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Ethics and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Allen Wood, PhD Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Correspondence and reprint requests to: Allen Wood, PhD Dept. of Philosophy Stanford University Building 100, Room 102O Stanford, CA 94305-2155 E-mail: [email protected]

There are important ethical issues that can be raised about embryonic stem cell research. One large ethical issue that has unfortunately arisen recently has to do with the falsification of scientific results and how, if at all, the scientific community can protect itself from such a thing. Regarding all medical research, and indeed, regarding everything having to do with health care policy, there are important ethical issues about who bears the burdens and reaps the benefits in a health care system that is fundamentally unjust, inhumane and inadequate to the needs of the growing segment of our population that is economically disadvantaged. Who is going to own this technology? Who is going to reap the economic benefits from it? How are the medical benefits going to be distributed? Yet another ethical issue is about how properly to obtain informed consent from women who volunteer to donate eggs for embryonic stem cell research, since there are some risks, but no direct benefits, to the donor. In the present political climate in this country; however, such genuine ethical questions tend to be pushed aside by other issues that are closely related to the campaign to deprive women of their legal right to control their own bodies, such as the right to terminate a pregnancy. In a rational society, these questions would be dispatched quickly and call for only marginal consideration. In ours, however, they are the first ones we need to address, and so they are the questions I will be addressing here. The noisiest objections to embryonic stem cell research take the form of the claim that destroying something (an embryo or a fetus) is destroying something that has a right-tolife (i.e., the right not to be killed), essentially the same right to life that is possessed

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by all human persons. Sometimes these claims take the form of saying that it is wrong to destroy “innocent human life” in any form. Taken literally, that would make it wrong to undergo surgery, maybe even to cut your hair or fingernails. What is probably meant, and sometimes made explicit, is rather the idea that it is wrong to ‘kill a human being’—where this last phrase is taken to be equivalent to “cause the death of any living entity that is numerically identical to what has the potentiality to become a fully functioning adult human being.” Then the claim is made that as every normal adult human being is numerically identical to the fetus and to the embryo from which he or she developed, it is just as wrong to destroy a fetus or an embryo as to kill a normal adult. To deal with these questions we must begin with an even more fundamental question: why is it wrong to destroy or kill an innocent human being? What is it about such a being that gives it a right not to be killed? The answer to this question is not obvious, and not something on which there is universal agreement.

A Kantian Approach to Issues of Personhood The approach I will advocate is Kantian. I think the Kantian approach captures much that is already present in our common sense thinking about the moral status of human beings and their rights, but it renders this thinking more precise and helps us to settle difficult questions by providing a philosophical foundation for our answers. Some aspects of the Kantian position may be controversial, but that will be inevitable if we are to try to settle difficult ethical questions

318 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________Wood on considered grounds. I would not claim that the Kantian approach is the only possible one, but I think it is worth considering very seriously and that it can be used to construct some cogent arguments about the moral status of human beings in the early development of human life. Kant’s moral philosophy is characterized by the principle that rational nature in the person of every human being is an end in itself, something that has an objective value that makes claims on us, and grounds rights, including the right not to be killed (G 4 : 429).* Rational nature for Kant is also the capacity for autonomy, or rational selfgovernment, which in Kant’s view has dignity or an absolute worth that cannot be justifiably traded off against the worth of anything else, even some other thing with dignity. Kant has the reputation (partly deserved, but partly based on misunderstandings) of having been extremely inflexible on certain moral issues, and infamously unwilling to admit exceptions to some moral rules. However, I do not think that a general spirit of inflexibility in applying moral rules would be part of, or even minimally consistent with, the basic principles of Kantian theory. Whatever Kant’s own views on particular issues may have been, a Kantian should go with the basic principle and be prepared to jettison Kant’s particular moral opinions, which often reflect the prejudices of his time or his own idiosyncrasies and are not required by his principles. Why did Kant think that rational nature in persons is an end in itself? As I interpret him, Kant thinks that we cannot employ reason in making decisions without according a special and primary value to rational nature in ourselves, and therefore, if we are consistent, equally in others also. It is the possession of the capacity to act rationally, especially the capacity to act autonomously, that fundamentally makes a being a person. The fundamental claim made on us by the value of

