Denialism

Saletan on the Ethics of Stem Cells

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by

MarkH
in

William Saletan takes the position that progressives have no real bioethical position on stem cells in his most recent column in Slate. I’m a bit disappointed with Saletan over this one, because in his never ending quest to be thoughtful about everything, he’s usually much more fair to people – even those he disagrees with. But listen to his characterization of “progressive bioethics”.

I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it’s a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people’s qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a skin cell. It’s like I’m picking up a radio signal and they’re not. I’d think I was crazy, except that a few billion other people seem to be picking up the same signal. At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.

…

Lately, “progressives” have taken to issuing talking points. Every time a peer-reviewed science journal reports some new way of deriving embryonic stem cells without having to kill embryos, I can count on receiving a “progressive bioethics” e-mail that warns me not to be distracted by such fantasies. Bioethics has become politics by another name.

…

To fend off the bullies, the nerds have seized on stem cells. Some of them think embryonic stem-cell cures are just around the corner. Others know better but believe in the research anyway. What unites them is awareness that stem cells score very well in polls, much better than anything else on their agenda. Of 32 commentaries posted on the Web page of the “Progressive Bioethics Initiative,” 26 focus on stem cells. Some don’t even address ethics; they just lay out the polls. Stem cells are a chance for liberal bioethicists to beat the living daylights out of their opponents.

…

So I went to talk to them last night. I bitched about the atheism, the talking points, and the word progressive. I made a pitch for my version of liberalism. The freedom to strip-mine embryos, have a baby at 60, or kill yourself can’t be the end of the story. Not everything that’s legal is moral. The most interesting moral questions aren’t the ones you can settle with simple rules. They’re the subtle ones you find in literature and real life.

Conservative bioethicists think that when we recoil at something in this gray area, our repugnance signals a moral problem. Liberal bioethicists dismiss this argument as “fuzzy intuitionism” based on an illogical “yuck factor.” The liberals are making a big mistake. Fuzz and yuck are very real. They’re a lot more real to most people than bioethics is. You can’t just ignore them or wish them away. You have to help people sort them out and honor their concerns in a way that doesn’t require prohibition. An embryo may be less than a person, but it’s more than a tissue source. The government can’t stop you from having a baby at 60, but don’t be so reckless.

Is this a fair characterization of the ethics of using stem cells for research and maybe one day, tissue-engineering and cures? It may be what he took from the meeting, but I hope that isn’t the extent of progressive or liberal bioethics on stem cells, a desire to use a hot-button issue to beat conservatives at the polls. As someone who thinks this research important, I’ll try and do Saletan a favor and create a positive argument for embryonic stem cell research.

Much of the “Fuzz and yuck” that Saletan complains of stems from the idea that life begins at conception – an idea that is pervasive well beyond the Catholics who have incorporated it into their dogma. I think the start of an ethical argument on using stem cells from embryos is addressing this fundamental issue of where life begins, and if this gut idea of life is appropriate one to base policy on.

For one, any time someone suggests life “begins” you know that you’re no longer talking about a biological problem but a moral or theological one. It is not a biological problem as life does not “begin” with each round of human reproduction. Life is continuous. Sperm are alive, and eggs are alive, and life has been a continuous stream of living organisms begetting more living organisms since it began in some form some 1 billion years ago. The appropriate question isn’t whether life “begins” but rather when should we care? Should we care about eggs and sperm? Clearly not, they are wasted by humans anytime between once a month for women and 5-times daily for some men. So, most would agree we shouldn’t care about the basic germ cells being spilled upon the dusty ground as Monty Python so eloquently put it. Every sperm is not sacred.

But one could then argue, the fusion of the egg and a sperm is a “new” life. This isn’t a great distinction either for a few reasons. For one, that would also make each egg and sperm that went through recombination and meiosis new life since they don’t have a gene complement identical to their parent cells. So would cancer be “new” life. Just because something is new, doesn’t create a valid argument, in my opinion, for its value or personhood.

The best argument they have is that the embryo is a “potential” life – but is it really? Some 50% of fertilized eggs fail to implant, of those 50% that implant, the spontaneous miscarriage rate is about 10%. So 45% of the time fertilization might lead to a viable fetus. It is potential life, but there’s already a great deal of waste of this kind of life that no one sheds a tear over – probably because they realize that it’s not really a person being lost. Sperm and eggs then have potential of leading to a viable fetus too, what then makes the fertilized embryo more special? The higher probability of viability? What probability of forming a life then confers the value of personhood? Where is the threshold? Is wearing a condom then robbing sperm of their vital probability of making a new life equivalent to abortion? (some would say so – most would not)

Either way, an embryo that hasn’t been implanted doesn’t really represent a new person, as it only has about a 45% potential of becoming life. I realize not everyone will buy that leap, but what does it say of personhood if basic biology leads to the death of some 55% of persons before they’re even born? And shouldn’t we recognize the true origin of the idea that life begins at conception as an equally arbitrary and fundamentally religious one? It used to be that the Catholics believed ensoulment occurred with the “quickening“. Not the quickening from Highlander, it’s when the baby starts moving in the womb – another arbitrary marker. Ahy should conception be any more wise and wonderful than the quickening which served for so many centuries? And is it appropriate to base the ethical policy of a science like stem cells on the dogma of a religion? Since life does not “begin”, nor does life being new justify personhood (tumor rights anyone?), what else is left?

