Thanks for the continued conversation, here, here, and here. Eduardo is correct in viewing my position as absolutist - every human organism has equal moral worth. But, I don't see this claim as necessarily inconsistent with or prohibitive of making distinctions and favoring some human organisms over others.
Our universal and inviolate dignity as humans is realized within particular communities, and I may favor, may even have a duty to favor, those within my community over those outside my community. I feed, clothe, shelter, and educate my children before I feed, clothe, shelter, and educate someone else's child while recognizing the inherent and equal moral worth of the other child. My children are directly my responsibility, while someone else's child is only indirectly or more remotely my responsibility. I think this partially answers Eduardo and shows that the absolutist (and in my mind nonnegotiable) claim of equal moral worth is not inconsistent with distinguishing between humans and favoring some over others. But, I suspect I haven't fully responded, so I'll press on a little farther.
We distinguish between people all the time, favoring some over others. If our 24 hour news cycle (as it relates to murder and kidnapping) is indicative, we, as a society, favor children and attractive young white women. Sometimes in my constitutional law class, when we are discussing the limits of the law to address prejudice, I'll ask my students to think about how they read stories about crime in the local newspaper. Many, with rigorous honesty, will admit that they pay more attention to crimes committed against people like them whether on racial or, more likely, socio-economic grounds as identified by neighborhood. We favor, I think, those we identify with. Eduardo's hypothetical detached firefighter identifies more with the infants than with the tiny human organism in the petri dish, and will, therefore, save the infants before their younger brothers or sisters. He will also, I hasten to add, probably choose to save the infants over their disabled great-grandparents. He has been culturally conditioned to make these choices. Whether these choices are justified, I leave to others.
If we fail to see the equal moral worth of all human organisms, we will rationalize assigning less worth to some subset (blacks, Jews, fetuses, the disabled, the elderly) of humans in order for us to exert power over them in the name of some other real or imagined good. Even when we recognize the equal moral worth of all human organisms, we (or, at least I) must struggle with the temptation to favor those who are most like me. The lawyer wanted to justify himself so he asked Jesus, "who is my neighbor?"
While we're at it, I might as well make clear why I think the hypothetical may actually matter for more than just challenging Michael S.'s claim.
To be clear, for starters, the magisterium says embryonic stem cell research and abortion are wrong, and that is good enough for me. I can understand the logic of what the hierarchy says on these issues, and while I can appreciate alternative positions, I am willing to accept the Church's judgment on faith. In other words, I do not dissent from these teachings, although I do have questions about how best (or appropriately) to translate these moral teachings into reality through the law.
How does the hypothetical relate to this? As we've been discussing, I have concerns about how to weigh the injustice of abortion and stem cell research against other injustices, particularly as relates to the problem of deciding for which party to vote. I think the hypothetical provides some perspective on how to go about doing that. It suggests to me, for example, that the claim that the loss of life due to stem cell research makes it impermissible to ever vote for a Democrat oversimplifies the analysis by more than a little bit. A mechanism for weighing these issues that ignores the difference between an eight-cell embryo that is destroyed in research and a child killed on the streets of Baghdad, or that equates stem cell research, however wrong it is, with Nazi medical experiments, will not do.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I read a while back about a new technique in which one cell was taken from the embryo and used to generate stem cells for research, leaving the embryo capable of developing into a healthy child. I know that this technique (of removing one cell without destroying the embryo) is used within IVF to screen for genetic defects before transferring embryos in a mother, and I understand that it has been used with a great deal of success for those diagnostic purposes for some time. I have not yet been able to track down an official Church evaluation of the use of this technique to generate stem cells for research and would appreciate it if another MOJer (or a reader) could direct me towards something.
Sorry, Mark, but I just don't get what you don't get. Michael S. made the following claim:
We cannot conclude that some types human
organisms have more worth than other types or that human organisms at
some stages of development have more worth than those at other stages.
