Embryonic Stem Cell Research and "The Nonindividuation Argument Against Personhood"

Some MOJ-readers will be interested in this article by Louis M. Guenin, a member of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School:  The Nonindividuation Argument Against Personhood, Philosophy, 81 (2006), 463-502.  Here is the abstract:

I consider the argument, thought to clinch the moral case for use of a human embryo solely as a means, that (i) only a human individual can be a person, (ii) because it can happen at any time before formation of the primitive streak that an embryo splits into monozygotic twins, no embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a human individual, and therefore (iii) no embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a person. I explore the following proffered arguments for (ii): (a) indivisibility is a necessary condition of individuality, (b) nonidentity of an embryo with successor twins impugns the embryo’s individuality, and (c) totipotency of an embryo’s constituents is inconsistent with the embryo’s being a human individual. These arguments are tested and found wanting; so too is an alternative to (a), the argument that indivisibility is intrinsic to personhood. Whereupon (ii) is unsustained. In search of ways to rehabilitate the nonindividuation argument, I canvass alternative metaphysical views and inquire further into biological individuality, but find that the argument cannot be saved. I conclude by analyzing where this leaves matters concerning the morality of embryo use.

In the article, Professor Guenin explains at length and with rigor why the argument at issue (NA) does not work.  "If you and I are human individuals, so too are early embryos."  (P. 501.)  This is a conclusion in which Robby George and many others will concur.

The final paragraph of Guenin's essay, however, will be less welcome:

If NA slays no dragons, neither does its defeat win the day for zygotic personhood.  Proponents of zygotic personhood must yet make their case.  They are apt to mention that we must show respect for the sacred divine gift of human life by refraining from killing any developmental stage of a human organism, that we should adopt zygotic personhood because we cannot identtify any plausible prenatal personhood-conferring event other than conception, and that because fertilization creates a new genome, fertilization creates a person.  Arrayed against zygotic personhood stand accounts that demand one or another cerebral attribute for personhood.  My own account contends that upon a woman's and coprogenitor's morally permissible exercise of the discretion to decline intrauterine transfer of an embryo lying outside them, the developmental potential of that embryo is so bounded that it cannot mature, and hence that neither does there correspond to that embryo a nomologically possible person into which the embryo is then capable of developing and that could be harmed, nor could anyone gain anything for any being by treating the embryo itself as a person rather than by using it in humanitarian research.  We are back to the debate that raged before twinnability entered.  Our NA excursion has resembled the journey of Wagner's audience, as whimsically depicted by Anna Russell, as of the moment in Gotterdammerung when the ring falls to the bottom of the Rhine--the place where it lay when the story began.  "You could have skipped the first three nights and be as far ahead as you are now without sitting through this ordeal--and at these prices!"  [Pp. 502-03.]
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