rational nature is the claim that we express respect for rational nature in the way we act, especially in the way we act toward persons. The Kantian view is therefore a version of the view to which David Oderberg applies (with corresponding disapproval) the ugly neologism “personism.”† That is, Kant’s fundamental moral principle does not entail that all living beings of the human species are persons; it grounds personhood in the possession of capacities that not all humans in fact have, and that might also in principle be possessed by nonhumans. Some form of personism (in this sense) seems to me the virtually inevitable result simply of asking for a reason why human beings should have rights or moral status. There seems nothing about membership in any particular biological species that could ground such rights. To ground them on the thought that human beings belong to our own species seems no better than granting moral status only to those of the same nationality, religion or skin color as yourself. If rights are grounded on some distinctive property that justifies them, then whatever property this is, it seems in principle quite possible that some members of the human species will not have this property, and that entails personism. To reject personism, therefore, either you must be stubbornly unwilling to ask why human beings should have rights, or else you must insist on accepting uncritically a patently unsatisfactory account of why they do. For Kant, a person is a being capable of making rational decisions, and being held responsible (morally as well as legally) for its actions (MS 6 :223). In this sense, and within our experience, all and only normal adult human beings are persons. Thus our starting point for deciding who should possess the rights of persons, such as the right not to be killed, must be with normal human adults. I will call these beings “persons in the strict sense.” But the more basic principle that

*Kant’s writings will be referred to by volume:page number in the Akademie Ausgabe, Kants Schriften (Berlin: W.deGruyter, 1902). ‘G’ abbreviates: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. ‘MS’ abbreviates Metaphysik der Sitten. The standard English translation of these works is Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), which includes volume:page references to the Akademie Ausgabe in its margins. † See ref. 1. On Peter Singer’s version of this doctrine, see Chapter 4 in ref. 2. Oderberg objects that grounding personhood in rational capacities leads to the result that people who are drugged, drunk or asleep cease to be persons, and hence killing them would not be wrong, see (1), p. 35. There is room, of course, for different criteria for saying that a being possesses a certain capacity, and a reasonable view would seem to be that a person who is asleep or drugged or drunk (unless they are more or less permanently in such a state) possesses the capacities on which personhood depends. But even if we decided that a sleeping person did not possess rational capacities (while asleep), it would be even more obvious than it is in the case of children or the mentally incompetent that a sleeping person should be considered a person in the extended sense, so Oderberg’s quibbles about when someone possesses rational capacities would be beside the point anyway. Oderberg acknowledges, see ref. 1, p. 35 that there are distinctions between temporary lack of rational capacities due various factors—to sleep, or the immaturity or bare potentiality of those capacities in a child or a foetus. But regarding them he makes the quite astonishing statement that “it is hard to see how these distinctions make a metaphysical difference of the kind that supports a moral distinction,” see ref. 1, pp. 35, 36. Apparently Oderberg thinks that in these matters ethical principles are to be dictated by some metaphysical conception of a “human being,” but without our having to say, or even to ask, what it is about a human being that gives human beings the rights of persons. There could in principle be many different metaphysical conceptions of a human being, and of what makes an entity the same human being, some extending back before the fertilization of an ovum, some beginning only at birth or at some point after. Which of these is the appropriate conception to use depends not on metaphysics but on the ethical considerations that motivate the whole idea that human persons have rights, and principles governing which rights they have. Since Oderberg’s favorite principle here is that a person with a right to life is an “innocent human being,” see ref. 1, p. 4, it is worth noticing that this explicitly involves one factor (innocence) which is moral rather than metaphysical. So why shouldn’t the other factor—what kind of being it is that has personhood and the rights of personhood, equally depend on ethical considerations rather than matters of metaphysics? Oderberg seems to suppose that we regard it as unproblematic and in no need of further explication that human beings (innocent ones, anyway) should have the rights of persons, but he then wants to turn over to metaphysics the task of explicating what counts as a “human being” in this sense and to allow no ethical challenges to a the metaphysical conception he then comes up with. I see this as an instance of the dishonest and evasive way of treating all these questions (which I will mention presently in the text) that looks to “nature” (or God) to answer questions which it is really up to us as rational beings to answer on moral grounds.

