Dignified arguments

The human embryo is very small, far smaller than the head of a pin. It cannot feel. It cannot think. It has no autonomous existence. And products derived from it are potentially both profit-making and wonder-working. No wonder scientists in the United States and Britain are exasperated by government restrictions. They see no ethical problem whatsoever with dicing embryos up on a laboratory bench.

But anyone who doubts the immense moral seriousness of the debate over the use of human embryos in stem cell research need only read a recent issue of Nature. Nature is the world’s leading scientific journal and its crisp editorials express the views of the world scientific establishment. For years it has been a fervent supporter of therapeutic cloning and embryo research, a harsh critic of President Bush’s restrictive stem cell policy and a cheerleader for the Labour government’s push to make the UK the world’s stem cell capital. In the words of Diana Schaub, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, "It is recognizably one of us — recognizable not to the naked eye, but to the scientifically trained eye."

So what has the scientifically trained eye of Nature done? It has followed Groucho Marx’s precept: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others." Since human dignity leads inescapably to the conclusion that embryo experimentation is inadmissable, it has ditched human dignity. "Dignity as a concept cannot be a director of moral judgement," it insists.

What is cringingly embarrassing about this argument is that it was cribbed from a controversial article by the Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker in The New Republic. Nature has taken seriously Pinker’s bad-tempered and abusive attack on a report from the President’s Council on Bioethics. This strongly supported human dignity against a growing number of bioethicists and scientists who claim that it is too squishy to serve as a rationale for bioethical decisions. "[W]hat it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare," sneered Pinker. "For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing."