More Thoughts On Stem Cells

My previous post had already gotten longer than I wanted, so I decided to put these thoughts in their own post.

Let's engage in a though experiment, of if we're feeling fancy, a "Gedankenexperiment". For the sake of argument, let's suppose it can be clearly shown there is absolutely nothing morally objectionable -- nothing even "morally questionable" about embryonic stem cell destruction.

Supposing this, here's the question: Should the government be funding embryonic stem cell research?

I claim no and for two entirely separate reasons.

For my first reason, I'd like to invoke Dale Frank's recent (excellent) essay "Morality and Politics". To fund anything, the government has to first come up with funds. To do that, they tax. And why do you and I pay taxes? Coercion. Mr. Frank, please explain:

As a normative statement of morality, I have no quibble at all with the idea that wealthy people should devote a significant portion of their income to the poor. I would heartily approve of private citizens involving themselves in a campaign to encourage the wealthy to support single mothers, fund programs for at-risk inner-city kids, or devote some of their income to any of a thousand worthy causes to help the less fortunate. Those who agreed to provide that funding would be performing a virtuous act.

But virtue, to be virtue, requires free will. The moment I put a gun to a rich man's head, plop his checkbook down and tell him that I will not leave until either his signature or his brains are on that check, his acquiescence is no longer a matter of virtue. He has simply been robbed, even if I take that check and distribute the money to widows and orphans.

The preferred tax policy of the left, of course, is a graduated income tax, whereby the more money you have, the more you are coerced into giving to the government. They get to choose how much money to take from you—irrespective of your wishes—because they believe that taking your money against your will is a moral act, as long as the the money is given to someone they consider more deserving. Moreover, in pursuit of that end, they require you to keep detailed financial records, which they reserve the right to inspect at any time, to ensure you're giving them all the money they demand.

They consider obtaining money by force, in order to distribute it as they please, to be a moral political solution. This, from the people who are constantly telling us that "you can't legislate morality", when that is precisely what they are trying to do.

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Given that all government relies on coercion, it seems to me that the only ideology with any claim to morality is one that reduces government coercion to the smallest possible amount, and leaves the citizenry both economically and morally unhindered to make their own decisions

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In my view, the more coercive a government is, the less moral it is. The only legitimately moral acts of government are to protect the individual citizen from force or fraud, and to protect the citizenry as a whole from foreign aggression. Once a government goes beyond that, for any purpose, it becomes increasingly immoral, because it increasingly becomes a tool for one group of citizens to use force on another group. And it doesn't matter if you're grabbing money at gunpoint to give to widows and orphans, or jailing pornographers for corrupting the morals of our children; it's still morally illegitimate, because the ends do not justify the means.

So the lofty goal of funding research to, say, cure Alzheimer's, is actually immoral because it's done by coercion. Give yourself some time to think this one out. And, April 17 might be a good day to set aside time to think it through.


Moving on to my second reason, let's expand our thought experiment to even accept that government funding of research is a hands down "good thing" and wholly moral. Perhaps we can even go so far in our thought experiment to agree the government has a responsibility to work towards curing Alzheimer's. Well, at this point, the government has a several options in the realm of "stem cell research": adult stem cells, cord blood stems, and embryonic stem cells.

It seems reasonable to suggest that, with our mandate of responsibility to cure Alzheimer's, we should choose the type of stem cells with the most likely chance of success.

To quote Wikipedia:

To date, no approved medical treatments have been derived from embryonic stem cell research.

and

There is a technical problem of graft-versus-host disease associated with allogeneic stem cell transplantation

Hmmm...

Moving from the Wikipedia article on embryonic stem cells to that on adult stem cells:

Adult stem cells are being developed for use in treatments for a variety of human conditions, ranging from blindness to spinal cord injury. Since adult stem cells can be harvested from the patient, potential ethical issues and immunogenic rejection are averted.

If you are a libertarian or even just a pragmatist, tell the Congress not to fund embryonic stem cell research.

On Embryo Ethics

Life size model of baby at 8 weeks after conception

The Boston Globe recently ran an article about embryonic stem cell research titled "Embryo ethics". I suspect the article's author, Michael J. Sandel, and I draw fairly different conclusions at the end of the day, but I welcome his article to the debate. For far too longer, there's been effectively no debate.

Let me start by addressing some minor "meta" things that irked me before engaging in the debate myself.

First, the article made the front page of Digg, with the Digg submission titled "Embryo ethics: Why Stem Cells Aren't People". I suspect from the article that Sandel would agree that "stem cells aren't people" but he never makes that stark claim, nor does he in any sense "prove" such a claim.

