Underlying President Bush's view regarding stemcell research and cloning are two assumptions: we originate at conception, and we have full moral status as soon as we originate. I will challenge both assumptions, argue that at least the second is mistaken, and conclude that the President's approach is unsustainable.

The main objection to human embryonic stem cell research is that it involves killing human embryos, which are essentially beings of the same sort that you and I are. This objection presupposes that we once existed as early embryos and that we had the same moral status then that we have now. This essay challenges both those presuppositions, but focuses primarily on the first. I argue first that these presuppositions are incompatible with widely accepted beliefs about both assisted conception and (...) monozygotic twinning. I then argue that we never existed as embryos. If this last claim is right, killing an embryo does not kill someone like you or me but merely prevents one of us from existing. (shrink)

This paper advances a new criterion of a vulnerable population in research. According to this criterion, there are consent-based and fairness-based reasons for calling a group vulnerable. The criterion is then applied to the case of people with serious illnesses. It is argued that people with serious illnesses meet this criterion for reasons related to consent. Seriously ill people have a susceptibility to “enticing offers” that hold out the prospect of removing or alleviating illness, and this susceptibility reduces their ability (...) to safeguard their own interests. This explains the inclusion of people with serious illnesses in the Belmont Report’s list of populations needing special protections, and supports the claim that vulnerability is the rule, rather than the exception, in biomedical research. (shrink)

: This paper starts from three assumptions: that we are essentially human organisms, that we start to exist at conception, and that we retain our identity throughout our lives. The identity claim provides the background to argue that it is irrational for a person to claim that it would be impermissible to kill her now but permissible to have killed her at an earlier age. The notion of "full moral status" as an ascertainable property is questioned and shown to be (...) dependent on previously accepted moral norms. It is concluded that the exclusion of the very young from the scope of the norm o f common morality that prohibits the killing of the innocent amounts to discrimination on the basis of age. (shrink)