FEATURE ARTICLE
From January-February 2001
The Point of a Ban
Or, How to Think about Stem Cell Research
by Gilbert Meilaender
In its report Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research, the National Bioethics
Advisory Commission says the following of the congressional ban on federally
funded embryo research: "In our view, the ban conflicts with several
of the ethical goals of medicine, especially healing, prevention, and research."1
So inured have we become to such language that we fail to
notice its oddity. Is it surprising that a ban should conflict with desirable
goals? Or isn't that, in fact, why we sometimes need a ban—precisely
to prohibit an unacceptable means to otherwise desirable ends? Taking note
of this point—the oddity of NBAC's statement—should help us think
about the issue of stem cell research. To explore the logic and make sense
of a ban on stem cell research is my aim here. To be sure, such a ban may
be persuasive chiefly for those who are concerned to affirm the dignity of
the embryo, but the public debate need not be restricted to a seemingly endless
argument about the embryo's status. Since many parties to the debate claim,
at least, to agree that the embryo should be treated with "respect,"
it may be fruitful to explore other issues—in particular, the nature
of moral reasoning and the background beliefs that underlie such reasoning.
I propose to take a very long way round. Our understanding of what is at
stake can be sharpened if we begin not with stem cell research but with a
quite different moral question.
In the memoir of his service as a Marine in the Pacific theater of World
War II, historian William Manchester writes at one point:
| Biak was a key battle, because Kuzumi had made the most murderous discoveryof the war. Until then the Japs had defended each island at the beach. When the beach was lost, the island was lost; surviving Nips formed for a banzai charge, dying for the emperor at the muzzles of our guns while few, if any, Americans were lost. After Biak the enemy withdrew to deep caverns. Rooting them out became a bloody business which reached its ultimate horrors in the last months of the war. You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands—a staggering number of American lives but millions more of Japanese—and you thank God for the atomic bomb.2 |
Yet, one might argue—many have—that it would always be wrong to
drop atomic bombs on cities, that doing so violates the rights of non-combatants.
One might argue for a ban on that approach to waging war, even though in the
instance cited by Manchester one can reasonably claim that such a ban would
have conflicted with some of the ethical goals of statecraft: to minimize
loss of life, and to seek peace and pursue it.
Utilitarianism of Extremity
How do we reason about such a ban in the ethics of warfare? There are, of
course, different views about what is permitted in war, as there are different
views on all important moral questions. But if we contemplate briefly the
logic of one very widely read treatment—Michael Walzer's Just and
Unjust Wars3—we will discover
that it provides a helpful window into our consideration of banning federal
support for stem cell research.
Following a well-trodden path, Walzer notes that there is a kind of dualism
in just war theory. It requires two different sorts of moral judgments: about
when it is permissible to go to war (what Walzer calls "the theory of
aggression") and about what it is permissible to do in war (which he
terms "the war convention"). These are two different sorts of judgments.
If we are fortunate, they will cohere for us: that is, those who have just
cause for going to war will be able to win without fighting in ways that are
prohibited. Because, however, these really are two different moral judgments,
there are moments when we face "dilemmas of war," when it may seem,
for example, that those whose cause is just cannot win unless they violate
the war convention.
Confronted with such a dilemma, we might reason in several different ways.
We might adopt a simple utilitarian approach; indeed, as Walzer notes, "[i]t
is not hard to understand why anyone convinced of the moral urgency of victory
would be impatient" with the notion of a ban on certain means to that
victory (p. 227). The more desirable the goals we pursue, the more tempting
it will be to allow seemingly obvious utilitarian calculations to carry the
day. If we take this route, the war convention provides us with rules of thumb
at best. It offers some general guidelines about how to fight, which may be
set aside whenever they conflict with the means required for those with just
cause to win. To reason thus is in effect to conclude that the morality of
war really involves only one kind of moral judgment: about when it is permissible
to go to war. There is no genuine "dualism" in just war theory.
