos. In
fact, Bush has cited the fact that "there is no ban on embryonic
stem cell research" in touting the virtues of his "balanced
approach."

The moral oddness of the Bush "don't fund, don't ban" position
confused even his spokesman, Tony Snow. Last year, Snow told the
White House press corps that the president vetoed the stem cell bill
because he considered embryonic stem cell research to be "murder,"
something the federal government should not support. When the
comment drew a flurry of critical press attention, the White House
retreated. No, the president did not believe that destroying an
embryo was murder. The press secretary retracted his statement, and
apologized for having "overstated the president's position."

How exactly the spokesman had overstated the president's position is
unclear. If embryonic stem cell research does constitute the
deliberate taking of innocent human life, it is hard to see how it
differs from murder. The chastened press secretary made no attempt
to parse the distinction. His errant statement that the president
considered embryo destruction to be "murder" simply followed the
moral logic of the notion that embryos are human beings. It was a
gaffe only because the Bush policy does not follow that logic.

The president's refusal to ban privately-funded embryonic stem cell
research is not the only way in which his policies betray the
principle that embryos are persons. In the course of treating
infertility, American fertility clinics routinely discard thousands
of human embryos. The bill now before the Senate would fund stem
cell research only on these excess embryos, which are already bound
for destruction. (This is also the position taken by former governor
Mitt Romney, who supports stem cell research on embryos left over
from fertility clinics.) Although Bush would ban the use of such
embryos in federally funded research, he has not called for
legislation to ban the creation and destruction of embryos by
fertility clinics.

But if embryos are human beings, to allow fertility clinics to
discard them is to countenance, in effect, the widespread creation
and destruction of surplus children. Those who believe that a
blastocyst is morally equivalent to a baby must believe that the
400,000 excess embryos languishing in freezers in US fertility
clinics are like newborns left to die by exposure on a mountainside.
But those who view embryos in this way should not only be opposing
embryonic stem cell research; they should also be leading a campaign
to shut down what they must regard as rampant infanticide in
fertility clinics.

Some principled right-to-life opponents of stem cell research meet
this test of moral consistency. Bush's "don't fund, don't ban"
policy does not. Those who fail to take seriously the belief that
embryos are persons miss this point. Rather than simply complain
that the president's stem cell policy allows religion to trump
science, critics should ask why the president does not pursue the
full implications of the principle he invokes.

If he does not want to ban embryonic stem cell research, or
prosecute stem cell scientists for murder, or ban fertility clinics
from creating and discarding excess embryos, this must mean that he
does not really consider human embryos as morally equivalent to
fully developed human beings after all.

But if he doesn't believe that embryos are persons, then why ban
federally funded embryonic stem cell research that holds promise for
curing diseases and saving lives?