A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

What (if anything) is wrong with ESCR?

Even if you don’t think (as I don’t) that a just-fertilized embryo is a human person with full moral standing, it’s not unreasonable to feel a bit queasy about embryonic stem cell research. I think philosopher Bonnie Steinbock, in several articles and books, provides one helpful way of thinking about this. Even if embryos don’t have moral standing, she says, they can still have “symbolic value,” somewhat in the way a dead human body does. We treat human bodies with a certain reverence because of their symbolic value, not because we’re concerned about not harming or wronging the dead person (they can’t be harmed). Likewise with embryos: being non-sentient, they don’t have interests that can be thwarted and so don’t meet the minimum criteria of moral standing. However, because of their symbolic value, they do deserve a certain amount of respect.

What does this mean in practice? According to Steinbock, it would be wrong to use embryos for frivolous purposes (like developing new cosmetics, say), but research with a legitimate promise to save lives would be OK. Again, the analogy with dead bodies, though it has limits, is helpful: most of us think using the organs of a dead person (with their prior consent) to save lives is OK, but other, frivolous uses of the body would be wrong. Following this line of thought, if ESCR does have real promise of saving lives, it is, other things being equal, permissible to use (pre-sentient) embryos for that purpose, even while recognizing that they have a certain intrinsic, non-instrumental value. (This ignores other moral aspects of the issue, such as how the embryos are to be obtained, whether such research would end up creating a “market” for women to sell their eggs, the proper allocation of medical research dollars, the risks of “commodification,” etc.) I don’t know if it’s completely satisfactory, but one of the merits of this view is that it can make sense of the moral complexity many people experience about this issue without affirming the–highly counterintuitive, in my view–position that an embryo has the same moral standing as a conscious, sentient human person.

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6 responses to “What (if anything) is wrong with ESCR?”

  1. Rick Ritchie

    “Symbolic value” is an interesting idea. I’ll be mulling that one for a while.

    What are the public policy implications of this status? I can certainly see that this should have persuasive value for many, but what about when some don’t see it? Is this a public policy concept? I can see the value even if it is not.

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  2. Lee

    I think Steinbock thinks it has a kind of publicly recognizable status, though I can see problems using it to try and draw bright lines. On the other hand, we use other fuzzy concepts in public debate often enough (“security,” “welfare”). Worth thinking about more.

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  3. Kevin J Jones

    I suggest a more counterintuitive situation arises when we treat the human embryo as distinct morally and ontologically from more mature stages of human life.

    If we deny that we ourselves were embryos, then we render opaque common intuitive statements like “I was conceived during my parents’ honeymoon in Georgia” or “Louise Joy Brown was conceived via IVF in a British fertility lab.”

    Have you happened across Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefson’s book _Embryo_? It defends the most rigorous position that personhood beginns at conception. They make some heady claims about the continuity of the embryo and its moral status.

    For instance, if we are to claim that a capacity for sentience and consciousness is a marker of moral worth, then that root capacity exists in human (and other animal) embryos. To lapse into Aristotlean categories, gametes arguably have the material, but not formal, capacity for those qualities.

    I suppose some distinction between remote and proximate capacity could be made. But I’m still pretty sure that I, and not something else, was conceived about nine months before my birth.

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  4. Two Perspectives On Human Life « Upturned Earth

    […] another from Lee McCracken, discussing the work of Bonnie Steinbock: Even if embryos don’t have moral standing, she says, […]

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  5. Siarlys Jenkins

    Tollefson offers a syllogism of four premises, and states that in order to disagree with his conclusion, one must deny at least one of the four. I have denied the first. A zygote, a blastocyst, an embryo, the early stages of fetal development, are not a human being.

    A human being is an organism, not a cell, or a cluster of cells. Borrowing the words of Tollefson’s colleague, Dr. Gerard Nadal, an ORGANISM is “ the whole and complete animal, made up of all the organ systems functioning as a coordinated whole.” Until the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, including a functional brain, the musculo-skeletal system, the digestive system, albeit not yet ingesting anything, are present and functioning as a coordinated whole, a human being is not present, even if there is a cute little foot.

    Dr. Nadal is quite tense about this use of his own standards, since he avers that it is a proven scientific fact that the zygote is a human being, and will tolerate no discussion of the matter. Tollefson, in his book, is much more laid back and gives every appearance of reasonable willingness to engage. Whether he would remain calm in the fact of his premises being undermined, I can’t tell.

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  6. Simplify « The Mind has Mountains

    […] Here’s a interestingly-reasoned article on embryonic stem cell […]

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