In an effort to preserve at least some sense that two different sorts of
moral judgments are present, we might turn to what Walzer calls a "sliding
scale." Roughly speaking, it means: Although there may be some rules
that should never be violated, "the greater the injustice likely to result
from my defeat, the more rules I can violate in order to avoid defeat"
(p. 229). Some acts of war, even in a good cause, might still be wrong—if,
for example, the destruction they bring is disproportionate to the good they
seek to serve. But that "limit" is an essentially utilitarian one,
and hence the sliding scale is simply a gradualist way of eroding the distinction
between just war theory's two kinds of moral judgments. "The only kind
of justice that matters is jus ad bellum" (p. 230). In short, the sliding
scale is simply the timid person's avenue to utilitarian calculation.
The true alternative to such calculation seems to be a kind of moral absolutism:
do justice even if the heavens fall. "To resist the slide, one must hold
that the rules of war are a series of categorical and unqualified prohibitions,
and that they can never rightly be violated even in order to defeat aggression"
(p. 230). This is deontology with teeth. But it does, at least, acknowledge
the force of each sort of moral judgment we make about war—what goals
it would be desirable to realize, and what rights it is necessary to respect—and
it permits the tension between these judgments to stand. It does not deny
that winning in a just cause is often very important indeed; it simply refuses
to reduce reasoning about how to fight to calculations of how best to win,
and it does not gradually chip away at the rights recognized by the war convention
by means of any sliding scale. In short, it acknowledges that a ban on fighting
in certain ways will certainly make it more difficult to achieve the good
ends sought in war, but it does not offer that fact as, in itself, an argument
against such a ban. The morality of warfare involves both judgments about
values to be realized and rights to be upheld. When important values cannot
be realized without violating rights, it would be peculiar simply to note
this fact as an argument in favor of violating rights-as if a ban on such
violation were out of the question. It might be that we should do justice
even if the heavens will fall, even if those values cannot then be realized
or must be pursued in some slower, less certain, manner.
For such a position Walzer has considerable respect. Nevertheless, he himself
adopts "an alternative doctrine that stops just short of absolutism.
. . It might be summed up in the maxim: do justice unless the heavens are
(really) about to fall"
(p. 231). This "utilitarianism of extremity" does not commit us
to reasoning in terms of a sliding scale. Whether one's cause is relatively
more or less just, the rules of the war convention apply with equal force,
and we are not to chip away gradually at its limits. Ordinarily, a nation
with just cause ought to accept defeat rather than try to win by fighting
unjustly. Sometimes, however, in very special circumstances, a nation at war
may face an enemy who simply "must" be defeated, whose possible
victory constitutes "an ultimate threat to everything decent in our lives"
(p. 253). The paradigmatic example of such an enemy, for Walzer, is the Nazi
regime.
Confronting such an enemy, facing a defeat that threatens everything decent
in human life, there might come a moment when we simply had to override the
war convention and fight unjustly. This is no gradual erosion of moral limits
such as the sliding scale permits. It is, rather, "a sudden breach of
the convention, but only after holding out for a long time against the process
of erosion" (p. 231). The deontological limits remain in place until
the moment when we must reason in accord with a utilitarianism of extremity
and override them.
How shall we recognize such a moment of supreme emergency—and, just
as important, how not suppose that we face such a moment every time we are
tempted to fight unjustly in a good cause? Walzer offers two criteria to help
us delimit the moment, though of course criteria alone can never replace the
discernment of wise men and women. It must be both strategically and morally
necessary to override the war convention: no other strategy must be available
to oppose the enemy, and the enemy must really constitute an ultimate threat
to moral values. The moment is upon us only when we face an enemy who can
be beaten in no other way, but who must be beaten. For Walzer, Britain's decision
to bomb German cities—a decision made late in 1940—responded to
such a moment of supreme emergency.4 Civilians
were targeted and the war convention overridden. Yet even in this moment of
supreme emergency, Walzer argues, the war convention is "overridden,"
not "set aside." Logically puzzling though it may be, Walzer believes
that political leaders who undertake such deeds bear a burden of criminality,
even though they do what they must according to a utilitarianism of extremity.
