In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel accused President Bush of moral inconsistency with respect to the President’s position on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). According to Sandel, if Bush regards the destruction of embryos as tantamount to killing a full-grown person, then he ought logically call for a total ban on ESCR, since it would be morally equivalent to murder.

I think there are two problems with Sandel’s argument. First, it assumes that pro-lifers can never engage in piecemeal, pragmatic politics or compromise. Many pro-lifers would like to see abortion banned, but in the interim they’re also quite happy to see policies that limit abortion enacted such as bans on federal funding of abortion, parental notification laws, bans on partial-birth abortion, etc. Bush could well be following a similar tactic, recognizing that a ban on ESCR has no chance of being enacted.

The second problem, though, is that Sandel doesn’t address the possibility that one can oppose the destruction of embryos for scientific research without conceding that an embryo is morally equivalent to a full-grown person. This isn’t dispositive, but I imagine that most of us, if faced with the choice between rescuing a child from a burning building or a dish with fertilized ova in it, would have no problem deciding to save the child. This suggests that we don’t regard embryos as morally equivalent to human persons.

But it doesn’t follow from this that embryos have no value, or that it’s unproblematic to use them as raw materials for research. There are several objections one might make to this practice that don’t rely on the supposition that an embryo is morally equivalent to a human person. One is that the use of embryos in research is another step on the road of regarding all of nature and life as a “resource” to be used for our benefit. This denies their intrinsic value and makes human utility the measure of all things. To draw a line and say that certain things mustn’t be done to embryos is a way of affirming the intrinsic value of nascent human life.

It’s very difficult to make these kinds of arguments in a political culture based on concerns of utility or on rights, since embryos don’t seem at first blush like the sorts of entities that can have their utility diminished or their rights violated. But it’s noteworthy that Sandel, a noted communitarian thinker who has criticized “procedural liberalism”, wouldn’t be more sensitive to ethical concerns that go beyond this rather narrow set of concerns. A polity might, on communitarian grounds, affirm its respect for life by making certain kinds of research off limits. Of course, Bush hasn’t generally made his case in these terms, and one can question whether such a policy reflects the values of our polity considering that it has been maintained only by presidential veto. Still, I would think that Sandel would recognize that such a case could be made since it’s more congenial to his approach to political philosophy.