How is the hypothetical not directly relevant to that claim? I'm not talking about stem cell research or abortion with this hypothetical, as I made clear in my original post, since those involve intentional harm. I'm just asking about Michael S.'s absolutist claim, which I found interesting and somewhat counterintuitive (and not at all necessary to the anti-abortion position) that we cannot distinguish among any of the stages of life between conception and natural death, favoring one over another. I think we by and large do favor certain life stages over others, particularly at the earliest stages of development, and I think that it is reasonable to do so. Moreover, I think your proposed alternatives perfectly demonstrate
the limited point the hypothetical is trying to bring to light.
The simple fact is that if I made my hypothetical such that there were
an aryan in
one room and a Jew in the other, or a disabled person in one room and
healthy person in the other, the answer people would give would be
quite different. What the Nazi firefighter would do is also completely irrelevant, except to show us what NOT to do.
No one on the site has come forward to say that they would choose the blastocysts over the infants. 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. I suppose in the end this hypothetical is getting at a similar point to one that Steve has tried to raise on several occasions, to no avail, when he has asked why we don't treat failure of embryos to implant as a public health crisis.
We are in complete agreement that it certainly does NOT follow
from this hypothetical that we can do anything we want to blastocysts. For what it's worth, I think the suggestion that we have to treat all stages of life between conception and natural death as having exactly the same value (which is what I take to be Michael's position) or, if not, anything goes presents a
false choice.
I don't get what the infants vs. blastocysts hypo is supposed to prove. Sure, our intuition is that the fireman would choose to rescue the infants. I suppose that means we value infants more than blastocysts. So what? Does that mean we should not regard blastocysts as human persons who should be protectected from a decision to eliminate them? Or is the hypo to be taken to mean that because we would value infants more than blastocysts, then we should feel free to honor the choice to eliminate that form of human life when it is not necessary to do so? If we can pick and choose among different forms of human life, what is the limit? Apparently, we can value the healthy more than the disabled, the young more than the elderly, the Aryan more than the Jew and so on, and make life and death choices accordingly For example, who would the Nazi fireman choose to save -- the Aryan or the Jew? All the hypo "proves" is that people tend to value some forms of life more than others. How does that resolve the ethical problem created by one who chooses to end an innocent life because it is unwanted?
It's not "legal theory," but it seems relevant . . .
Rod Dreher -- author of "Crunchy Cons" who blogs here -- has posted a long account of his decision to leave the Roman Catholic Church and become Orthodox. As many readers know, Dreher wrote a great deal about the clergy-sex-abuse scandal.
Here is a post, over at Commonweal, about Dreher's decision. Here (scroll down) is something from First Things.
Dreher's account makes for hard, sobering reading, I think. Fr. Neuhaus writes:
Having said that, however, Dreher’s essay is important. Yes, his decision is in large part reactive. But he is reacting to very real corruptions in the Catholic Church. I hope every Catholic bishop and priest will read his essay, and especially those bishops and priests who are inclined to heave a sigh of relief that we have weathered the sex-abuse scandal. And every Catholic engaged in the standard intra-church quarrels, whether on the left or the right, should take to heart what he says about Catholics being more preoccupied with church battles than with following Jesus.
Dreher concludes his reflection with this: “Still, those of you more charitably inclined, please just pray for me and my family, that we always live in truth, and do the right thing, and be found pleasing to God, the Father of us all.” No Catholic should hesitate to join in that prayer.
Paul Caron (TaxProfBlog) has a post, "Which Law Prof blogs have the juice," in which he discusses the "blog juice rating" (click here for the juice-o-meter) of a number of law blogs. Although he forgot to run the numbers for MOJ, here are the ratings for a few law-related blogs:
I ran the numbers for MOJ, and got a score of 4.6, which puts us in pretty good company!
Eduardo suggests that this story (which is right out of O. Henry), "Jobless man asks judge for jail time," "speaks for itself" with respect to "our social safety net." Does it? What does it say?