The passage from William Manchester might be thought to make such an argument
from supreme emergency. "You think of the lives which would have been
lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands, . . . and you thank God for the
atomic bomb." But Walzer believes the decision to drop the atomic bomb
on Hiroshima was unjustified, and he argues that the American government did
not face a moment of supreme emergency that necessitated a breach of the war
convention. American policy sought from Japan an unconditional surrender,
and Japanese policy was to make an invasion so costly that the Americans would
prefer to negotiate a settlement. "[T]he continuation of the struggle
was not something forced upon us. It had to do with our war aims. The military
estimate of casualties was based not only on the belief that the Japanese
would fight almost to the last man, but also on the assumption that the Americans
would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender" (p. 267).
Since the Japanese government was not, in Walzer's view, "the moral
equivalent of the Nazi regime," there was no imperative reason to demand
unconditional surrender. It "should never have been asked" (p. 267).
Of course, it would have been morally desirable—very desirable—to
end the war quickly. And yes, it would have been morally desirable to end
the war with a clear-cut victory. And of course it was morally desirable to
minimize the loss of life. One can imagine those whose lives would have been
lost had we refused to drop the bomb arguing that we might have saved them
had we been less scrupulous. But for Walzer all that provided no persuasive
reason to override the war convention. Hence the ban on bombing cities should
never have been set aside here—good though the cause undeniably was.
To say, "the ban on bombing civilians conflicts with several of the ethical
goals of warfare and must therefore be set aside" would have been morally
mistaken.
Two other features of Walzer's analysis need notice here before we turn to
the issue of stem cell research. The first concerns his discussion of "The
Dishonoring of Arthur Harris," and the second attends to the problem
of nuclear deterrence. The very concept of supreme emergency assumes that,
almost always, the deontological limits marked off by inviolable rights remain
in place. Those limits are transgressed only in the most extreme instance
of moral and strategic necessity. And they are never simply "set aside";
they are "overridden." Having been overridden, they must then be
put back into place. Those who transgressed the ban and fought unjustly bear
a burden of criminality. Walzer does not suppose that nation-states, especially
victorious ones, could or should legally punish responsible leaders, but he
does think that, after the fact, a way must be found to reinstate the overridden
moral code. Thus Arthur Harris, chief of Britain's Bomber Command, who advocated
bombing civilians and whose pilots carried out that terrorist policy, was
the only one of Britain's top wartime commanders not rewarded after the war
with a seat in the House of Lords. This "refusal to honor Harris,"
Walzer writes, "at least went some small distance toward re-establishing
a commitment to the rules of war and the rights they protect." Supreme
emergency must be a "moment." It must come to an end, and the moral
law must be reacknowledged and reinstated.
To see that is to understand why one of the least successful features of
Walzer's analysis of just war theory is his discussion of nuclear deterrence.
The moral problem of deterrence—especially acute during the Cold War
but still troubling today—is that one targets civilians, threatening
almost unimaginable destruction, in order to avoid war altogether. For the
many years of nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union,
the posture of deterrence seemed to work (at least in the sense that nuclear
weapons were used only to deter and not to fight). Walzer tries to make sense
of this by suggesting that "[s]upreme emergency has become a permanent
condition. Deterrence is a way of coping with that condition, and though it
is a bad way, there may well be no other that is practical in a world of sovereign
and suspicious states. We threaten evil in order not to do it, and the doing
of it would be so terrible that the threat seems in comparison to be morally
defensible" (p. 274). The benefits are so great that, horrifying as it
is in principle, deterrence can become "easy to live with" (p. 271).
The needed reinstatement of the moral code is deferred—indefinitely.
It is hard to find this persuasive. Having resisted any too easy transgressing
of rights and limits, having confined utilitarian calculation to the moment
of supreme emergency, Walzer simply settles for a permanent condition of supreme
emergency. But, of course, when all moments are catastrophic, none is. In
the dark of night all cats become gray, and we lose the ability to make needed
and important moral distinctions.
Stem Cells
In a recent article, Glenn McGee and Arthur Caplan argue for the moral justifiability-perhaps
even obligatoriness—of stem cell research.5 They
suggest that NBAC and other scholars (in particular, John Robertson) have
been too ready to accommodate research opponents who would ban any research
that involves deliberate destruction of embryos. If advocates of research
cede too much ground to these opponents, they never directly confront the
objection, even though they argue for moving ahead (if with caution). By contrast,
McGee and Caplan argue that even if one grants the humanity and personhood
of the embryo, its destruction in stem cell research is justified because
this research promises to relieve incalculable suffering. Therefore, "the
moral imperative of compassion . . . compels stem cell research" (p.
