Still Not Getting It -- Comments from Robbie George

Robbie George has thoughtfully intervened by email to me in our debate over blastocysts vs. infants. I will let him respond to Eduardo's argument that he does not get what I don't get about this hypothetical: Robbie begins

"I'm deeply skeptical, as I see from your MoJ posting in reply to Eduardo Penalver you are, of the capacity of emotional reactions to disclose ethical truths, especially when it comes to difficult and contested ethical questions.  (This is one point on which I sometimes find myself a little at odds with Leon Kass---a thinker for whom I have the greatest admiration.)  But even assuming that our reaction to the hypothetical dilemma sketched by Professor Penalver could disclose something about the moral status of human beings in the embryonic stage, a profound problem is presented by the difficulty of imagining how we would feel---what our emotional reactions would be---in circumstances in which all the factors other than stage of development just as such incline our feelings towards rescuing the infants.

When we first hear the hypothetical case, we immediately think:  "of course, I would rescue the infants."  But at work here are lots of implicit assumptions---many having no necessary connection to the differences of developmental stage between embryos and infants.  Unless we pause very deliberately to disentangle things, we will (for example) be working with the background assumption that the infants would suffer intense pain in the fire, and perhaps even experience terror.  In addition, we will be assuming that the infants have parents and perhaps grandparents, siblings, and others who have already bonded with them and have begun forming relationships with them.  These people will be devastated by the loss of these infants, and it will intensify their pain to know that the infants' death came by incineration.  So, if we are to have any hope of learning anything about the moral status of embryos from the problem, we will have to stipulate that the infants had, as it happened, been given general anaesthesia just before the fire began and will therefore feel no pain and experience no terror.  We will have to stipulate further that no one has bonded with the infants or formed any sort of relationship with them.  Now, when we begin entering these stipulations (and we would have to enter still more, but I don't want to make this comment too tedious), we become less sure of just what (and how powerful) our feelings or "intuitions" would be in the circumstances of the fire.  But let us grant, for the sake of argument, that even with all the stipulations entered, we would still find ourselves drawn to rescue the infants rather thant the embryos in tragic circumstances in which a choice between them must be made.  Does that tell us that humans in the embryonic stage really are inferior in moral worth to infants (or, at least, what we really believe "deep down" that they are inferior)?

Let's step back to get a bead on the problem.  We assume that "everyone would choose to rescue the infants."  Yet no one can identify a reason (that can stand up to analytical scrutiny) for distinguishing in fundamental worth and dignity between human beings on the basis of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency.  That is because we humans possess fundamental worth and dignity by virtue of the kind of substance we are---namely, a rational animal organism---and not in virtue of accidental qualities, such as the stage of development we happen to have reached.  So we rational animal organisms possess worth and dignity from the point at which we come into being, and we possess them for our entire lives.  We come to possess them by coming into being as a human (or other rational animal, if such exist) individual, and we cannot cease to possess them except by ceasing to be (by dying).

So the question is whether the fact that "everyone would choose to rescue the infants" indicates that there is some deep reason---one that no one has been able to articulate (and which is perhaps not articulable)---for supposing that infants and those at later developmental stages possess greater worth and dignity than human beings in the embryonic and (perhaps) fetal stages.  The point of the hypothetical dilemma is to find a way to defeat the analytical argument that at least seems to show rigorously that the nature of human dignity is such that it cannot depend on accidental qualities.  (I'll attach to this message the ms. of an article I have forthcoming in Daedalus which presents a version of the argument in non-technical terms.)

Now, Professor Penalver is heading in the right direction by trying to eliminate all elements of differential attachment, so that we are left with a pure choice (in which emotion plays no role) between rescuing the embryos or the infants.  The idea is that by eliminating emotion, we're left only with reason.  The reason is, in other words, whatever it is that is left when we squeeze out all the elements of emotional motivation.  So the inference that is invited is that, since we would (it is assumed) in the tragic circumstances choose to rescue the infants, there must be a reason.  The trouble, I think, is that it is impossible to remove all the elements of emotional motivation. Building in all the stipulations necessary to make the hypothetical case work as a true test, there still remain powerful emotional factors. It is far easier to empathize with and emotionally relate to the infants because (though they are no more capable than the embryos of immediately exercising characteristically human mental functions) they manifest more fully than the embryos qualities we associate with ourselves.  They have faces, for example, and hands.  (As a matter of psychological fact, humans across cultures tend to regard their faces and hands as integral to their identities as individuals.)  The infants are sentient, as any adult contemplating the hypothetical dilemma would have to be.  (Of course, some living adults lack sentience, just as there are adults lacking faces and hands.)  The infants have begun expressing, albeit in a very rudimentary way (so rudimentary as to justify the quotation marks I am about to set the term within), a "personality."  Their humanity (though no more real than the embryos') is much more evident to appearances.  Indeed, it is immediately evident, in a way that the humanity of the embryos is not.  (That, in significant measure, is what produces the debate over the human and moral status of the embryo in the first place.)