I would argue that fertilized unimplanted embryos do not deserve personhood status, or any other rights, simply because they are “new” life or potential life, or because the dogma of one religion changed from quickening to conception a couple hundred years ago. I believe that the opponents of embryonic stem cell research have failed to make a legitimate, non-dogmatic argument for the personhood or rights of a pre-implantation embryo, that justify its rights beyond that of an egg, or a sperm or a tumor. Personhood should mean more than “potential”. It’s more than just a beating heart. It’s a brain, thinking, feelings, all those things that make us human and not just instinct-driven machines. It’s why brain death is considered an end of life, even though the heart is still beating – remember all organs come from “living” cadavers.

There is more to life than just the presence of living tissue, or a beating heart and I believe a ball of cells isn’t a person. If you ask me it’s a lot more “yucky” for some theologian, or priest, or conservative bioethicist to say that a ball of cells has even a fraction of the value of a life like mine. Does it strike anyone else as being morally repugnant to make such a comparison? Doesn’t it seem even more disrespectful of the value of human life to reduce humanness to something as base as merely having living cells? Or potential? Or newness?

Saletan may not have been able to find progressives at this conference that were willing to debate this without discussing the political advantage or the utility of the science, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Comments

  1. Tyler DiPietro

    Opposition to embryonic stem cell research is, along with creationism and much anti-psychiatry woo, one of the many political problems that grows from the substrate of people’s attachment to a medieval supernaturalism that has become untenable in the light of modern science. The real problem is that people are still holding on to the idea that personhood and humanity arises from a supernatural “soul”, “life-force”, or whatever, instead of ordinary physics and chemistry.

    This is what Saletan is talking about when he waxes indignant about how condescending “progressive bioethicists” are to the fuzzy intuitions and emotive reactions some people have toward ESCR. He does us absolutely no favors by legitimizing these sorts of irrational and anti-intellectual impulses. We need less of that, not more.

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  2. Infophile

    Very well said, and exactly the arguments I’ve made on miscellaneous other occasions (I wonder if the latter is causing the former opinion there…). Interestingly, all these arguments could apply just as well to the abortion debate; it’s the same fundamental disagreement. I guess the only difference here is the purpose of the procedure: Avoiding pregnancy versus medical research (and hopefully treatment in the future).

    Also, does this strike anyone else as possibly implying a “Wisdom of Repugnance” argument (just not extended all the way to the conclusion yet)? Or maybe it’s simply a plea for mean old progressive atheists not to do things because they make religious people feel queasy if they think about it too hard.

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  3. bob koepp

    Mark – Your discussion of when life “begins” might benefit from an organismic perspective — i.e., you might interpret claims about life beginning at conception as claims that conception produces a new organism. In the case of humans, this new organisms is indisputably human, though not yet a person.

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  4. kemibe

    Saletan’s use of the phrase “kill embryos” is testament enough to his own view on where life begins. He seems to toss the responsibility for coming around to a consensus squarely in the laps of liberals by way of advocating a “liberal-but-not-liberal-like-them” position, and he more or less accuses bioethicists of orthodoxy while skirting ownership of personal biases that color his piece. I’m also disappointed, because I really like reading Saletan and believe he’s full of a significant aliquot of shit here.

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  5. Al T

    Unfortunately Mr. Hoofnagle I believe you’ve demonstrated what Mr. Saletan was complaining about. Rather than read or study what your opponents are trying to get at and coming to a common understanding you throw out old canards about how the Catholic Church used to say X but now says Y. It’s interesting how that the Catholic Church’s change of opinion seems to demonstrate it’s silliness, but in fact (if you would bother to read what the Catholic Church says of itself) their findings changed because of increased information concerning what happens during reproduction. Things like “quickening” were considered to be part of the best biological knowledge of the day. Now that quickening is out the door, so are the moral conclusions that resulted from it. I like to think of the conclusions that people reach about moral issues as looking like f(x,y,z). If you think you have a piece of knowledge represented by x and on further research x is very different then what you initially plugged in than of course your conclusions will change. Changing your mind about something when new information arrives is a sign of a healthy mind.

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  6. Tyler DiPietro

    “Changing your mind about something when new information arrives is a sign of a healthy mind.”

    Unfortunately the Catholic Church isn’t willing to take the information we have to it’s proper logical conclusion. They simply retrofitted some new info to extant dogma to prevent complete disconfirmation. We should give no quarter to ancient superstition, slight and irrelevant modifications notwithstanding.

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  7. Al T

    “Unfortunately the Catholic Church isn’t willing to take the information we have to it’s proper logical conclusion.”