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Ethics and Embryonic Stem Cell Research _________________________________________________________________________319 should determine to what entities the rights of persons pertains is that we should so act as to respect the value of the humanity or rational nature that makes any being a person in this sense. This might easily lead us to expand the class of beings we regard as persons for the purpose of ascribing some rights to them, such as the right not to be killed. Call these other beings “persons in the extended sense.” For instance, children who do not yet have the capacity to exercise rational agency, or who have it only to a certain degree, and also adults who have temporarily lost their rational capacity, should clearly be treated for many purposes just as persons should be treated. The Kantian line of thinking that leads to this conclusion, I submit, is this: we would not show proper respect for the rational nature of persons in general if we did not treat temporarily incapacitated or immature rational agents as persons, thinking about them in certain respects just as we think about persons in the strict sense, and according them certain rights, including the right not to be killed, just as we do persons in the strict sense. Persons in the extended sense may not possess all the same rights as persons in the strict sense. Because children lack the capacity to direct their own lives without the guidance of others, they cannot have the same right to direct their lives that adults do. But for just the same reason, society owes greater care for their interests than it does for the interests of those who are able to look after these interests themselves. But persons in the extended sense have the same right not to be killed, for instance, as persons in the strict sense. The rights of personhood in the extended sense might vary depending on why it is that the human being is not a person in the strict sense; hence personhood in the extended sense may be in some ways be a different status from personhood in the strict sense, but it is not a lesser status. The obvious question, in view of our present concerns, now is: How widely should we apply the notion of personhood in the extended sense? Does it apply to all phases of the existence of beings who are (or may at some time, under any conceivable circumstances, come to be) persons in the strict sense? Does it extend even to fetuses? Even to embryos? Even to embryos located outside a uterus that can become persons only if extraordinary measures are taken to implant them in a uterus? The crucial question, as I see it, at least from a Kantian standpoint, is: what actions, affecting such beings, are required by a proper expression of respect for rational nature? To answer this question we must consider more than merely what our actions express toward those potential persons. For if preventing a fetus from being killed also involves infringement of the freedom of a person in the strict sense to control the life processes going on in her own body, then the preservation of the life of that fetus or embryo by forcibly violating that freedom expresses extreme disrespect for the humanity of a person in the strict sense. If preserving the life of an embryo would require extraordinary measures, and also stand in the way of scientific research that promises to extend the lives and protect the rational capacities of many, many persons in the strict sense, then preserving the life of that embryo expresses, on the whole, a gross disrespect for rational nature. From a Kantian standpoint, therefore, social policies that would compel a woman to bear a child, and that would block vital medical research, are not at all moral requirements. In fact,

I think that they are mindless moral obscenities, unthinking remnants of a traditional morality that has refused to face the choices with which we are faced in light of modern medical technologies and a modern scientific understanding of human life. A fetus or embryo, which is definitely not a person in the strict sense, is also not to be considered a person in the extended sense. Because it is a potential person, there is surely some value in its life, which needs to be weighed in making decisions about when and how to preserve or destroy that life. But such merely potential persons should not share in the rights of persons in the strict sense, such as the right not to be killed. Broadly speaking, birth is the most natural dividing line between persons in the extended sense and beings whose existence may have value, but should not be accorded the rights of persons, such as the right not to be killed. For preserving life before birth by enforceable right requires encroachment on the rights of a person in the strict sense, whereas after birth there is at least the possibility in principle of protecting the being’s life without doing this. This consideration is not, and is not intended to be, as absolute as those usually advanced by the proponents of the view that fetuses and embryos have a right-to-life. But it might be all the more sound for that difference.

Interpretation and the Application of Moral Principles It is worth noting that the claims I have just been making are hermeneutical in nature: That is, they involve the interpretation of the meaning of certain actions, specifically, what those actions express regarding the worth of rational nature in persons. Hermeneutical judgments are notoriously impossible to ground on deductive arguments proceeding from general principles. They have a certain particularity to them, based on carefully surveying the interpretive situation and considering the totality of relevant elements of that situation in relation to one another. Interpretive judgments are by the same token contextual in character, and subject to variation and correction in the light of new information and therefore in the light of history. Their correctness always depends on the exercise of good judgment, in a particular context, based on an entire set of heterogeneous considerations, in this case, the value of the life of a being that may be expected someday to be a person in the strict sense against the value of the freedom or the vital welfare of one, or many beings who are actually persons in the strict sense. Interpretive judgments can be either rational or irrational. But their rationality does not consist in their conformity to anything that is quantifiable or reducible to an algorithm or a tidy decision procedure. Interpretive judgments become irrational chiefly when they become simple-minded, dogmatic and arbitrary, as by stubbornly cleaving to some factors on which they depend and mindlessly ignoring others, and also basing the interpretation on motives that are discreditable and unacknowledged. Traditional moralistic thinking all too frequently displays both these kinds of irrationality. It stubbornly adheres to traditional or sectarian prejudices, ignoring all other considerations, and failing to acknowledge these for what they are, but instead portraying its blind stubbornness as a highminded adherence to principle. The view that every embryo and every fetus is a person, with the same right to life as a human adult, is a spectacular example of such irrational,

