The debate about embryonic stem cell research is not about whether or not we should advance scientific research on stem cells. The question before us is whether or not we can ethically sacrifice the lives of a certain group of people (people at the embryonic stage of their development) to benefit other set of people. When we hear reports of prisoners in China being killed to harvest their organs to benefit very sick people the threshold we consider there is not how beneficial those organs would be to the recipients. Instead, our focus is on the ethics of killing Paul to benefit John. We must ask, Is it just to sacrifice the lives of these people to benefit those others? By the same token, the controversy is not whether or not we should conduct embryonic stem cell research but whether or not we have the right to harm a group of people to harvest those cells in the hopes of one day benefiting others. Even if those cells indeed produced successful cures we should still oppose it in the same way that we would oppose killing a healthy Chinese prisoner so we can place his heart in someone else because we know that the heart indeed would work well. Of course, some adhere to the thoroughly unscientific idea that embryos are not human beings. That is their way of bypassing the logic commanding them not to harm embryos.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 16:02:29 +0000
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