153). The "central moral issues in stem cell research" have to do,
McGee and Caplan say, "with the criteria for moral sacrifices of human
life" (p. 152). (It is instructive to note that they tend to talk not
about when life may be "taken," but about when it may be "sacrificed"
or "allowed to die." Clearer language would make for a clearer argument.)
Thus even if one grants the personhood of the embryo, they argue, the question
whether the embryo's life may be taken is still unresolved, at least for most
of us. Only those who oppose all killing of any kind "can rationally
oppose the destruction of an embryo solely by virtue of its status as a human
person" (p. 153). For most of us, who do not oppose all killing as unjustified,
the question becomes: "what constitutes unwarranted violence against
an embryo, and for what reasons might an embryo ethically be destroyed—e.g.,
in the interest of saving the community?"
(p. 153).
When, if ever, is it permissible to sacrifice a human life in service of
the common good? When is such killing warranted? For McGee and Caplan, "it
is clear that . . . no need is more obvious or compelling than the suffering
of half the world at the hand of miserable disease. Not even the most insidious
dictator could dream up a chemical war campaign as horrific as the devastation
wrought by Parkinson's disease" (pp. 155ff). Since it would be possible,
they think, to salvage by transplantation the DNA of the embryo-to-be-destroyed,
little would be lost other than easily replaceable cellular components (cytoplasm,
mitochondria).6 And they find it "difficult
to imagine those who favor just war opposing a war against such suffering
given the meager loss of a few cellular components" (p. 156).
Their argument might be summarized thus: "You think of the lives that
will be lost because of serious diseases such as Parkinson's—a staggering
number of lives—and you thank God for stem cell research." In the
face of a structurally similar argument from William Manchester and others,
Walzer suggested that the United States might have changed its war aims, and
that unconditional surrender was an optional goal. McGee and Caplan never
consider analogous possibilities. Only unconditional surrender of Parkinson's
disease will do. Progress at relieving human suffering does not seem to be
an optional goal. Nor apparently is slower progress, achieved by research
techniques not involving the destruction of embryos, acceptable.
Perhaps McGee and Caplan suppose that we are in something like a moment of
supreme emergency. If so, they have at best made a case for moral necessity—they
have identified an enemy that must be defeated. They have not yet ventured
to make a case for strategic necessity—to show that progress cannot
be made, even if more slowly, by means that do not involve destruction of
embryos. Further, the case for moral necessity commits us to accepting nothing
less than the eradication of all horrible diseases. Conquer one, after all,
and there will be another to be conquered. Supreme emergency becomes a permanent
condition, and the "sacrifice" of human lives in service of the
common good and the war against suffering never comes to an end. Indeed, knowing
that our actions are compelled by "the moral imperative of compassion,"
we act with a good conscience, bear no burden of criminality, and feel no
need to find ways to reinstate the moral code we have overridden. By comparison
with Walzer's analysis of just war theory, this attempt to justify stem cell
research seems all too casual.
Consider a different argument about yet another issue. In a brief piece about
euthanasia, written in 1990 when Jack Kevorkian had suddenly garnered attention,
William F. May adopted a position on euthanasia that is not unlike Walzer's
lengthier argument on the morality of war.7 Despite
judging that the motivations behind the euthanasia movement were "understandable
in an age when dying has become such an inhumanly endless business,"
May offered a number of reasons why acceptance of euthanasia would be bad
policy. He argued that "our social policy should allow terminal patients
to die but it should not regularize killing for mercy." Even the good
end of relieving suffering brought on by "an inhumanly endless"
process of dying did not lead May to set aside the ban on euthanasia. But
he did recognize something like a moment when both moral and strategic necessity
could come together in such a way as to persuade one to override that ban.
"I can, to be sure, imagine rare circumstances in which I hope I would
have the courage to kill for mercy—when the patient is utterly beyond
human care, terminal, and in excruciating pain. . . On the battlefield I would
hope that I would have the courage to kill the sufferer with mercy."