Second, the Digg submission is in Digg's "General Sciences" category. Most of the article deals specifically with President Bush's views on embryonic stem cell research and the article is pretty much devoid of scientific facts and figures. It's largely philosophical and political (which is fitting given the fact that Sandel is a political philosophy professor at Harvard). The article should have been filed under "politics," not science.

Third and final "irk." In the Digg submission title, in the article lead in, and in the article's introductory sentence, the phrase used for "embryonic stem cell" is just "stem cell." Doing so confuses the debate and I wish people (by which I really mean "the media," I guess) would take the time to regularly differentiate what kind of stem cells they're talking about.

OK, now to the content of Sandel's article. Sandel uses the four pages of his article to ultimately arrive at the conclusion that President Bush's position on embryonic stem cell research isn't logically coherent. Sandel's argument boils down to:

[Bush] vetoed a bill that would have funded new embryonic stem cell research, saying that he did not want to support "the taking of innocent human life."

But it is a striking feature of the president's position that, while restricting the funding of embryonic stem cell research, he has made no effort to ban it.

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If harvesting stem cells from a blastocyst were truly on a par with harvesting organs from a baby, then the morally responsible policy would be to ban it, not merely deny it federal funding.

Sandel's argument is a valid one, and I can recall Bush highlighting the fact he wasn't working to ban embryonic stem cell research as though that was a "good thing" back in the 2004 debates. When he did that, it rubbed me the wrong way because it doesn't make sense. "I'm commited to not having the government fund murder - but, don't worry, I'm not going to ban it!"

Unfortunately, I suspect most American might actually hold a similar view. And, in fact, Sandel event hints at this, saying "But those who view embryos in this way should not only be opposing embryonic stem cell research; they should also be leading a campaign to shut down what they must regard as rampant infanticide in fertility clinics. Some principled right-to-life opponents of stem cell research meet this test of moral consistency", which leaves a pretty strong implication that there is a good portion of the right-to-life community that isn't part of that "principled" "some".

The fact that the President and a supposed outside-the-principled-some don't have a logically coherent moral position doesn't dismiss the claim that a blastocyst stage embryo is a human being however. Sandel hints at an implication that it does some how dismiss that claim (and the Digg community is apparently buying that implication.) That implication is nothing more than a twist on the argumentum ad populum fallacy. ("If the majority can't believe it in a logically consistent way, it must not be true!")

And at this point, I'd actually like to draw on another logical fallacy - Loki's Wager. To quote Wikipedia:

Loki is a trickster god [...] who [...] once made a bet with some dwarves. The price should Loki lose the wager, it was agreed, would be his head. Loki lost the bet, and in due time the dwarves came to collect the head which had become rightfully theirs. Loki had no problem with giving up his head, but he insisted they had absolutely no right to take any part of his neck. Everyone concerned discussed the matter; and, one could suppose, they are discussing the matter still. Certain parts were obviously head, and certain parts were obviously neck, but neither side could agree exactly where the one ended and the other began. As a result, Loki keeps his head indefinitely.

Consider the question of "when (human) life begins." Like identifying what's a "head," there are some example it's easy to classify. A 20 year old, a five year old, and a 1 month old are all easily classified as "human life." How about a fetus only still partially in the womb? A fetus entirely still in the womb? An eight week old fetus (a model of which is shown above)? An eight day blastocyst stage embryo?

Much like distinguishing exactly where the neck ends and the head begins, deciding a cut off on when life begins is currently, at best, nothing more than conjecture and is colored as much by theology as science.

To give in to Loki's fallacy would be to conclude that since the "concept cannot be defined, [it] therefore cannot be discussed". That's not what I'm aiming for here. Rather, what I'd like to add to the embryonic stem cell research debate is the claim that until we can say with absolute certainty that a six to eight day blastocyst stage embryo is not a human person, we should withhold government funding from embryonic stem cell research (and, in fact, ban embryonic stem cell research).

Moral relativism quickly enters the picture and tries to blur things with a counter claim along the lines of "well, if I don't believe a blastocyst is a human person, I should be able to do research and/or be benefited by research done on human embryonic stem cells." This is yet another fallacious argument; if I hold a sincere belief that you aren't a valid human person, that doesn't give me license to experiment in a way that would destroy your life.

What matters is the actual nature of the blastocyst stage embryo: is it a human life or not? Until it can be definitively shown as not being a life, how dare we engage in activities that destroy what may be a human life.

via digg ...