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320 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________Wood simplistic thinking. There is no limit to the harm that can be done by this kind irrationality when it is combined with unbridled political power, as it threatens to do in this country at present. Persons in the strict sense come into being through natural processes that are gradual. In a sense, the whole reason there is a moral problem here at all is that we are required to apply a concept, that of a person in the extended sense, a being with rights, such as the right not to be killed in a way that sharply distinguishes beings to which the concept applies from beings to which it does not, but there is in reality no precise or nonarbitrary point distinguishing cases where the concept should apply from cases where it should not. Yet moral and legal principles seem to require determinate answers to these questions, whereas the gradual nature of the process by which persons come into being entails that drawing the line between persons in the extended sense and nonpersons will be a matter of careful judgment, not a matter that nature decides for us in a tidy fashion. Opponents of abortion and embryonic stem cell research typically fasten on the moment of conception, where the egg and sperm come together to form a single cell, as the point at which (as they like to put it) “human life begins” and in their view, there abruptly comes into existence that entity which is numerically identical with a person. Yet however they may describe the process, this dividing line is in the end just as arbitrary as birth, or viability, or consciousness, or brain activity, or implantation, or any other that could be drawn. A sperm cell and an egg are each potential persons, and so are the still simpler chemical compounds out of which each is formed. It is a point familiar to philosophers that judgments of numerical identity often depend on the concepts under which we bring the entities about which we make such judgments. If a certain building centuries old has been frequently repaired and restored, it is correctly judged to be the same building (the same mansion or church or city hall), though it is clearly not the same collection of wood and stone and other materials as it originally was. Thus even if it is true for some purposes that we count an embryo or a fetus as “the same living human organism” as the newborn baby, the child, or the adult into which these eventually develop, this does not require us to consider the embryo or fetus as “the same person,” entailing that it has the same rights as the child or the adult. There is no metaphysical truth about which concepts we must use that imposes itself on us from above, overriding all rational moral considerations. The concepts under which we classify entities as numerically identical are not arbitrary, but different ones might be chosen for different purposes, and there is no rational ground why any such choice, taken in abstraction from the entire context in which we ought to consider what most shows respect for rational nature, should be legislative for our decisions about what should count as a person in the extended sense and what should not. In deciding how to determine these matters, and where to draw the line between a person in the extended sense and something that is not a person, we are responsible to our own

reason, and to nothing else. I think part of what motivates the position of opponents of abortion and embryonic stem cell research is the understandable (but nonetheless irrational) desire to flee this burden of responsibility, or to transfer it to “nature” or to God. To prejudiced people, moreover, the voice of their prejudices usually sounds like the voice of nature and the voice of God. Our ignorant ancestors, who fashioned these prejudices in a situation different from ours, thought they could lay down inflexible laws for us to follow. But nature did not arrange things so conveniently for us. To answer the questions in the way of these prejudices is to lie to ourselves, taking something to be authoritative for us which we know perfectly well should not be authoritative for us. Cultural advancement in the interpretation of what it means to respect rational nature in persons is something that moves slowly, often in fits and starts. In the case of people’s convictions about abortion, it has taken a long time for women to be acknowledged as free persons and the equals to men, and for this to be factored into our judgments about what kinds of beings count as persons having a right-to-life. Even after a culture has reached a new level of enlightenment, there are nearly always powerful forces that oppose the enlightened view, or even that reject enlightenment in favor of the pious worship of old authorities and traditions. We see a lot of that in this country right now. Although the Catholic Church has long held that both human life and personhood begin at conception, and opposed abortion on these grounds, this has never been the dominant moral view in the United States. It would be a historical falsehood to claim that this was the rationale for the laws prohibiting abortion that were struck down by Roe v. Wade. In the 19th century, abortion before “quickening” was entirely legal in many places; and where it was prohibited, this was often not because a fetus was considered a person, but because birth control simply as such was regarded as immoral, on the ground that it carries with it the obscene suggestion that sex might have some purpose in human life other than procreation, and because birth control might make it easier for people to indulge with impunity in fornication or adultery. Sometimes the prohibition of abortion served to protect the privileges of male physicians from the incursion of female midwives, or to make it easier to prosecute quacks who sold remedies that caused unwanted miscarriages. Where antiabortion laws were on the books, they were sometimes not seriously enforced.* The argument that abortion is wrong because a fetus is a person with a right to life is, outside Roman Catholic dogma, a relative novelty.

What is Kant’s Own View? It might be wondered what Kant himself thinks about the personhood of fetuses or embryos. The fact is that he never addresses such issues directly. He takes it for granted without any argument that even small children are persons, even though he had to be clearly aware that they are not fully rational agents and cannot be held accountable for their actions in the way that adults can be. He never distinguishes, as I have, between persons in the strict sense and persons in the extended sense, though

*Regarding the history of this legislation, see the following on line sources: http://www.connerprairie.org/HistoryOnline/wlaw.html http://www.connerprairie.org/HistoryOnline/whlh.html http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/finnis-shameless

