Draw Breath

It seems that the two-way straw men of the stem cell debate are alive and well on the Irish Times letters page. Keith Lockitch, who seems to be a postdoc at the Ayn Rand Institute, wrote a letter the contents of which I'm guessing are pretty much here. He leaves a marvellous hostage to fortune in claiming that the embryo is not quite human. Rather:

"An embryo is a potential, not an actual, human being, just as canvas is a potential, not an actual, work of art. It is a primitive cluster of cells, which is no more unethical to destroy than the cells that make up one's appendix. Calling an embryo "human life" is an evasion of the distinction between a mass of undifferentiated cells in a test tube and an actual, living human being."

This provokes a response from Fr Séamus Murphy SJ, who decides that the best strategy is to put the most unsympathetic spin possible on Lockitch's words by responding that,

"the embryo is not any old heap of undifferentiated cells, but a cell-grouping of a very particular kind, or an adult human being would not be its long-term outcome...[Lockitch] says that an embryo is a potential, not an actual, human being. Yet the living embryo exists and is therefore 'actual,' so it must be an actual living something, and that can only be human."

Following this, Gerry Whyte from TCD's Law School weighs in with a more intelligent letter to tell us about his secular defence (pdf; pp. 73ff) of the embryo's right to life. I was struck at first that Whyte co-opts Peter Singer into defending precisely the opposite opinion to that which Singer is proposing in the book that Whyte quotes. I find that a bit strange, but still Whyte is quite correct in that Singer would agree with the narrow point that Whyte makes: that, as Singer has it,

"the discussion up to now has shown that the liberal search for a morally crucial dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus has failed to yield any event or stage of development that can bear the weight of separating those with a right to life from those who lack such, a right, in a way that clearly shows fetuses to be in the latter category at the stage of development when most abortions take place. The conservative is on solid ground in insisting that the development from the embryo to the infant is a gradual process."

Of course, Singer makes this point, from his Utilitiarian perspective, to say that the abortion debate is barking up the wrong tree in trying to find that line in the development of a human being between deserving a right to life and not deserving a right to life. For Singer the important point is that at which one becomes a person (and yes, that implies for Singer that there are no particularly good reasons for extending rights to newborn human beings). Singer wants us to protect beings who can anticipate the future and have desires and wants for the future and who envisage and fear their own demise. Their desires are valuable, and producing fear in them is cruel.

Whyte is using the Singer quote to precisely the opposite end: for him it implies precisely that the embryo must be treated as a unique human being, with all the protections you and I enjoy, from the moment it is fertilised.

But, was this Lockitch's point? That the embryo is not human? Well, I doubt it. I suspect that Lockitch's point is poorly articulated version of  Singer's. What he ought to have said is that an embryo is not a person and therefore doesn't have the same moral weight as a person. So, no Fr. Murphy. A fair reader would have acknowledged that this was probably Lockitch's point. Although, the embryo is an 'actual' living something, it is not a human person. Our genetic relation to it is not morally important.

Whyte is more interesting. His narrow points on yesterday's letters page are entirely acceptable: you don't have to be religious to decide that life starts at conception (though I suspect that it helps). And, unless you decide it starts at conception, it's hard to decide the precise point when moral value can be attached to a human being. But his general point (in the dissenting opinion he links to) is not successful

It's all very well to say that "I cannot convince myself of any view other than that the embryo, as an inchoate unique and irreplaceable individual or individuals, is deserving of such respect as to preclude its deliberate destruction," but can this really be a moral solution to the debate? If it was that simple there wouldn't be a debate. Or to put it this way, I doubt that Whyte would like to put his moral money where his mouth is. If he meant it he would be saying that taking the morning-after pill is tantamount to murder. And I doubt he would go so far as to think that.

This isn't a particularly glib response. I want to highlight that, even though one might claim that the fertilised egg has the same moral standing as an adult human, one's sentiments don't really follow that line. And, to be briefly Nussbaumian about it, I suspect the emotions are a good guide here. There is something more profoundly wrong with the destruction of a self-aware person than there is with the destruction of a non-sentient being.

Singer's line is certainly uncomfortable, but it is persuasive because it gives us a reason for attaching rights to beings (whether human or not) because of the effect that actions have on their sense of themselves, not because of our arbitrary guesses as to their either their status or their potential status.