Thanks, Michael, for your thoughtful response. Before I go rake leaves (ugh), let me refine the hypothetical a bit, to try to focus in on the issue more carefully. First, assume that you have no prior connection to any of the four. You are just a firefighter, and you know from the owners of the house that there are two blastocysts in one room and two infants in another, but none of them are related (or even known) to you. This removes the element of differential emotional attachment. Also assume the infants and blastocysts are as healthy as they can be. I assume none of this would change the answer you give. Whether you feel guilt afterwards doesn't really answer the question whether this is a form of discrimination among life stages. That is, if there were two infants in each room, you might choose the room to the left, or you might choose the room to the right. You would still feel guilt, but you would acknowledge that you had no choice and that the choice between the two rooms had been entirely arbitrary and random. The situation would be precisely like the one confronted by Buridan's Ass. Maybe you chose the room on the right becuase you are right-handed or because of the color of the door or because you flipped a coin, but you would attach no significance to the content of the choice: you just have to act. And, without more facts in the hypothetical, there would be no claim that you had discriminated against the children you didn't pick and, really, no basis for discriminating. (Again, the absence of discrimiantion would not reduce your feeling of guilt and sadness at being forced to make the choice.) Is there any chance, however, that anyone would save the petri dish over the infants or go through the same random process in determining which room to enter? I doubt it, though I'd love to hear what others on the site think. It seems to me that the force of the hypothetical is that it taps into the intuition that everyone would always save the infants. Does that choice demonstrate that it is rational not to treat all life stages equally?
Eduardo, thank you for playing devil's advocate. The hypothetical reminded me of the scene in the movie Sophie's Choice, in which Meryl Streep's character was forced by the Nazi's to choose between her son and her daughter.
As Eduardo notes: "there is obviously a difference between choosing whom to save and actually intending to cause harm to something or someone." And, those who advocate abortion in the name of choice and the destruction of nascent human life in the name of science advocate harm to human life in its earliest stages in order to bring about some other perceived good. Eduardo is "not aware of an argument (even by people who support stem cell research and abortion) that unborn human beings are not entitled to any respect or dignity at all." Certainly advocates of abortion and the destruction of embryos for scientific purposes afford unborn human beings less respect and dignity than is afforded animals in our culture.
Setting aside the obvious difference between choosing whom to save and actually intending to cause harm, doesn't the choice between infant and blastocysts turn largely on one's emotional attachment or in some people - depending on their psychological makeup - on utilitarian calculations. Most people would choose the infant because they have grown more attached to the infant. But suppose the infant had a disease and would be dead within the week anyway, might some be tempted to make a different choice.
I have four children and each has a bedroom. If we had a fire in the house, and I could only save one and I had an equal chance of saving each one, I would be forced to make a truly tragic choice that would haunt me the rest of my life? How did I choose? How did I distinguish? Why did I choose the one I did? Did I love this one more? Did I feel sorry for this one more? Did I think this one was less capable of helping themselves? A physchologist would benefit finanicially from my anguish.
Reading Tort cases in law school and during my clerkship year was not good for me and my active imagination. Suppose I had two children in my car, one mine and the other entrusted to me by a friend. You can see what is coming. A car wreck. Only one can be saved. Who do I save. My heart wants to save my child. I am much more attached to my child, and based on this distinction (coupled with a sense of duty because God has entrusted me with this precious life), I'd prefer my child's life over the other child. On the other hand, my friend has entrusted me with his precious child, and I have a duty to my friend to take care of his child. Which do I choose in the moment?
I agree with Eduardo (for the reasons he gives and the one's articulated above) that although the hypothetical is relevant, it is a bit silly.
As to the second part of his post offering (again in the spirit of debate without owning them) reasons why the unborn human organisms (or some set of the unborn) possess less dignity and worth than other human organisms, I'll respond later by quoting from a forthcoming article by Robert George.