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Ethics and Embryonic Stem Cell Research _________________________________________________________________________321 some such distinction is obviously needed to render consistent the things he says. There are passages where Kant might be thought to be addressing issues about the personhood of fetuses or embryos at least indirectly. In the course of his condemnation of suicide as violation of a duty to oneself, he asserts that when a pregnant woman commits suicide, she is guilty of murdering her unborn child as well as of murdering herself (MS 6 : 422). On the other hand, in the course of discussing whether an unmarried mother who kills her infant is guilty of murder, Kant offers the argument (it is not clear how far he endorses it) that since an illegitimate child has not come into being under conditions recognized by the state, the state is not required to acknowledge its existence, or, therefore, to regard the causing of its death as the violation of anyone’s rights (MS 6 : 336). The first passage seems to treat a fetus as a person, and by implication, abortion as murder; the second seems to claim that infanticide (much less abortion), when committed by an unwed mother, is not murder. In both passages, however, the argument is being driven by quite another agenda than the question of the personhood of a fetus. Even if Kant had stated an unambiguous position on the personhood of embryos or fetuses, our task as Kantian moral philosophers would not be to follow his errors blindly, but to consider what Kantian principles really imply, and to interpret them correctly.

Unacknowledged Motives Behind the Objections to Abortion and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Debates on topics surrounding the personhood of fetuses and embryos are notoriously intractable. They also often lead to mutual hatred between people on different sides of the debate. Part of the explanation for this, in my view, is that the motivation behind the moral opposition to abortion (and therefore, as a kind of corollary, to embryonic stem cell research) arises from a set of irrational impulses and ancient prejudices that remain largely unacknowledged even by those most in the grip of them. The issue about abortion arises in the course of a long history pertaining to the social role of women and of human sexuality. No dogmas about the precise point where life begins and no abstract arguments about numerical identity should be allowed to distract us from this history. For most of the time people have lived on this planet, females have been the domestic servants of males, or their sexual property as the vehicles through which they generated children (preferably, sons). Fathers made sexual use of their daughters in a disturbingly large minority of cases, although precise information about this is understandably scanty. It is only very recently, and chiefly in cultures influenced by the European Enlightenment tradition, that radically new attitudes have developed that regard women as persons with rights equal to those of men, including authority over the life processes taking place within their own bodies. Even in the most advanced cultures, many women are still reduced to sexual slavery through economic dependence. Sexual violence

against women, including sexual abuse of daughters by fathers, still remains disturbingly common and systematic. Estimates vary, but a conservative estimate is that in our culture one girl in three is sexually molested either by her father or by another male society has placed in a position of power over her, before she reaches the age of 16.* Alongside this, there is also an ageold history of social tradition in thinking about human sexuality, which is partly a consequence of the subjection of women and partly owing to a complex of sick ideas about sex deriving largely from the same religious traditions that have long supported the systematic subjection of women. It is still less than a century since even the bare expression of enlightened challenges to this condition of collective denial and madness has been tolerated by the social institutions whose function is to coerce and indoctrinate. According to these traditions, a pregnant woman has no right to terminate the life of the child growing inside her body because that child, and even the womb that supports it, is not hers to control. It belongs to her male proprietor, her husband, if she is a wife, and if she is a slave, servant, or concubine, it belongs to some male who owes her even less consideration than a wife is owed. The primary moral duty of any woman in these traditions is to preserve the customarily assigned male property right in her sexuality. “Promiscuity,” sex with a man who has no proprietary right over her, is considered the worst crime she can commit. Within marriage, female adultery is unforgivable, although male adultery is a peccadillo which any truly loving wife will always forgive. Of course purer strands in traditional morality, i.e., those deepest in denial about actual human psychology and conduct, forbid sex outside marriage equally to both men and women, and some strands even regard sex within marriage as something unholy, unclean or morally detestable, even if it is regarded as inevitable and hence must be tolerated. Thus they temper gender injustice only with a monstrously morbid pathology regarding all human sexuality whatever. Few any longer dare to admit to these views in the traditional forms just described. But their unacknowledged influence is, I believe, the most natural interpretation of the prevalence of the relatively novel, extreme and simplistic view that embryos and fetuses are persons with a right to life equivalent to that of a human adult. That view serves an intelligible function as enabling people to retain older conceptions of the cultural status of women although hypocritically paying lip-service to the modern enlightenment principle that all persons have a right to free status and are of equal worth. Extending personhood to fetuses and embryos can even be portrayed as a more high-minded and generous version of this modern egalitarian principle. Of course this generous extension has the immediate consequence that a woman’s body, and in particular her womb, though perhaps no longer directly the property of a male proprietor, is still subject to social control as the property of a person other than herself. Nature itself has laid upon

*For obvious reasons, it is difficult to obtain precise and reliable information about this, and estimates vary. One-third is a conservative estimate given the estimates produced by most studies. Sigmund Freud noted the high rate at which his female patients reported molestation, especially incest, but he always remained skeptical of these reports and fashioned a complex theory to explain the evidence. More recent studies tend to side with Freud’s patients against Freud. See refs. 3–6. Russell (6) found 38% and Wyatt (5) 45% of women interviewed reported memories of sexual abuse during their childhood. One in three is a conservative estimate. Only about 25% of the molesters are strangers. Most often the molester is the girl’s father.

