Ditching Religion and Reality

During deliberations of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Human Embryo Research Panel in 1994, the panel chairman would refer dismissively to critics who believe human beings are animated by a "divine spark." Other panel members used the phrase "yuck factor" as shorthand for the outrage their proposals might provoke in Americans not sharing their advanced views--especially Americans who receive moral guidance from their religious faith.

In this issue panel member Ronald Green (2001) gives more substance to this cultured distaste for religion. He says that religious influence has "obscured" the objective reality that--not to put too fine a point on it--our moral choices in this area do not depend on an objective reality.

His "Copernican revolution" is certainly a radical one--perhaps more radical than he realizes. For it offers a deconstruction of the very idea of ethics as anything more than a ratification of the social or political preferences of any group of self-interested people. When there are no facts "out there" to limit our freedom to define other humans in or out of the class of protectable human life, such preferences have no competition.

The consequences of this revolution for the ethics of human subjects research are potentially devastating. For this area of ethics has involved a constant struggle between claims of future clinical benefit and counterclaims that fellow humans must not be used as mere means to this end. The Green approach could effectively eliminate one pole of this conflict. For if harm to a particular class of marginalized humans could produce benefits for a great many of us whose lives (in our view) really matter, that in itself can be the decisive reason for denying that they are members of the moral community. Effectively, claims to clinical benefit--even highly speculative claims, like Green's apparent assumption that embryonic stem cell research is the sole or most effective avenue to treating spinal cord injury--will always serve as a trump card, as long as the people we exclude from the community do not seem too similar to us.

It does not help to insist, as he does, that such decisions will not be unfair or arbitrary, because they will be "made by us all"--for these decisions will determine who is seen as part of "us all" in the first place.

Green's efforts to place limits on his mechanism for nullifying human subjects protections are unconvincing. For example, he suggests that "birth is an excellent boundary marker for establishing full and equal moral protection for human beings," because "it is a definitive event, easily recognized" and "it represents a point at which the physical claims to life of mother and child can no longer conflict." But the first property he cites does not belong to birth any more than it does to fertilization--the birthing process can take hours, even days, and debates as to when we should see a child as "born" are familiar from moral and legal debates on partial-birth abortion. The second property he cites belongs as much to embryos conceived in vitro as it does to newborns--in both cases respecting this life infringes on no countervailing claims regarding a woman's bodily privacy.

Indeed, contrary to Green's claim that the embryo has no legal status in Anglo-American law, 29 states have legal declarations that human life begins at conception or fertilization (Avila 2001, 213), and nine states prohibit harmful experimentation on human embryos (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 2001). Louisiana even defines the embryo fertilized in vitro as a juridical person to whom parents and fertility clinics owe a duty of reasonable care. The U.S. Supreme Court--in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (492 U.S. 490, 504-505 [1989])--has declined to interfere with such laws, so long as they do not infringe on the specific practice of abortion. If we can set aside such...