Friday, November 23, 2007

Okay, Some More Truth, Then   [David Freddoso]

BadIdea continues the debate over stem-cells. He concedes points I made on Wednesday night about the dishonesty behind the political embryonic-research-funding movement (and I will arrogantly recommend my own post as a must-read, because it took me a long time to write and document, and you'll enjoy it).

More importantly, he accuses the Right generally of "hypocrisy" on the issue of stem-cells and mentions a few of us here. Just to get it out of the way, I will register my token objection to his misuse of the word "hypocrisy" — he really means to accuse the Right of having an "inconsistent argument." But herein lies the core of his argument, which is a good one:

It’s dishonest when Democratic politicians pretend that stem cell panaceas are right around the corner (or even more ridiculously, that they already exist but evil Republicans won’t let you have them), but it’s also dishonest when Republican spinsters claim that an immediate lack of direct applications and treatments proves the uselessness of any one avenue of research.

It may surprise you, but I think he is dead-on right (even if there are deeper scientific and medical problems with cloning research and embryo therapies than he lets on in his post as a whole). Before I get to that, I am with him in being skeptical of Bush's role in precipitating the new breakthrough — although I'd come at it from a different angle. There is something to be said of Bush's political resistance to doing just one kind of science (of which I am happy, don't get me wrong), but he never really stopped state, federal, private and foreign money from flowing to ESCR anyway. And because the new method, as Ian Wilmut has said, will be "more productive" in the long run (it is very difficult and expensive to clone people), I would expect that scientists would have arrived at this breakthrough eventually either way.

But to return to BadIdea's main point on stem-cells, the argument against embryonic research on the grounds that adult research is more medically promising has always been troubling — or at least, it has unintended consequences that I don't think most people on the Right have considered.

Opponents of embryonic research have often pointed out — correctly — that adult stem-cells have shown and do show more promise currently in the field of medicine. I call this the "effectiveness" argument. Yet there remains the unanswered scientific question of whether embryonic research would have panned out to be more effective over time. The strength of the "effectiveness" argument, it would seem, always hinged on this question.

The "effectiveness" argument has always had a kernel of truth to it: Were I a paralytic, I would object to seeing limited resources diverted away from something that could cure me in my lifetime (namely, adult stem-cells) and dedicated instead to something that is speculative and probably 20 years down the road (embryonic stem-cells). Note that this represents a divergence between "science" and "medicine."

I have met paralyzed advocates of adult stem-cell research funding who have made precisely this argument, and it seems sound and practical. Yet it has serious problems that no one on the Right has addressed. For example: Does it follow from this same argument that we should avoid funding this newly discovered (and like ESCR, still speculative) pluripotent adult stem-cell research in favor of something that will bring more immediate results — such as traditional adult stem-cells? Or does the Right simply junk the "effectiveness" argument now that the ethical concerns have disappeared?

In other words, the "effectiveness" argument either lends itself to some self-deception, or else it asserts a primacy of medicine over science that I don't think most of its adherents have thought through.

I reject this conundrum altogether, but here I might be in the minority. I believe that Congress is supposed to help the cause of science by awarding patents, not by subsidizing biotech corporations and universities who do one kind of research or another. Ideally, government would skim much less from the private sector in the first place, because it only misallocates capital according to political considerations. Instead of seeing their money go into bridges to nowhere, hippie museums, the Department of Commerce, foreign military occupations, etc., etc....Americans — citizens, big biotech, universities, etc. — could voluntarily do more good for humanity in science and other pursuits, whether they do so for profit or for philanthropy.

Anyway, the more important principle at issue here is the one that really underpins opposition to the embryonic research. I would put it this way: The willful destruction of human life in a science experiment is always unethical, regardless of any good consequences it may bring. At the very least we should not subsidize this practice, and ideally it should be banned for the same reason our government (theoretically) protects human life in all other cases as one of its core missions.

This is where most pro-lifers have been on this issue all along. It is completely consistent and has strong philosophical grounding: Whether in science or in any other human endeavor, the end never justifies the means. This philosophical truth is relevant to you whether you take a Christian, Aristotelian, or Secular Humanist view toward human activity.

When people deviate from this principle — and this includes those who sneer at pro-lifers for being "anti-science" for asserting that science does not trump ethics — they embrace a "consequentialist" philosophy that opens a moral floodgate. If consequences can determine the morality of an act, then why is it wrong to cheat on a test, or to cheat on one's wife, or to fabricate a news story? If no one finds out about it, and there are no bad consequences, then why is there anything wrong with those acts? (In fact, by this logic, the real evil would be to expose the crime, creating bad consequences all around.)

In our modern utilitarian culture — which weighs pleasure and pain for the many and for the few as its main moral criteria — the logic extends thus: What is our moral basis for saying it is wrong to hurt someone — even to cause death — if there are greater benefits for a larger number of people? Why is it wrong to torture people, if it could stop a terror attack? Why not drop the atom bomb, fully intending to kill civilians, if that weakens the survivors' opposition to surrender? After all, each of these acts could prevent a greater number of deaths and pain for a much larger number of people. Does that make them right?

The only way to stop this chain of reasoning is to draw the line much sooner. Some human acts are just plain wrong and cannot be considered good, no matter the consequences. This, and not some argument over effectiveness, underpins the real argument against embryo destruction.

11/23 07:44 PMShare