Even in such a "moment"—which can scarcely become anything
like a "permanent condition"-May seems to think that the ban on
killing is overridden rather than set aside and that a measure of guilt may
remain. He writes that "we should not always expect the law to provide
us with full protection and coverage for what, in rare circumstances, we may
morally need to do. Sometimes the moral life calls us out into a no-man's-land
where we cannot expect total security and protection under the law."
This is the sort of argument one looks for if a ban is to be overridden.
Did NBAC do better than McGee and Caplan in offering such an argument? To some extent, it did, and although I find its approach defective, I have considerable respect for the seriousness with which it seems to have proceeded. For example, NBAC declines simply to weigh on some utilitarian balance possible relief of future suffering versus destruction of embryos. This becomes clear in its discussion of R. Alto Charo's proposal to bypass entirely the issue of the embryo's moral status. Charo suggests that we seek simply to balance deeply felt offense to some (who accept the full humanity of the embryo) over against potentially great health benefits for some future sufferers. "Thus, although it is clear that embryo research would offend some people deeply, she would argue that the potential health benefits for this and future generations outweigh the pain experienced by opponents of the research."8
This "Manchesterian" argument eliminates from the outset any possibility of a ban founded on a belief that certain wrongs ought never be done. NBAC rightly notes that, at least for anyone prepared to contemplate the possibility of a ban on embryo research, Charo's recommendation must seem to be sleight of hand. "It might be argued, for example, that placing the lives of embryos in this kind of utilitarian calculus will seem appropriate only to those who presuppose that embryos do not have the status of persons" (p. 51). NBAC does not simply say, "You think of the suffering that will go unrelieved and the lives that will be lost without this research—and you thank God for stem cell research." It at least recognizes the force of the sort of point raised over thirty years ago by Paul Ramsey:
| I may pause here to raise the question whether a scientist has not an entirely "frivolous conscience" who, faced with the awesome technical possibility that soon human life may be created in the laboratory and then be either terminated or preserved in existence as an experiment, or, who gets up at scientific meetings and gathers to himself newspaper headlines by urging his colleagues to prepare for that scientific accomplishment by giving attention to the "ethical" questions it raises-if he is not at the same time, and in advance, prepared to stop the whole procedure should the "ethical finding" concerning this fact-situation turn out to be, for any serious conscience, murder. It would perhaps be better not to raise the ethical issues, than not to raise them in earnest.9 |
NBAC's conscience is not that frivolous. Nonetheless, it stops short of taking
a ban fully seriously. Its alternative to simple utilitarian calculation seems
to be a mode of reasoning analogous to Walzer's "sliding scale."
Its stated aim is "to develop policies that demonstrate respect for all
reasonable alternative points of view."10 To
that end, NBAC looks for ways to express "respect" for the embryo
even if not the kind or degree of respect afforded the rest of us. Hence,
for example, it offers the following as "a reasonable statement of the
kind of agreement that could be possible on this issue": "Research
that involves the destruction of embryos remaining after infertility treatments
is permissible when there is good reason to believe that this destruction
is necessary to develop cures for life-threatening or severely debilitating
diseases" (p. 52). That is, the more urgent the cause, the more potential
good to be gained from this research, the more respect for the embryo must
give way to the research imperative.
That this is a kind of sliding scale becomes clear when we note one of the
limits recommended by NBAC. Its report supports research on spare embryos
to be discarded after IVF procedures but recommends against creating embryos
solely as research subjects. But this is not a limit to be respected even
if the heavens will fall—or even a limit to be overridden only if the
heavens are about to fall. It is a limit to be chipped away at gradually,
as the little words "at this time" in the following sentence indicate:
"We do not, at this time, support the federal sponsorship of research
involving the creation of embryos solely for research purposes. However, we
recognize that in the future, scientific evidence and public support for this
type of stem cell research may be sufficient in order to proceed" (p.
55).
This is a kind of "proceed with caution" view. One suspects that
the chief "limit" to research discerned by NBAC involves not so
much the status of the embryo as the status of "public support."11
There is no sense here of a limit that could be overridden—if
at all—only in a moment of supreme emergency, which overriding would
involve a burden of criminality, and which limit would somehow have to be
reinstated after the fact. Such an argument, if it could be made persuasively,
would be a very strong expression of respect for embryos. NBAC does much less,
however. From one perspective, in fact, perhaps NBAC's cautious sliding scale
shows less respect for embryos than McGee and Caplan's "full speed ahead"
approach, since one can read McGee and Caplan as justifying stem cell research
with a kind of "supreme emergency as a permanent condition" argument.