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322 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________Wood her certain responsibilities to that other person, the one that is growing inside her, and society has been charged by nature with the right to force her to honor these responsibilities. Further, regarding a fetus as a person helps to ensure that human sexuality will continue to be invested with the meanings and associations that traditional morality wants it to have. Unwanted pregnancies are notoriously consequent on various forms of impure, illicit or promiscuous sexual activity. Even if a woman’s husband, father or other male proprietor of her body is not entitled to control her sexuality, still no one is entitled to protect her from what the tradition wants to think of as the “natural consequences” of its misemployment such as unwanted pregnancy. Having to bear an unwanted child is simply nature’s punishment for her moral crime. For those who think this way, it is an easy step to considering AIDS as God’s just punishment for the various kinds of illicit (or even supposedly “unnatural”) sex acts through which it might be contracted. Issues surrounding sexuality and the beginnings of life that bear on the status of women have to be understood in terms of this long history of morbid and brutal practices and ways of thinking. And positions on those issues must be interpreted in light of the stance they take toward that history and those practices. When you consider the views that are usually held in conjunction with the thesis that personhood begins at conception, this provides a compelling interpretation of the real social and historical meaning of that thesis. If the real concern of those who hold these views were to prevent abortions, you would expect advocates of such views to be strongly supportive of both sex education and methods of birth control that prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. But on the contrary, most abortion opponents are not strong supporters of these, and many of them are strongly opposed to them. If the real concern were (as they often protest that it is) concern to protect the helpless, the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, then you would expect them to be strong advocates for social programs aimed at protecting other weak and vulnerable members of society, after they are born. But they are not. On the contrary, once they have meddled in the life of the pregnant woman, forcing her to bear a child she does not want and probably will not be well provisioned or well motivated to care for, they are ready to leave her to the mercies of a grossly inequitable economic system, and to spend all their resources instead on making sure that the lives of other women are meddled with and ruined as well. Given the overall pattern, it is an insult to human intelligence for them to pretend, either to us or to themselves, that they are motivated by anything other than a desire to reassert society’s traditional control over the sexuality of women and return them to a status of less than free personhood. Regarding embryonic stem cell research, some of the opposition to it is also owing to a common cultural fear of, and hostility to, science and scientists. Not all of that hostility is unreasonable. Science has often been put in service of capital, governments and armies, and it has often served, and continues to serve, their ends with terrible results. Individual scientists all

too frequently let personal or professional advantage blind them to the human implications of their work.* Scientists have sometimes even rationalized their complicity in evil under the ideological cover, which is so shamelessly transparent as to invite ridicule, that science is morally neutral, or even that morality, unlike science, is not subject to reason and evidence at all, so scientists in their professional capacity are entitled to ignore it. As such shabby ploys illustrate, scientists are by no means immune to the kind of moral bankruptcy that reveals itself in these sorts of sophistries. Cultural conservatism, however, has other and less reputable motives for hating and distrusting science. Polls show that at least in the United States, scientists profess belief in a supernatural deity in dramatically lower percentages than the general population. Many people cannot forgive modern science for discrediting the traditional religious view of the world, to which many still cling, and in which they find consolation in a world that modern science has rendered both larger and more uncanny than many people can complacently endure. I recently heard a school board member in Kansas say in a news report that teaching evolution in the schools is like telling your children that the whole universe is nothing but a sick joke. It is important to recognize the element of truth in what he says, at least as a candid remark about the way the scientific picture of the world is likely to be perceived by those who have been taught only a traditional religious view of the world, especially when it has been inculcated in an authoritarian spirit that regards as sinful and dangerous all questioning and all freedom of thought. But of course these same people must learn that as knowledge of our world increases, our children will have to learn to live in a world different from that of their parents’ likings and prejudices. For those who refuse to learn this, any scientific research that threatens to make the basis of life less mysterious, and especially research that proposes to extend human control over the fundamental biological determinants of life, will probably seem immoral and blasphemous, an encroachment on the sovereign prerogatives of the Deity. When political power is virtually monopolized, as it is at present in this country, by a well-organized minority of religious fanatics who are in a state of denial about biological truth and represent an outright hostility to the spirit of scientific rationality, there is little space left for the genuine ethical issues, and even the formalities of rational debate often become a mere pretense. We have seen this recently in the dishonest attempts to foist bad science (“intelligent design”) on children in middle school science classes, as if there were serious doubts among biologists about evolution by natural selection, when the real point is not to promote scientific open-mindedness but instead to provide a pretext for ignoring the evidence and continuing to embrace a discredited religious view of the world. Such people often portray themselves as high-minded defenders of morality, but their conduct displays such contempt for the most elementary standards of honesty that we can only regard their position as one of utter moral bankruptcy. In the same way, when opponents of abortion or stem cell research try to articulate the

*Literary depictions of such callousness and corruption on the part of scientists are well known. We need only think of Frankenstein, or of the Doctor in Berg’s opera Wozzeck (based on the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner) who rhapsodizes over the way Wozzeck’s derangement confirms his theories, while caring not in the least about the way this derangement is leading inevitably toward the murder and suicide which will be the climax of the tragedy.