What does all this mean?  It means that reflection on the hypothetical dilemma does not enable us to identify a reason, strictly speaking, for favoring the infants over the embryos purely by virtue of their more advanced stage of development.  (Remember, we have by entering a set of stipulations created a pure, but entirely artificial, case.)  But that doesn't necessarily mean that it would be morally wrong to act on the entirely understandable and widely shared emotional motives we would have for doing so.  It is not always wrong in accepting bad side effects---even where death is among the side effects---to resolve a dilemma on the basis of one's feelings.  Where one is not acting contrary to the integral directiveness of reason(s), one may (even in tragic circumstances) act on subrational motives.  For example, no one would criticize a mother who rescued her own two infants (or embryos) over two infants (or embryos) that are not her own.  Indeed, few would criticize her for rescuing her own infant instead of a pair of twins or even triplets where she is rushing to escape a fire and has time to rescue either her own infant or the others, but cannot rescue hers and the others.  And we could multiply examples to make the same point.

Professor Penalver, if I understand him correctly, is trying to use the hypothetical dilemma to show that somehow deep down we perceive a reason to think that infants are of greater worth and dignity than embryos based on their more advanced stage of development.  For reasons that I hope I've made clear, I don't think it will accomplish that goal.  He is right about one thing, though.  Whatever it shows, reflection on the hypothetical dilemma does not license deliberate embryo-killing. Deliberate (or "direct") killing is not what is at issue when someone faces a choice of whom to rescue.  A judgment in favor of saving X instead of Y, where both cannot be saved, does not entail that we would be justified in killing Y, even where killing Y could enable us to save X (by, for example, providing a transplantable vital organ needed to keep X alive).  Plainly it would be wrong to harvest the heart and liver of a PVS patient to save the life of a fifteen year old girl---or even two girls---who, with organ transplants, could lead long healthy lives. Similarly, I hope that Penalver would agree that it is wrong to kill embryos (whether in the zygote, morula, or blastocyst stages or in later stages) to produce pluripotent stem cells in the hope of creating therapies to benefit more developmentally mature human beings.

But this brings me to a point on which I am confident that Professor Penalver is mistaken.  He says:  "I'm quite certain that if I said there were a disabled person in one room and a healthy person in the other, people would (correctly) say that they would find some random way to choose between the two rooms."  Depending on the type and extent of disability, I'm quite certain that the opposite is the case.  Imagine that in one room there is a normal, healthy fifteen year old girl.  In the other, there is a twenty-three year old woman in a persistent vegetative state.  My guess is that most people would not "find some random way to choose" whom to rescue.  Most people would rescue the girl.  And they would make the same choice, even if the option were rescuing two young women in PVS conditions.  Now, I think we can make sense of this without supposing that the PVS patients are, by virtue of their debilitated condition, inferior to the girl in basic human worth and dignity.  We would, again, need to begin the analyis by entering stipulations to purify the comparison for analytical purposes.

(A final parenthetical point.  Professor Penalver has again raised the question why we do not consider early embryo loss to be a public health problem.  But those of us who believe in the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of human life in all stages and conditions do consider it to be a serious public health problem, though it is impossible to do very much about it given the current state of knowledge.  Still pro-life scientists and physicians take it seriously.  They work to prevent early embryo loss and miscarriages when they can, both for the sake of embryonic life, and to assist couples whose desire to have children is frustrated by implantation failure or other problems leading to embryo death.  And, needless to say, many defenders of embryonic human life oppose forms of "contraception" that prevent newly conceived embryos from implanting.)"

Robert George