Family & Life

Thirteen Flaws in the 'Incoherent, Confusing and Devoid of Reason Report of... : 23rd May 08

Thirteen Flaws in the Report of the Council for Bioethics—Unusable for Public Policy. Report Criticised for Being 'Confusing, Incoherent and Devoid of Explicit, Systematic Ethical Reasoning'

The recent Report from the Irish Council for Bioethics supports embryonic stem cell research, involving the destruction of the embryos. It denies ‘full moral status’ to human embryos, granting them only ‘significant moral value’ (Report, 41).

The many flaws of the Report make it unusable for public policy.

1. The Report admits that the embryo is a living human (39, 48), referring at times to its ‘parents’ (42), but produces no justification for its claim that it is not a person and may rightly be used and destroyed. Since the Report may lead directly to embryos being treated thus, that is unacceptable.

2. Most submissions received from the public held that there could be no good reason for denying the personhood (not to be confused with personality) of the embryo. Since the Council solicited submissions, it owed respondents the courtesy of taking them seriously, by providing reasoned argument to show why its position is ethically superior.

3. While the Report says a lot about different moral opinions, it is curiously devoid of explicit, systematic ethical reasoning. It seems to have that strange post-modern, even relativist, idea that there can only be moral opinions – never any moral judgement based on giving reasons. Yet without that, a stance rejecting the majority’s view can have little public legitimacy.

4. The Report does not accept natural law. It doesn’t even believe in moral facts (e.g. inherent human dignity). For its authors, morality is invented, not discovered: so human beings’ moral value is not some pre-existing fact we ‘recognize’ but merely a social status we ‘grant’ or ‘accord’ (the Report’s own words). Thus there are no human or natural rights that society must recognize, only civil rights that society creates (and can take away).

5. The Report takes no position on when the embryo acquires ‘full moral status’. It thus fails to harmonize its ethical vision with that of the Constitution’s Art. 40.3.3 which acknowledges the right to life of ‘the unborn’. Inexplicably, it simply assumes that the embryo does not fall into the category of ‘unborn’.

6. The Report ‘grants’ the embryo ‘significant moral value’. What this means is not made clear, beyond saying that it may be used for medical research but not for research into cosmetics (44). So it has quantifiable, property-type value, being (a) always worth more than cosmetics and (b) worth more or less than medicines depending upon the use-value its parents assign it. The Report says the embryo has ‘intrinsic value’ (48), though not that it has value as an end-in-itself. In the context, that can only mean that there is always some use for it.

7. The Report notes the availability of other stem cell research options involving adults that are not morally problematic. But even when that fact is added to the ‘significant moral value’ of the embryo it still does not (in the Report’s view) outweigh the value of being able to experiment on embryos.

8. The Report argues that supernumerary IVF embryos that parents don’t want (and won’t donate to other couples) should be used for medical experimentation on the basis of the ‘Nothing-is-lost’ principle (43). In view of that, one cannot take seriously its hinting that it disapproves of the ‘instrumentalisation’ (48) of the embryo. Dean Swift satirized that principle in his Modest Proposal (1729), in which he listed the ‘moral values’ (social and medical benefits) that would be promoted by the eating of human infants of no use to anyone else.

9. The Report is sometimes incoherent. It says: ‘As embryos are the first stage of a new human life, they are ordinarily created for the purpose of bringing a life into the world’ (48). The first clause implies embryos are as human as babies, since both are ‘stages’ of human life, whereas the second suggests that a human life is something brought into being much later. There are only two moments in the human reproductive process when we speak of ‘bringing a life into the world’: conception and birth. If conception is meant, the sentence is nonsensical. If birth is meant, the sentence implies that full moral status applies only after birth.

10. The Report is confused about the terms ‘potential’ and ‘actual’. They do not apply to different things, but to the same thing under different aspects. The only thing that can be a potential human is an actual human. An embryo can be a potential adult without being an actual adult, only because embryo and adult are different life-stages of the one thing.

11. Connected to that, it is also confused about the notion of person (38). It takes personhood as something for which humans must individually qualify (on the basis of criteria like self-awareness). That implies: (a) only some humans are persons, (b) they are persons for only part of their lives, and (c) they are persons to varying degrees, an idea reflected in the incoherent talk about ‘becoming’ a person, as if there could be 17% persons. No theoretical sense can be made of any of this, and the ultimate result is that we will be unable to tell what a person is.

12. It is also a disembodied notion of person, with only accidental connection to flesh-and-blood, thus devaluing the body. No wonder then that the value of the body is seen as merely instrumental.

13. That same notion also discriminates between human beings, introducing a radical inequality between them. To accept that principle is to adopt something that can be used to justify a similarly lethal discrimination against the senile and the severely mentally challenged.

The sensible view is to take personhood as applying to individual humans on the basis, not of their individual ‘merits’ or development, but simply on their membership of our species. One counts as a person by virtue of being a living human being. That’s the only approach taking human embodiment seriously, affirming equality between human beings, and removing doubt about which of us are persons. It is the only view that is theoretically coherent and morally acceptable. Séamus Murphy SJ, Lecturer in philosophy.

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Thirteen Flaws in the 'Incoherent, Confusing and Devoid of Reason Report of... : 23rd May 08

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