    On the contrary, science while contributing to the discussion does not own it. And while you might consider the modification slight, I sited it because clearly Mr. Hoofnagle considered it to be important evidence.

    However Mr. DiPietro, I believe you’ll find that your rebuttal is exactly what Mr. Saletan was talking about when he said, “A lot of them talk about religion as though it’s a communicable disease.” Your dismissive comments will not bear any fruit in this discussion because you don’t care what the other side thinks. The reality is that we’re all forced to share this world with people that don’t think like us. If you don’t take your opponents propositions seriously (even if you disagree with them) then they will never listen to you.

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  8. Argonaut

    Since we all seem to be trying to argue the Great Religious Computer into a Star-trekkian logical breakdown, let’s remember this: the first axiom is that a soul exists. When it arrives is the only permissible debate, and we can’t win that one. Catholics say at conception. The Inuit say it’s a month after birth (good idea, since the infant mortality rate used to be quite high in those conditions). We can be as sensitive to others’ qualms as we are able, but unless we destroy a person’s religious belief (in a friendly, qualm-filled way of course) it won’t make any difference.

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  9. lifeethics

    Mark, the “new” life form that is the embryo is developing in an integrated, recognizable, and largely self-directed manner. And, at one time, each of us was an embryo. Ask one of the thousands of children born from in vitro fertilization whether their lives began at fertilization, implantation, or some other point in their development.

    Saletan is discussing one of the points of disagreement in bioethics: the correctness of acting to create a human embryo outside of the body and to further endanger the life and development of that embryo for the purposes of other humans. You mix terms such as “rights,” “value,” “morally repugnant,” “worth,” and “personhood” with the biological fact of fertilization as the beginning of the individual organism – and with your own bias as to “a life like” yours. And you, like the bioethicists that Saletan writes about, do not seem to be able to see beyond your own bias.

    Define for me those characteristics, which when acquired, convey enough personhood for you to advocate protection from intentional acts to kill or enslave them. Would you bestow protection after implantation, 14 days, birth, or the ability to correlate events with their consequences? Would you find it “morally repugnant” to create anencephalic organ donors or low IQ workers with human parents, or to experiment on neonates who have less than 50% chance of survival?

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  10. Minerva

    Proponents of hES research are often too biased or ignorant on the subject to present it properly.

    hES research is good for study – not therapies.

    Tumor formation is an identifying factor (e.g. no tumor after injection = no embryonic stem cells present).

    To get past the tumors, they must be differentiated to final tissue – and final tissue not from the subject requires a lifetime of immunosuppressing drugs.

    Final tissue from the subject requires cloning or parthenogenesis – but even Ian Wilmut will tell you that all clones have random problems with gene expression – hardly a positive quality for therapy.

    Furthermore, both require countless eggs, even in the best-case/efficency senarios. Drug-induced mass-egg harvesting is a potentially life-threatening procedure. Already poor women around the world are being lured for as little as US$250 to undergo the procedure … and the irreversal health consequences become their problem according to the greedy egg brokers.

    As final tissue, they also could only be used to replace identified damaged tissue, requiring surgery for the already compromised patient.

    The contortions required to possibly use these cells for anything more than ‘to study’ or drug testing is more than that of a limber squirrel at a bird feeder … the risks and cost make it prohibitive … and ridiculous when alternative sources, such as autologous or berashis stem cells exist for the function of repair (vs. creation of an entire organism).

    Other stem cells have been shown to seek out damage and repair with only an infusion. In stroke, for example, an infusion of stem cells repairs not only the damaged brain tissue – but the connective circulatory tissue that feeds it (failure of which is the primary cause of the stroke in the first place). In cases of autoimmune diseases like lupus & crohns, the condition was not only put in remission – but organ damage reported.

    Religion and politics make easy scapegoats for those fond of the ‘superior dance’ – but not so much the fact.

    Almost 90% of cryopreserved embryos are designated for future family building. Opponents of the destruction of embryos have offered alternatives that would provide hES far in excess of the 275 estimated yielded if all US ‘clinic embryos’ designated for research were used strictly to produce stem cells. Bush, for example, issued an executive order to expand funding to what could be 1/2 of all IVF created embryos, since that is how many arrest due to poor egg quality from mass-harvesting. These embryos yield normal stem cells at the same rate as other embryos (better still than cryopreserved, 35% of which don’t survive the thawing process).

    hES from arrested embryos, blastocyst extraction, and nuclear transfer (ANT) – all in Bush’s executive order – should be enough for researchers and drug testers. Providing more only puts women needlessly at risk. (Women have died donating eggs, you know.)

    Women shouldn’t have to die to provide research materials.

    The exploitation of the poor and ill to provide career, political, and financial gain by researchers, politicians, and big business (including news media) disgusts me.

    In reality, embryonic stem cells are like Paris Hilton. Just an appearance gets all the attention – while those actually doing something get ignored.

