RE: President's Bioethics council (Fwd: [StemCells] Digest Number

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jul 19 2002 - 23:36:17 MDT


At 08:31 PM 7/19/02 -0700, Reason wrote:

>http://www.exratio.com/bioethicssucks.org/

which declares as its key `argument':

>It's almost as if six thousand people dying each and every day matter less
to a
>Bioethicist than ruminating in council and coming to a decision based on
his or her
>gut feelings.

I agree with your own gut feeling, but this is absurd and unfair. Those
bioethicists who oppose such interventions do so on principled grounds. You
don't agree with them, and neither do I. Probably we both find some or all
of those grounds mired in inane superstition and medieval pseudo-science.
But a view concerning the sanctity and inviolability of an embryo is not
*gut* based but theory based. If you wish to be an effective opponent of
such views, dismantle the theory with better arguments and empirical evidence.

Actually it's even harder to do than that, I think. Christopher Reeve might
walk again if stem cells harvested from embryos are the basis of his
treatment. However, suppose an effective treatment were developed that
required killing a six year old child, or a sixty year old, and harvesting
the pineal gland (or whatever). Most of us, surely, would agree that such
treatment is unethical, even if the donor were paid handsomely and agreed
to die. If a principled bioethical argument asserts that the two cases are
in fact identical, since an embryo is already a person, this is not a gut
feeling. It's a claim that has to be argued against and defeated, or
perhaps set aside as ludicrous, in public debate.

IMHO.

Damien Broderick



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