The President’s Council on Bioethics has addressed the moral status of human preembryos in its reports on stem cell research and human therapeutic cloning. Although the Council has been criticized for being hand-picked to favor the right-to-life viewpoint concerning human preembryos, it has embraced the idea that the right-to-life position should be defended in secular terms. This is an important feature of the Council’s work, and it demonstrates a recognition of the need for genuine engagement between opposing sides in the (...) debate over stem cell research. To promote this engagement, the Council has stated in secular terms several arguments for the personhood of human preembryos. This essay presents and critiques those arguments, and it concludes that they are unsuccessful. If the best arguments in support of the personhood of human preembryos have been presented by the Council, then there are no reasonable secular arguments in support of that view. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ‘The Pro‐Life Argument from Substantial Identity: A Defence’, Patrick Lee argues that the right to life is an essential property of those that possess it. On his view, the right arises from one's ‘basic’ or ‘natural’ capacity for higher mental functions: since human organisms have this capacity essentially, they have a right to life essentially. Lee criticises an alternative view, on which the right to life arises from one's ‘developed’ capacity for higher mental functions (or development of some (...) other accidental property). I argue that his criticisms of this alternative view are misguided or self‐defeating, and that there are good reasons to hold we have a right to life accidentally rather than essentially. (shrink)