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  11. William

    I don’t think it’s a theological question to ask when life begins. Oh, to be sure, it can be approached in a theological manner, but that’s no more productive than any other theological mumbo. What liberals are asking is, more generally, since we value human lives, what are the boundaries of human life — of which beginning is one, so is ending, and so are various spatial and consequential parameters in between — and inside those boundaries, what requirements does valuing a person’s life impose on us personally and collectively?

    You make some pretty good arguments that there is, basically, fuzz about the leading temporal boundary of life — i.e., when it begins. However, let me flip it over and give you a quick heuristic. Start with you, right now. You’re alive, ya? Run the film of your life backwards in your head. You can imagine yourself as a baby? Picture the traumatic experience of being born? See yourself in the womb? Half-developed? A single cell? At any point here, you can still point to some object and say, “That’s me; now, run the film forward…” When can’t you? *Pop.* When there’s two bits to track, and it’s imaginable that some different sperm would have won the race to the egg. So there’s a temporal border to identity.

    Personhood is necessarily a societal construction (one that civilized societies have gradually been extending to more and more populations as humanity has advanced), as are the values we attach to it. We’re not going to find a magic threshold — even “birth” is fuzzy (hello, IDX). What we as liberals need to do is ask principled questions about consequences: what is the value of stem cell research? What is the value of assigning personhood from birth, or conception, or another threshold? If we choose to uphold a princple — call it “defend the weak” — by outlawing murder, infanticide, late-term abortions, stem cell research (to progress steadily backward through age thresholds), what are the costs and benefits societally and to the individuals involved (for whatever assignation of individuality we make)?

    In summary, I think there’s a discussion to be had here, and in fear of any encroachment on choice liberals are rejecting important discussions of competing values. We’re the smart ones. Let’s be nuanced.

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  12. MarkH

    Define for me those characteristics, which when acquired, convey enough personhood for you to advocate protection from intentional acts to kill or enslave them. Would you bestow protection after implantation, 14 days, birth, or the ability to correlate events with their consequences? Would you find it “morally repugnant” to create anencephalic organ donors or low IQ workers with human parents, or to experiment on neonates who have less than 50% chance of survival?

    Life begins when the kids move out and the dog dies.

    Interesting you mention anencephaly. I’m not going to respond to demands to define life, that’s not my job. I only am arguing that our current knowledge about biology suggests life at conception is totally arbitrary distinction and our opponents have not adequately justified that time point.

    Back to anencephaly. Would you keep an anencephalic child alive? Here you have a child, with no chance of survival, no possibility of meaningful life, born, essentially, without a brain. Enough is present sometimes to maintain basic functions – like breathing, but not cortex, no real source of humanity. I wouldn’t consider such a child to be a person, and wouldn’t expect a mother to carry it to term, nor would I expect doctors to keep it alive after birth. It is unfortunate when this does happen, as with baby K.

    This is because I believe humanity is more than the maintenance of calcium gradients across cell membranes, or a beating heart, or the ability to breathe. Humanity is diminished by these arguments that a ball of cells is equivalent to me. Or that the things that really make a person are ignored in these arguments. This isn’t an exceptional world view either, or we wouldn’t have organ donation. What it ends up boiling down to is this idea of a soul, a fundamentally religious concept, that has no place in policy decisions.

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  13. MarkH

    Minerva, I suppose that I am biased and ignorant in this case?

    Interesting considering I use them in my lab, that might be a cause for bias, but ignorance?

    Your arguments are the standard set of BS talking points from conservatives on ES cells, are scientifically inaccurate, and not helpful to the discussion. Troll elsewhere.

    **sorry william, fixed**

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  14. Lee Silver

    “the embryo is developing in an integrated, recognizable, and largely self-directed manner. . .”

    No, not always. If you grow a human embryo in a Petri dish, it will morph into a disorganized mass of tissues referred to as a teratoma. This “thing” can be propagated indefinitely under proper culture conditions. So what is it? If this tissue mass is not a human being (and I doubt that you would think it is), but the embryo it developed from was a human being, when did the human being “die.” The life itself didn’t die, so if you think something did die, whatever that something is (or was) has nothing to do with biological notions of life.

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  15. Tyler DiPietro

    “On the contrary, science while contributing to the discussion does not own it.”

    I’m not interested in who “owns” the discussion, I’m first and foremost interested in what is true and what is not. There is no objective way to support the ridiculous medieval beliefs about “souls” the Catholic Church has canonized. That said ridiculous beliefs are in part driving the discourse on this topic is a testament to the ignorance and delusion of the general population, not the intellectual content of their ideas.

    And as far as considering religion a “communicable disease”, that happens to be a pretty good approximation of my postion.

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  16. Al T

    “I’m first and foremost interested in what is true and what is not.” Which is interesting because so is Saletan and so is the Catholic Church. Working together seems like it could be a more successful strategy. And calling a religion a “communicable disease” doesn’t give people that don’t agree with you a reason to pay attention. It just turns them off. Whereas if we focus on truth, we might get people to pay attention. Especially since there isn’t an atheist truth, medieval truth and a Catholic truth, but just truth. Either souls exist as the Catholic Church defines them or they don’t. And if you have two parties that care about truth then they’ll eventually have to come to an agreed upon conclusion to that topic.

