Embryos, Stem Cells, and the "Strategic" Element of Public Moral Reasoning

Calls for national debate, or a "new national conversation" (Zoloth 2002), are a leitmotif of bioethics documents. When these calls appear in documents that are written in response to ongoing social concerns and debates, however, they can have an evasive ring to them, like hollow substitutes for a substantive analysis of whatever difficult issue has already gripped the national attention. For instance, while stem cells may provide a new interest in the moral status of human embryos, this subject has already spawned a cottage industry in applied ethics and been ground-to-death in the teeth of a divisive public controversy over abortion. How is the call for a new national conversation supposed to bring about anything "new" in either our understanding of the substance of these issues or the existing public controversy?

In truth, I suspect that this leitmotif in bioethics both expresses a frustration with some of the profound diffi- culties posed for public moral reasoning by the nonideal world in which we live and attempts to reassert a particular civic ideal. The civic ideal is articulated nicely by Zoloth. It is the ideal of a community of equals whose commitment to mutual respect and tolerance provides the social space in which questions of value and shared purpose can be worked out in a spirit of cooperation. This is also the social setting in which a certain conception of conversation is most at home. This is conversation as an activity that requires something like a space of intimacy in which uncertainty about one's own convictions can be expressed and the exchange of beliefs and reasons can be a conduit for personal and mutual change. Reasserting this civic ideal and calling for this kind of conversation is, in part, an exhortation to expand the space in public debate in which the exchange of reasons holds sway.

This call to a new national conversation also expresses a sense of frustration at the diverse array of social, political, and emotional forces that constrain the reach of this space of public reasoning. As Maienschein (2002) and Green (2002) each vividly illustrate, even the language in which the the broader public debate about the status of the embryo is carried out embodies fundamental assumptions about the "embryo" as a single, stable entity with a static set of properties that change at easily identifiable and distinct stages. Perhaps more importantly, as Green so aptly notes, the way in which this language masks the role of normative judgments about the importance of moral boundary markers is supported by certain pervasive social and cultural dynamics as well. What is striking about both of these articles is their awareness of certain habits of mind--patterns of talking, thinking, and emotional response--that have to be negotiated if the merits of their claims are to inform the broader public understanding.

I submit that if bioethicists are to succeed in the task of facilitating the exchange of reasons in public discourse more generally, they will have to overcome the idea that "strategic" considerations of this sort relate solely to mere persuasion and are unconnected to the judicious and responsible assessment of normative arguments. They will have to realize that in the nonideal world, we must care as much about the cognitive and affective orientation of persons to moral propositions as we do about the logical relationships that hold between the premises of our arguments (London 2000).

Asking people to change the way they think about embryos is asking them to do more than adopt a new vocabulary. Often, it means asking them to reevaluate, not just the way an entire cluster of moral values are organized, but the affective dispositions that have been shaped by those values as well. Without displaying how this new view of embryos can be harmonized with what is essential to these broader values and dispositions, important distinctions risk...