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)

As elsewhere, the ethical debate on embryonic stem cell research in Central Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland, involves controversy over the status of the human embryo. There is a distinctive Kantian flavor to the standard arguments however, and we show how they often embody a set of misunderstandings and argumentative shortcuts we term "embryological Kantianism." We also undertake a broader analysis of three arguments typically presented in this debate, especially in official position papers, namely the identity, continuity, and potentiality arguments. (...) It turns out that these arguments do not support the strong, quasi-personal status accorded to the embryos in these official opinions. (shrink)

This article is a critical review of David Boonin's book, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2002), a significant contribution to the literature on this subject and arguably the most important monograph on abortion published in the past twenty years. Boonin's defense of abortion consists almost exclusively of sophisticated critiques of a wide variety of pro-life arguments, including ones that are rarely defended by pro-life advocates. This article offers a brief presentation of the book's contents with extended assessments of (...) those arguments of Boonin's that are his unique contributions to the abortion debate and with which the author disagrees: (1) Boonin's critique of the conception criterion and his defense of organized cortical brain activity as the acquired property that imparts to the fetus a right to life: (2) Boonin's defense of J. J. Thomson's violinist argument and his distinction between responsibility for existence and responsibility for neediness and its application to pregnancy. (shrink)

The study attempts to determine whether or not human fetuses have moral status. Three broad categories of answers to the question were analyzed. The arguments developed by Michael Tooley in Abortion and Infanticide are assessed as representative of the liberal view. Those of L. W. Sumner in Abortion and Moral Theory stand as moderate claims and in the position defended by William May in "Abortion and Man's Moral Being" represents a conservative position. The work of other authors is drawn upon (...) to help analyze the central arguments and to provide alternate interpretations. Among these are Jane English, Judith Thomson, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ronald Green, Joseph Donceel, Lawrence Becker, and Gareth Matthews. ;Though each of the three principal authors is found to present potentially forceful arguments, none of them is thought to provide a fully convincing account of the moral status of fetuses. Important difficulties stem from the use of particular theories of rights and from inadequate treatment of the concept of potentiality. ;The study arrives at two conclusions. The first is that arguments for or against the moral status of fetuses are grounded in more basic, conflicting moral theories about rights or moral behavior. Thus the question of the moral status of fetuses is not likely to receive a universally acceptable answer before moral philosophers come to agreement on basic moral principles. ;The second is that the discussions above have nonetheless yielded two important considerations which together form the basis of a tenable position on the moral status of fetuses. I suggest that an argument can be developed from two claims. One is a conservative claim that an embryo or fetus is the same entity as a later human being. The other is a moral principle discussed by Michael Tooley, viz. that where an entity will at some time in its life have rights, it is wrong to affect it so that the entity will be incapable of exercising those rights when the time comes. The argument supports the conclusion that, from the period of the embryo on, there is an entity that merits our moral consideration. (shrink)