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  17. Al T

    “This “thing” can be propagated indefinitely under proper culture conditions. So what is it? If this tissue mass is not a human being (and I doubt that you would think it is)”

    I think the standard response to this type of ethical dilemma is the “Deerhunter Principle.”

    “If you’re out hunting deer and you see something in the woods that might be a deer but might be a human you are not allowed to shoot it.

    You can only shoot it if you are certain it is not a human being.

    Same principle applies whenever you have something that you’re not sure if it’s a human.

    So the stem cell procedure must be presumed to be objectively immoral and thus impermissible until such time (if ever) that we know more about how much human DNA something needs to qualify as human.”

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  18. Al T

    OOps, meant to include this. The quote from the last post came from here: http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2007/07/wired-writer-ge.html

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  19. MarkH

    That one would suggest that the embryoid body in the petri dish is near enough to being human to justify the deerhunter analogy just goes to show how defective one’s view of human life is.

    This is what irritates me so much about the anti-ES cell crowd. Their view of what humanity is strikes me as being incredibly dim.

    And it begs the use of another story to make the distinction. A nice Hobbsian choice. If a building was on fire and you could save a 5 year old child or an embryo, which would you save?

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  20. lifeethics

    Mark,

    You obviously feel very strongly that there’s some quality in humanity that can be diminished, but you continue to mix “defining life” with a request to define the characteristics that you personally believe constitute “humanity” or a “person.”

    Let’s begin from the assumption that whatever it is that you feel can be diminished in humanity or that can cause you moral repugnance doesn’t come from a religious belief. Perhaps it’s empathy, imagination or simple learning from the history of humanity.

    There’s a distinction between the cell produced by fertilization (a more accurate term than “conception”), parthenogenesis, or the various ways to reprogram somatic cells and other cells or groups of cells. It’s the same organization and integrated functioning that is lost at whole brain death with current technology. That’s why you work with embryos rather than gametes, and why Lee Silver’s comment about teratomas is incorrect.

    History tells us – this thread reinforces – that when we begin with one point of discrimination allowing intentional acts that disrupt the life span of an individual or groups of individuals, the lines of demarcation are “fuzzy.”

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  21. Coin

    It’s like I’m picking up a radio signal and they’re not. I’d think I was crazy, except that a few billion other people seem to be picking up the same signal.

    This is a truly remarkable couple of sentences right here.

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  22. William

    William, I suppose that I am biased and ignorant in this case?

    From an examination of the thread, I infer that this comment was intended to be aimed at Minerva? I would very much hope my post was contributory and not at all confusable with a trolling attempt.

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  23. Bronze Dog

    So the stem cell procedure must be presumed to be objectively immoral and thus impermissible until such time (if ever) that we know more about how much human DNA something needs to qualify as human.”

    Well, guess this means one of my hypotheses was on the right track for some people: That this stuff ends up redefining personhood as a function of DNA and not all those qualities of consciousness we value.

    DNA isn’t a part of my stance. A large collection of brain functions are, and so far, I’m pretty confident the embryos in question don’t have them.

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  24. MarkH

    Sorry William, I misread the tagline. Yes Minerva posted the usual anti-science nonsense people spread about hESC to make it sound like they’re not that valuable. Notice, that people that actually work and have expertise in them don’t make such statements.

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  25. Tyler DiPietro

    “Especially since there isn’t an atheist truth, medieval truth and a Catholic truth, but just truth. Either souls exist as the Catholic Church defines them or they don’t.”

    I completely agree with this statement. However, the sides aren’t equal in terms of which is supported by evidence. The actual physical evidence for any kind of mind-body dualism is about where the physical evidence is for Intelligent Design Creationism. Dogma is not on equal footing with the results of stringent scientific reasoning, and if Catholics can’t deal with that, tough shit.

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  26. Blast assist

    Anyone who introduces the notion of a “soul” into discussions about bioethics should be locked out of the discussion until they can rise above the level of bleating, turd-munching Down syndrome victims. The fact that millions of drool-bib candidates are warped and backward enough to believe in such a thing doesn’t obligate policymakers to hew to their annoying and incessant bullshit.

    A three-day-old embryo cannot feel pain, think, or manifest any other features associated with any useful concept of “life.” Arguing against ESCR on the basis that such an embryo may eventually become a person leads to similar and equaly valid arguments about masturbation and coitus interruptus – every sperm is sacred, right? Anyone who gorks off or pulls out at the moment of truthiness is a murderer. I bet Pope Ratzo whacks his meat, or at least did before he turned 107.

    Add to this the reality that the only alternate fate of stem cells earmarked for ESCR is being thrown away, and you have a ridiculously one-sided “argument” against this kind of research rooted in nothing more than ancient superstition and the inexcusably moronic attitudes of cross-eyed, drool-bib-wearing and brainwashed termites of faith who refuse to stay out of matters where they have no useful role.