While I doubt that it really makes sense to posit such a permanent condition
of supreme emergency, the attempt does at least acknowledge that nothing less
than such extreme circumstances could even claim to justify embryo research.
The more judicious, "at this time" approach of NBAC promises, by
contrast, a kind of relentless "progress" in what is allowed. It
is not really prepared ever to stop. It cannot contemplate or make sense of
a ban.
Ends and Means
Perhaps we can understand, then, why some critics of stem cell research would
not be persuaded by moral reasoning that uses simple utilitarian calculation,
applies a "sliding scale," or appeals to "supreme emergency
as a permanent condition." If we are among the unpersuaded, we are left
to contemplate seriously a ban. To do that, however, may compel us to think
also about the background beliefs—metaphysical and religious in character—that
undergird all our moral reflection. In particular, we will be forced to ponder
the degree to which relief of suffering has acquired the status of trump in
our moral reasoning.
Why might one, even while granting the enormous benefits to be gained from
stem cell research, be prepared to contemplate a ban on research that requires
the destruction of embryos? How must one think for such a ban to make sense?
Clearly, no ban can make sense if we say with McGee and Caplan that "no
need is more obvious or compelling than the suffering of half the world at
the hand of miserable disease." Nor could any ban make sense in the context
of a search, such as NBAC's, for a public policy "consensus" that,
while taking objections seriously, will always permit research to proceed.
Indeed, despite NBAC's serious attempt to be fair-minded, its understanding
of consensus ultimately excludes from consideration precisely those who might
be willing to think in terms of a ban.
The very notion of a ban can make sense only if we consider that the fundamental
moral question—for a community as for an individual—is how we live,
not how long. If we act simply for the sake of future good, the day will come
when those good effects reach an end-which is not a telos, but simply an end.
We will have done evil in the present for a future good that does not come
to pass.
In his meditations to himself, Marcus Aurelius writes: "Another [prays]
thus: How shall I not lose my little son? Thou thus: How shall I not be afraid
to lose him?"12 That is, how
shall I not be afraid if the alternative to losing him is doing wrong? In
our tradition this emphasis on means over ends, on how rather than how long
we live, has been grounded not only in such Stoic thought but also and primarily
in Jewish and Christian belief.
It has provided the moral background that makes sense of doing justice even
if the heavens are about to fall.
One who looks on life this way need not, of course, suppose that beneficence
is unimportant or that relief of suffering is of little consequence. Weighty
as such values are, however, they have no automatic moral trump. To appreciate
this, we can consider passages from two twentieth century thinkers for whom
it was clear that the most important moral question was how we live. In The
Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis created a series of letters from a senior
devil to a junior tempter on the subject of how to tempt a mortal—with
instructions that invert the moral world by inviting us to look at things
from the perspective of Satan (for whom God must be "the Enemy").
So, for example, Screwtape advises Wormwood about the attitude toward time
that he ought to cultivate in his patient:
| [N]early all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. . . . [The Enemy] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. . . . [W]e want a man hag-ridden by the Future-haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth-ready to break the Enemy's commands in the Present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other.13 |
Likewise, reflecting upon "the ethics of genetic control," Paul
Ramsey noted the relatively greater importance of an "ethics of means"
for religious thinkers:
| Anyone who intends the world as a Christian or as a Jew knows along his pulses that he is not bound to succeed in preventing genetic deterioration, any more than he would be bound to retard entropy, or prevent planets from colliding with this earth or the sun from cooling. He is not under the necessity of ensuring that those who come after us will be like us, any more than he is bound to ensure that there will be those like us to come after us. He knows no such absolute command of nature or of nature's God. This does not mean that he will do nothing. But it does mean that as he goes about the urgent business of doing his duty in regard to future generations, he will not begin with the desired end and deduce his obligation exclusively from this end. . . And he will know in advance that any person, or any society or age, expecting ultimate success where ultimate success is not to be reached, is peculiarly apt to devise extreme and morally illegitimate means for getting there.14 |
My aim is not to inject religious beliefs into public discussion of stem
cell research. On the contrary, my point is that such beliefs are already
there. To see clearly the kind of background beliefs which might make a ban
on stem cell research seem reasonable is also to realize that something like
a religious vision of the human is at work in arguments for such research.
