Meilaender on stem-cell research and torture

This essay is long, but well worth the time.  I particularly liked this:

If human beings were simply members of our species, it might sometimes make sense to sacrifice one or another of them for the sake of the species as a whole. But human beings are not just members of the species or parts of a whole. Each human being is a "someone" who belongs to no earthly community to the whole extent of his being. That is why we are not interchangeable. The "value" of one thousand people may be more than that of one, but the thousand are not more than one in personal dignity.