    If you disagree with the above, tough. Shut up and go pray about it. We informed and objective people aren’t interested.

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  27. Tyler Blalock

    My compliments on an excellent article. Your distinction on life and the “beginning” of life and so on has not occurred to me before and is very logical.
    Unfortunately, it seems that the default “folk biology” assumption of most people, even those who consider themselves to be nonreligious, seems to be that there is some kind of “life force” or magic stuff that separates living organisms from the rest of nature. This assumption is unspoken and often unconscious.
    It seems that the reason why I was so impressed with your article is because I had been trying to frame my arguments using that kind of assumption. It is not something that I believe at all, but it is an assumption that I happened to have due to its inherent existence in western thought and culture.
    It seems to me that if scientists and ethicists want to make the case for stem cell research to ordinary people, they will need to spend more time exposing and debunking this assumption. It is this assumption about the nature of life that gives rise to the “yuck factor” that most people feel when discussing this issue. So far, I have not seen very many bioethicists face up to this assumption in their arguments, and that is why so many people find their arguments unpersuasive.

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  28. Kagehi

    Here is a good one. Studies on Marmosets have determined that a high percentage of the genes they have are often from fraternal twins. I.e., they are all chimeric, and not just in the bone tissue, as once assumed. This can and does even have the side effect of cases where a mother gives birth to a child that is the daughter/son of their sister/brother, due to their own cells not being the one that produced the winning egg/sperm. Got to be damn confusing to determine paternity if we where Marmosets.

    Thing is, we do get chimeras in humans too, though usually to the extent that happens in Marmosets, though it “does” happen. However, there is some suggestion that some types of diseases, like arthritus, etc., which involve the body attacking its own tissues **may** be it attacking sibling tissue or even the sibling tissue attacking its hosts. No one has actually studied it to see how extensive small scale human chimeric conditions are, where only small amounts of tissue are present and widely scattered. The only know cases, other than the ones like in the CSI episode with a chimeric killer, are cases where large numbers of cells from a sibling exist in some tissue of specific organs, and can cause serious problems in some people. One other study I read a while back suggested that, in actuality, something like 60% of all pregnancies (or maybe it was 80%… I don’t remember) start as twins, but one is lost, either failing to implant, or being absorbed. Now, maybe that is “absorbed into the other sibling”, not absorbed by the mother, or the like.

    Point being, if you want to get really silly, you could actually argue that aborting a fetus is, some high percentage of the time, *maybe* killing “two” babies, but that in and of itself brings up how you define a person as an “individual” with only one “soul”, if conception is the moment of transference, and it turns out that 60-80% of the population is partly chimeric, due to the second zygote being “absorbed” into the one that gets born. lol

    Any way you look at it, new information on the subject just makes their arguments more and more strange, irrational, confusing and absurd.

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  29. plunge

    The reason we don’t even consider the “it’s a HUMAN BEING” arguments is because that argument is incredibly vapidly prima facie stupid. It gets pretty everything about morality so wrong that you really have to wonder if the people making it have any idea what a “morality” is supposed to be at all: they seem to be treating it as if it was some sort of arbitrary body of rules that don’t mean anything or have any implications FOR ANYBODY, instead of a system of values that are supposed to, uh, well, protect and consider the interests of beings who actually have interests in the first place (i.e. rocks and stem cells have no plausible place in a sane system of morality).

    Saletan is pissy because we don’t give the patently stupid the time of day. And that’s not to say that there aren’t LOTS of interesting moral quandries that relate to embryos, embryo research, and so forth. If Saletan is arguing that we don’t really think or care about those, then he’s lying. But, sorry, no, we aren’t going to spend lots of time considering ideas premised on PRATT (point refuted a thousand times) nonsense. Sorry!

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  30. MY

    This is a fascinating article, and as a layman I find it interesting to see these issues being addressed in detail. What seems obvious from many commenters though is the utter disdain for the opinions of anyone with religious views. I’m an atheist, but although I disagree with many believers viewpoints, I can’t offer a replacement set of values and wisdom on how to live life as a whole. I can shoot down the logic behind their beliefs, but can I offer a better system for the whole of humanity, one that offers the ultimate direction on how we should all behave? No, because that is, as Saletan says, fuzz and yuck.

    I can see the potential benefits of stem cell treatment, in fact they amaze and intimidate me. Just too good, too powerful, too disruptive. They seem to offer the magic bullet that we all love, and the debate over where they can be sourced from has introduced an element of yuck and fuzz that their proponents appear frustrated by. The comments on this page to me show that science and religion will never agree on where a person starts or ends, or in fact individually offer a definitive answer. So we are back to society as a whole to navigate this.

