I'm so glad there's a voice of reason in the world.
by Richard Dawkins from his website.
President Bush's compromise on stem cell research is as confused as one would expect. Surplus embryos are routinely flushed down the drain in the majority of in vitro fertilisation cycles. So, if stem cells are to be taken only from existing lines for fear of killing new embryos, IVF should be banned too. Of course it isn't, and it won't be. Nor should we expect funeral services and miniature gravestones for surplus conceptuses. That's all that needs to be said about that. I want to concentrate on another aspect, the capacity of religion to muddy the waters in such ethical disputes.
In the run-up to Bush's sophistic decision, both sides in the debate could be heard eloquently trading quotations from the Bible as though that were the proper way to settle an argument. Congress resounded with Chapter and Verse like an old-style Revival Tent. Senator Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) is an opponent of abortion but a supporter of embryonic stem cell research, and he invoked Genesis 2: 7:
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
What we have here, explained the resourceful Senator, is a "two-step process" for creating humans (Los Angeles Times, July 19th). The dust, in Step 1, clearly means cells. Step 2, in which God went for the nostril "and man became a living soul", obviously corresponds to implantation in the womb. So it's OK to do stem cell research, so long as the cells are taken before implantation.
Richard Doerflinger, spokesman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, criticized Senator Smith's "amateur theology." Well, it sounded pretty amateurish to me, but I can't help wondering what a "professional" theology could conceivably look like. What if one of Smith's opponents had offered a different reading of the symbolism of Genesis? How do you decide between alternative symbols? What if yet another senator had riposted with a quote from the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Would they have been self-evidently less valid than the Bible? Who says? Whose holy book trumps? You can see why the founding fathers insisted on the separation of church and state.
Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) was not to be outdone in theological close-reasoning : "We all agree that the embryo is alive. The question is, is it a life?" He took the view that stem cell research would deny "the dignity of the young human, effectively making the human embryo equal to mere plant or animal life or property" On the other side some theologians, including even some Catholic ones, have suggested that before 14 days an embryo cannot be "a person" because before that date it is still capable of dividing and becoming two people. I can just hear an ambitious young theologian advance the opposite view: an early embryo is twice as valuable precisely because it is capable of becoming not one soul but two! Again, by what objectively defensible standards are theological arguments to be judged?
Perhaps seeking to beat the senators at their own biblical game, a spokesman for a Massachusetts company doing stem cell research quoted Matthew 25, the parable of the talents and the servants. Two of the servants, you will remember, put their gold talents to work and doubled their worth. The third one fearfully buried his, and was duly chided: "Thou wicked and slothful servant." The spokesman might have added that stem cell research will certainly go on apace in other well-equipped countries, and The Times of London reports that at least one leading US research team has already departed for Britain. They, and their talents, will be made very welcome.
"Do No Harm", an influential lobby of "pro-life" (read pro human life) doctors and other medical professionals, has condemned all embryonic stem cell research (http://www.stemcellresearch.org/). Let's hope, for their patients' sake, that these well-meaning doctors are better practitioners than they are thinkers.
They are big on the dignity and status of the human embryo which, they are in no doubt, counts as a fully paid-up human individual. It "is human; it will not articulate itself into some other kind of animal. Any being that is human is a human being." And they unashamedly play the emotive cards of race, slavery and Nazi atrocity:
The last century and a half has been marred by numerous atrocities against vulnerable human beings in the name of progress and medical benefit. In the 19th century, vulnerable human beings were bought and sold in the town square as slaves and bred as though they were animals. In this century, the vulnerable were executed mercilessly and subjected to demeaning experimentation at Dachau and Auschwitz.
The chief confusion in the minds of these unrepresentative doctors is the one pinpointed with famous clarity by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), founding father of utilitarian moral philosophy.
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. . . a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But, can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes...
You don't have to follow Bentham all the way to giving a horse or a dog human rights. But he should make you think hard about why you favor, by comparison, a microscopic ball of cells containing no nerves at all.
Let's pick the confusion of the Do No Harm lobbyists apart. They start with the admirable principle that suffering is a bad thing, from which the vulnerable should be protected. Undeniably, slaves and victims of Nazi experiments suffered, and nothing like that should ever be allowed to happen again. Equally undeniably, those vulnerable victims were human. So far so good. The fallacy creeps in at the next stage. It does not follow that all vulnerable victims capable of suffering are human. Nor does it follow that all human entities are capable of suffering. To apply Bentham to a fertilised egg, the question is not, "Is it a member of a particular species, other members of which can suffer?" Nor "Is it potentially capable of turning into an individual (or even two individuals) which could suffer?" No, the relevant questions is "Does this embryo, here and now as a cluster of cells, suffer?"
Most reasonable thinkers would agree, on reflection, that the answer is no. Or at least they would agree that an early human embryo suffers less than an adult cow or pig with its fully functioning nervous system. Now, in the unlikely event of your being a Vegan, or a Jain who wears a mask for fear of inhaling and thereby damaging gnats, I salute your high principles and consistency. You really don't like things to suffer. But if you eat cows, or eat vegetables which have been grown with the use of insecticide sprays, yet still call yourself a pro-lifer because you oppose abortion and stem cell research, where is your consistency? Where is your logic? A Colorado beetle has a better claim to suffer than a human blastocyst.
But of course the pro-life argument as normally expressed is not about suffering and the need to avoid it. Pro-life, as I have already noted, has a hidden meaning: pro human life. The embryos that the pro-lifers seek to protect do not suffer, but they are infinitely precious simply and solely because they belong to the species Homo sapiens. Humanness is a mystical quality, something absolute and indivisible, something God-given . . . for of course this faulty reasoning all comes from religion, and only from religion.
It is here that the religious mind most starkly exposes its lamentable shortcomings. This kind of religious mind just knows, without question and without reason, that there is something self-evidently special about Homo sapiens, an essence of such infinite apartness that it over-rides Benthamite questions like "Can they suffer?" Or even "Can they think?" It is as though we had a unique and magical substance called Homsap, an enchanted juice, a divine elixir which bathes every cell of Homo sapiens and of no other species.
Well, that may be appealing, but modern biology tells us it is rubbish. No doubt Homo sapiens does have remarkable and even unique features, but these emerge from the organization of our trillions of cells, especially our brain cells, and from our shared cultural experiences. Infinite moral value is not baptised upon us by simple virtue of the species to which we belong. The essentialist view that humans are deeply special, down to their very substance, is profoundly at odds with the fact of evolution. But that must wait for another column.