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Ethics and Embryonic Stem Cell Research _________________________________________________________________________323 thesis that a fetus or an embryo is a person with a right to life, as if this were a rational position, I cannot take what they say at face value. I doubt they are leveling with me, probably because they are not even leveling with themselves. The point I am making is not one they could address by changing their individual psychology, as by advocating the same principles and policies, but with a different attitude or subjective intention. Still less can they evade the point by claiming that I am misrepresenting what they think or intend. The basic point is not about individual psychology at all. It is that although it is up to us what we say and do, the meaning of what we say and do is not up to us. If your actions display a bigoted contempt for the rights of women, or morbid traditional attitudes toward sexuality, or a narrowminded hostility to reason, science, and the overall welfare of humanity, you cannot change this by performing the same actions, merely accompanying them with a different subjective intention. My claims are about their individual psychology only to the extent that people who fail to acknowledge the meaning of their actions might also be guilty of culpable ignorance or selfdeception about the historical and cultural meaning of what they are doing and advocating. If they ceased to be in denial about this, the only difference would be that if they were morally decent individuals they could no longer in good conscience continue to advocate these principles and policies.

Cultural Conflict and Enlightenment The recent historical trend toward regarding men and women as equals, toward healthier attitudes toward human sexuality, and consequently away from the arbitrary and irrational position that human personhood with full human rights begins at conception is a powerful one intellectually, but it remains fragile culturally and politically. This trend is a result of gradual changes that have been going on throughout the modern world, and especially in consequence of the tradition of the Enlightenment, its critical reflective stance toward moral traditionalism and authoritarianism and its sustained attitude of openness to new evidence and argument in considering all questions of concern to human life. On one level, Enlilghtenment values seem victorious. It is difficult even for those who attack them not to acknowledge them, or at least pay lip service to them when it comes to serious issues. We have seen that even the enemies of these values as regards their implications for the treatment of women can no longer openly admit their allegiance to traditional ideas about sexuality and the subordination of women, but need to disguise this allegiance (even from themselves) by portraying it as a further extension of the ideal of human equality (namely, to embryos and fetuses). But on another level, the hold of Enlightenment values on modern culture has always been precarious. Enlightenment has always fought, and still continues to fight, a guerilla war against some of the oldest and strongest forces in all human culture. These forces can no longer show themselves openly for what they are, that has been the Enlightenment’s triumph. But these forces have always been well armed with dishonesty, ideology, and self-deception, so the fact that people can no longer openly repudiate Enlightenment values by no means insures their inevitable victory. It is entirely possible that the Enlightenment that appeared during the last half of the second millennium, giving rise to

modern science and the rational recognition (at least in theory) of the equal dignity of all human persons, is doomed to be nothing but a brief burst of sunlight soon to be swallowed up once again by the clouds of ignorance, brutality, darkness and confusion. At the core of Enlightenment culture is the idea that we must rely on rational thought, reflection and human communication to decide what to think and how to live. This is not, as it is sometimes depicted, based on any “faith” or special confidence in human reason (which is then commonly decried as excessively self-complacent or overly optimistic). Enlightenment thinkers (such as Kant) often had some of the bleakest views imaginable about the powers of human reason, stressing its limits, its incurable fallibility, and above all its moral corruptibility. The point is rather that if we are honest, we have no choice but to use our reason and muddle through as best we can. For anything else to which we might want our reason to defer (such as tradition or religious inspiration or revelation) would have to be granted such a status by us, on the basis of rational judgments, and then interpreted as to its contents, again by our own reason. To see things any other way is simply self-deception and dishonesty, a cowardly evasion of responsibility for what we think and do.