    Could some of the vitriol here be due to the US’s stand off between the opinions of those who do the research and those who control the rules, being as those involved in this research have a financial dependency on it’s future progress? Hardly a novel premise I know but these days the fact that something is technically possible seems to hold an increasingly powerful logic of it’s own. A child at 60, lesbian parents demanding a child without a father – the journey from lab to law seems to speed up incessantly. And with no framework to address these innovations we are supposed to just worship at the altar of progress?

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  31. Tom DiVito

    At what point does personhood begin for a “human”? It’s interesting to claim a clump of cells is quite different from an adult human (which it is), but not confront the other logical dilemmas that spawn from the statement. When does one attain personhood? Is it at one year (some arbitrary time period) or once they pass some type of “personhood” test? In either scenario there are shortcomings. If an arbitrary time period is used, then are there different levels of sub-personhood to separate blastocysts from infants? How about adults who are more “person-like” than others? If a personhood test is used, may we no longer consider adults who fail this test as people? Bringing some type of “personhood” into the debate that is not quantitative is analogous to the “soul” theory of the opposing argument.

    Science is about objectivity. Objectively define the ambiguous terms used to support your arguement in some quantitative way.

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  32. Scott de B.

    When does one attain personhood?

    It’s a gradual process, beginning at the start of pregnancy and terminating with adulthood. Although both endpoints are fuzzy, the concept is pretty understandable.

    I prefer to approach the question from the aspect of rights rather than personhood. A third trimester fetus should logically have more rights than a fertilized egg. A child has more rights than a third trimester fetus. An adult has more rights than a child. That’s my ethical starting point — after that, it’s up to debate what those rights should be.

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  33. Dilan Esper

    Very nice response. I go farther, however. I am kind of sick of this whole topic of “bioethics”, as if anyone who simply wants science to continue to progress without impediment is anything other than ethical.

    Look, I understand that on the extremes (e.g., Nazi experiments in WW2) there are justifiable limits on scientific inquiry, but this idea that there’s this whole field that consists of wringing its hands every time someone comes up with some new and different scientific procedure is silly. For heaven’s sakes, science has given us thermonuclear weapons and these people are worried about whether growing stem cells from discarded blastocysts violates some fundamental limit!

    We’d do well to simply reject the entire subject of “bioethics”, and let the scientific community– which tends to be very responsible anyway in its procedures– go ahead and continue its research on all fronts. With rare exceptions, research to save lives and discover new cures IS ethical, and we don’t need a bunch of scolds to be constantly telling us otherwise.

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  34. plunge

    “MY: I can shoot down the logic behind their beliefs, but can I offer a better system for the whole of humanity, one that offers the ultimate direction on how we should all behave?”

    I don’t know what you think you mean by “ultimate direction” but if we need not be so high-falutin, then basic principles and scope of moral direction are not that hard to come by and I very much doubt you really do stand so helpless on the subject as you claim.

    “Tom DiVito:Science is about objectivity. Objectively define the ambiguous terms used to support your arguement in some quantitative way.”

    Just because a boundary is fuzzy in the middle does not mean that it’s not objective or useful. It’s not entirely clear where the sea ends and land begins on the shoreline (because of the tides), but that doesn’t mean that we can’t clearly delineate things on the edges as either sea or land. Talking about the risk of adults or beings that have brains at all being denied personhood just because we aren’t clear on when the transition is, is as silly as someone claiming that we are at risk of building a parking lot in the middle of the Atlantic. All the tricky boundary cases are indeed legitimate worries, but there are also many cases that are so far from these boundaries that I don’t think it is really fair to raise them as legitimate slippery slope fears.

    Not that that has ever stopped Ramesh or Kass.

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  35. Tom DiVito

    plunge:

    I knew that I would be accused of the slippery slope when I posted above.

    I did not say this issue should not be confronted, nor did I say it was unsolvable. Delineation can occur. One may define where the sea ends and land begins along a shoreline – that is my point. I am asking for an objective definition for personhood, because it seems as though ambiguous terms without definition are under attack (ex. soul, conception). Science quantitatively defines phenomena, because quantitativeness is objective.

    A fuzzy boundary is not objectively or quantitatively defined. Fuzzy is not significant. Fuzzy is not publishable in a peer-reviewed journal. Fuzzy is a political term, much like “gray area”, used to avoid a distinct definition. Fuzzy is used to separate a topic from scrutiny.

    Terms like “fuzzy” and “gray area” are used to exempt a complex concept from quantitative scrutiny. Every gray color you see on your computer is based on a numerical formula. One gray is numerically different from another based on its position in a color chart. Its properties are measured so the computer may reproduce it. One can say with certainty, “this gray is darker/lighter than that gray”.

    One can even determine the degree of fuzziness. However, it begins with an objective definition of the qualitative term. If one animal is “fuzzier” than another animal by defining fuzzy (perhaps as “hairs per follicle”) and determining that because chinchillas have about 70 hairs per follicle, chinchillas are fuzzier than humans, because humans have less than 70 hairs per follicle.

    My intention for posting was to expose the faultiness of using a term like “personhood” without defintion, and then accuse (and/or belittle) others for using seemingly undefinable terms like “soul” and “conception”.