Precisely insofar as a ban is not really an option, insofar as proponents
of a ban cannot possibly be included in any proposed consensus, the argument
for research is that we—human beings—bear ultimate responsibility
for overcoming suffering and conquering disease. We know along our pulses
that we are, in fact, obligated to succeed, compelled to ensure that future
generations not endure suffering that we might have relieved. Possible future
benefits so bind our consciences that we are carried along by an argument
we might well reject in, say, the ethics of warfare. "You think of the
suffering that will go unrelieved and the lives that will be lost without
this research and you thank God for stem cell research."
It is quite true, of course, that a ban on stem cell research requiring destruction
of embryos would mean that future sufferers could say to us: "You might
have made more rapid progress. You might have helped me." To consider
how we should respond to them is to contemplate the moral point of a ban:
"Perhaps we could have helped you, but only by pretending that our responsibility
to do good is godlike, that it knows no limit. Only by supposing, as modernity
has taught us, that suffering has no point other than to be overcome by human
will and technical mastery—that compassion means not a readiness to suffer
with others but a determination always to oppose suffering as an affront to
our humanity. We could have helped you only by destroying in the present the
sort of world in which both we and you want to live—a world in which
justice is done now, not permanently mortgaged in service of future good.
Only, in short, by pretending to be something other than the human beings
we are."
Acknowledgment
The writing of this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Luther
Institute in Washington, D.C.
References
1. National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Ethical Issues
in Human Stem Cell Research, Volume I: Report and Recommendations of the National
Bioethics Advisory Commission (Rockville, Md.: National Bioethics Advisory
Commission, 1999), p. 69. back to article
2. W. Manchester, Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific
War (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), p. 210. back
to article
3. M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument
with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977). back
to article
4. We should note the limits to Walzer's understanding
of the supreme emergency faced by Britain: "For the truth is that the
supreme emergency passed long before the British bombing reached its crescendo"
(p. 261). Long after it was strategically necessary "the raids continued,
culminating in the spring of 1945-when the war was virtually won-in a savage
attack on the city of Dresden in which something like 100,000 people were
killed" (p. 261). back to article
5. G. McGee and A. Caplan, "The Ethics and Politics
of Small Sacrifices in Stem Cell Research," Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Journal 9, no. 2 (1999), pp. 151-58. back to article
6. A puzzling feature of their argument, which I cannot
unpack here, has to do with this claim that the trajectory of a human life,
which clearly begins with the embryo, is of little importance. As long as
certain elements (DNA) are salvaged and given a new trajectory, nothing has
been lost. McGee and Caplan develop their claim too briefly for one really
to know what its implications are for the matter of personal identity, but,
surely, they need to say far more if they are to try to make this move persuasive.
back to article
7. W.F. May, "Rising to the Occasion of Our Death,"
The Christian Century 107 (11-18 July 1990), pp. 662ff. back
to article
8. NBAC, Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research,
p. 51.
back to article
9. P. Ramsey, Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 13. back
to article
10. NBAC, Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research,
p. 51. back to article
11. I do not wish to deny the obvious fact that a public
commission such as NBAC must pay attention to and measure public support when
it makes recommendations. Nevertheless, if one accepts a research ban as one
choiceworthy moral option, then one must be open to the possibility that NBAC's
responsibility might be to marshal public support for such a ban. back
to article
12. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. Long (South Bend,
Ind.: Regnery-Gateway, 1956), VIII, 31, p. 100. back to article
13. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan,
1973), pp. 69-70. back to article
14. See ref. 9, Ramsey, Fabricated Man, pp. 29-31. back to article
Gilbert Meilaender, "The Point of a Ban: Or, How to Think about Stem Cell Research," Hastings Center Report 31, no. 1 (2001): 9-16.
This essay appears in the January-February 2001 issue of the Hastings Center Report.