Evidentialism In this way, the truly fundamental Enlightenment value is simply intellectual integrity or honesty, the attempt to understand why we are thinking and doing what we think and do, to judge these thoughts, actions, and reasons critically, and take the responsibility for them rather than passing the buck to some authority such as received traditions, customary institutions or some deity supposedly acting through them. Close to the root of this value is a moral principle sometimes called ‘evidentialism’ and stated by the 19th century mathematician, scientist and philosopher Clifford in the following formula: “It is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Earlier forms of the principle can be found in Descartes, Locke, Hume and the motto of the German Enlightenment Society of the Friends of Truth: Accept no opinion without sufficient reason. The form in which I would state the evidentialist principle is: There is a universal moral duty of rational beings to apportion strength of belief to the evidence; believe only what is supported by evidence or argument, and believe it to the extent, but only to the extent, that it is so supported. It may seem a far reach from this value to any particular stance on issues about embryonic stem cell research, but I think it is not. For one characteristic of traditional moral views, such as those displayed in the opposition to abortion and stem cell research, is that they do not respect evidence and argument and frequently engage in “faith-based” thinking, rationalization and intellectual dishonesty. Some opponents of embryonic stem cell research have claimed that all useful medical research could be done using adult stem cells or umbilical stem cells, hence that prohibitions on the use of embryonic stem cells involve no significant cost to science or medicine. They persist in such arguments despite overwhelming evidence that their claims are false. Here there is a plain intent to hold beliefs that portray the world as you would wish it to be, and enable you to persist in your traditional system of beliefs and policies

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324 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________Wood of action with maximal self-complacency and minimal cognitive dissonance, as well as to spread such beliefs to others, so that they will huddle together with you in support of your false view of the world and your misguided policies of action. Such an intent, when it causes you to ignore or misinterpret the evidence you have, or refrain from seeking out evidence you need, is intellectually dishonest. To put it in Kantian terms, it violates your self-regarding duty to think for yourself, broadmindedly and self-consistently. It usually involves also (as it does in the case just mentioned) the violation of more than one duty to others: first, the duty to deal honestly with them, and second, to do what is required to promote their interests, when they will be harmed by your failure to form and maintain your beliefs according to the evidence. I do not mean that every individual who opposes abortion or embryonic stem cell research, or that everyone who maintains that embryos and fetuses are persons, thereby automatically violates the evidentialist principle. It is possible in some cases that the evidence they have has been distorted by their experience, education or cultural background, or that in arriving at their erroneous conclusions they are making honest, innocent (although serious) cognitive mistakes in argument, interpretation or judgment. Obviously I also do not mean to imply that only moral conservatives are prone to violate the evidentialist principle. The fact is that we all are, and it is very difficult for anyone to adhere consistently to it. Hence evidentialists must necessarily take a tolerant and permissive attitude toward beliefs with which they disagree. Since the point of the evidentialist principle is that people should form their beliefs solely through their own free and responsible thought and inquiry, it would be directly counterproductive for anyone to enforce it coercively by punishing people for holding beliefs that someone else thinks are lacking in evidential support. Nevertheless, I think the prevalence of violations of the evidentialist principle by moral, political, and religious conservatives on a wide range of issues is both conspicuously common and that this is an important part of the explanation why their views are as commonly accepted as they are. As is illustrated by Hwang Woo-Suk’s apparent falsification by of some crucial results in embryonic stem cell research, in science it is also common enough for people to defraud others, and perhaps even themselves. Science differs from other

departments of human life not because of the greater integrity of the individuals who practice it, but because of institutional factors that are likely to bring it about that fraudulent claims will be soon exposed and decisively discredited. In business, politics or religion, for example, lying, fraud and falsification are also extremely common occurrences. But they often receive the public discredit they deserve after they have already done monstrous harm. Sometimes in those areas they are never decisively discredited at all, but live on for generations, or centuries, perhaps even in perpetuity as an influential industry, party or sect maintaining its vested interest and continuing to gull and hoodwink a great many people for an indefinite period of time. At this writing, the exposure of these fraudulent results leaves it still uncertain how far we have reason to doubt the apparent promise of stem cell research for the treatment of a wide range of human diseases. It may turn out that stem cell research will be much less important in the long run than many of us have been led to believe. But as this same troubling episode also shows already, science has the capacity to expose fraudulent results, when they occur, quite quickly and decisively. It is typical of the spirit of the Enlightenment that what it values most is not the heart-swelling aspiration to moral perfection but the more modest capacity to limit the duration and magnitude of the harm done by inevitable human imperfections. This is doubtless why the tradition of the Enlightenment, characterized above all by the virtues of caution and sobriety, has always taken the view that science is the human practice that provides us with the best model for how human beings might improve their conduct and their lot on earth.

References 1. 1 Oderberg D. Applied Ethics: ANon-Consequentialist Approach, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 10, 31–40. 2. 2 Oderberg D. Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 3. 3 Freud and Seduction Theory Reconsidered, http://www.geocities.com/skews_me/freud.html. Accessed June, 2005. 4. 4 John N. Briere. Child Abuse Trauma. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992. 5. 5 Gail Elizabeth Wyatt. The Sexual Abuse of Afro-American and White Women in Childhood. Child Abuse and Neglect. 1985;9:507–519. 6. 6 Diana E. Russell. The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986.

Stem Cell Reviews ♦ Volume 1, 2005