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  36. MarkH

    I don’t like it either really. It’s difficult to engage in this conversation without confronting the tendency of people to believe in some more ephemeral concept of what makes us human.

    I would rather avoid such terminology altogether and simply say, human beings at x developmental stage have rights. I suggest age 22, or whenever they start having to pay their own rent.

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  37. Tom DiVito

    “plunge: Talking about the risk of adults or beings that have brains at all being denied personhood just because we aren’t clear on when the transition is, is as silly as someone claiming that we are at risk of building a parking lot in the middle of the Atlantic.”

    Furthermore, your “parking in the Atlantic” analogy is a reductio absurdum of my legitimate logical concerns regarding how an actual quantitave measurement of personhood would play out.

    I did not build a straw man argument out of this issue. I was drawing attention to the use of one ambiguous term (personhood) to defend against a different ambiguous term (soul). At least those using “soul” as a defense do not claim they are using “science” to develop their position. They appear to accept a metaphysical, occasionally irrational basis for their position (a supreme being).

    Science is not political. Science is mathematical. A lapse in objectivity is not science.

    Your analogy would be appropriate if perhaps I said that if chimps passed the test, they may be considered “persons” or “humans” in some metaphysical way.

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  38. Tom DiVito

    Well said MarkH

    Reply
  39. lifeethics

    Y’all are talking about positive rights or entitlements, rather than actual rights, that are “unalienable.” Once you start assigning criteria, you’re taking and giving – and the powerful make the rules, not rights. Which work well in the case of any human research, as long as the subject never attains “personhood.”

    Reply
  40. bmmg39

    “The best argument they have is that the embryo is a ‘potential’ life – but is it really? Some 50% of fertilized eggs fail to implant, of those 50% that implant, the spontaneous miscarriage rate is about 10%.”

    Oh, good. I get to refute this argument one more time. Your argument is that many embryos fail to implant or die shortly thereafter — i.e. they die of natural causes. I suppose it follows, then, that we aren’t human beings, either, as most of us will die someday of natural causes, also.

    “Anyone who introduces the notion of a ‘soul’ into discussions about bioethics should be locked out of the discussion until they can rise above the level of bleating, turd-munching Down syndrome victims.”

    Well, that’s really bad news for your side, “Blast,” since the pro-ESCR folks are the ones constantly misstating their opponents as being primarily focused upon “souls.”

    “Arguing against ESCR on the basis that such an embryo may eventually become a person leads to similar and equaly valid arguments about masturbation and coitus interruptus – every sperm is sacred, right?”

    If you fail to understand the difference between a sperm and an embryonic human being, I’m not sure I (or anyone else) can help you.

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  41. plunge

    “Oh, good. I get to refute this argument one more time. Your argument is that many embryos fail to implant or die shortly thereafter — i.e. they die of natural causes. I suppose it follows, then, that we aren’t human beings, either, as most of us will die someday of natural causes, also.”

    You’ve clearly missed the thrust the argument, which is a RESPONSE to the claim that it is the natural progression of embryos to grow into a human being. But, in fact, that isn’t the most common outcome. That exposes the belief that they are potential lives as something a lot more subjective than scientific, and the person a lot more imagined into the future than real in the present.

    “If you fail to understand the difference between a sperm and an embryonic human being, I’m not sure I (or anyone else) can help you.”

    Again, you are just attacking a straw man here: no one said that they are exactly the same. The point is that they are both key steps on the way to persons, but they are not, in fact, persons yet by themselves.

    And heck, eggs can simply be induced to double and divide and grow into a fetus on their own. In theory, virtually any cell in the human body is potentially a new human if it receives the right signals to make it grow in the right way.

    I guess I should form my own version of the Snowflakes organization: I’m a person who might not have existed if my parents had decided not to have sex on a particular night but LUCKILY THEY DID!!!! They saved me from not existing!

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  42. bmmg39

    Well, yeah, they did. But before your parents took the “plunge,” you didn’t exist at all; after fertilization you did. Every biology textbook either gives fertilization as the unequivocal point at which a new human being’s life begins, or simply is vague on the subject. None agree with your contention that a human life begins at some later, arbitrary moment.

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  43. MarkH

    Oooh, there’s a testable claim. Show me how every biology textbook says that life begins at fertilization. This is interesting to someone who studies biology and it is a given in the field that life does not begin anywhere except about a billion years ago. Life is continuous, that is a biological fact.

    This is absurd, and a likely sign you’ve never read a biology textbook.

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  44. lifeethics

    Mark, you simply restate your position about “life,” you did not address bmmg39’s position that the new individual begins at fertilization.

    That the new embryo begins with syngamy *is* found in embryology texts.

    If you work with embryos, then you must know the difference between a gamete and an embryo.

    Reply
  45. Bobby

    http://www.fstdt.com/fundies/comments.aspx?id=14160

    Fundies say the darnest things ;D.

    Reply

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