Surplus embryps,nonreproductive cloning, and thef intend/foresee distinction

Hastings Center Report

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 29-36

  Patrick, William Fitz ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; ARTICLE; BIOETHICS; BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH; CLONING; COMMODIFICATION; CYTOLOGY; EMBRYO; EMBRYO RESEARCH; EMBRYO TRANSFER; ETHICS; FERTILIZATION IN VITRO; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION; HUMAN; LEGAL ASPECT; RESEARCH ETHICS; STEM CELL;

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION;

BIOETHICAL ISSUES; CLONING, ORGANISM; COMMODIFICATION; EMBRYO; EMBRYO RESEARCH; EMBRYO TRANSFER; ETHICS, RESEARCH; FERTILIZATION IN VITRO; HUMANS; RESEARCH EMBRYO CREATION; STEM CELLS;

EID: 0141797652     PISSN: 00930334     EISSN: 1552146X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3528435     Document Type: Review

References (22)

1. The useful expression "cloning-for-bio- medical-research" comes from the President's Council on Bioethics report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: President's Council on Bioethics, July, 2002, available online at www.bioethics.gov). I also follow the Council in referring to the clonal product as an "embryo" despite its not coming from a sperm and egg (see chapter III of the report).
2. The claim that the two kinds of case are on a moral par has been advanced by those on both the right and the left, as Outka has pointed out in "The Ethics of Human Stem Cell Research," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 12:2 (2002), 175-213.
3. See, on the right, R. M. Doerflinger, "The Ethics of Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research: A Catholic Viewpoint," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 9:2 (1999), 137-50, at 143, and on the left, J. A. Robertson, "Ethics and Policy in Embryonic Stem Cell Research," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 9:2 (1999), 109-36, at 126.
4. M.J. Sandel, "The Anti-Cloning Conundrum," Editorial for The New York Times, 28 May 2002, A-19.
5. Ibid.
6. See Sandel's personal statement in Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry.
7. Ibid., ch. 6, section 4.
8. In "Totipotency and the Moral Status of Embryos: New Problems for an Old Argument" (forthcoming in The Journal of Social Philosophy), I both try to undermine support for the idea that human embryos are moral persons and argue that they nonetheless have at least some moral status, which raises moral concerns over taking a purely opportunistic attitude toward them.
9. M.J. Meyer and L.J. Nelson, "Respecting What We Destroy: Reflections on Human Embryo Research," Hastings Center Report 31, no. 1 (2001): 16-23, at 19.
10. Outka helpfully appeals to the "nothing is lost" principle to further mitigate objections to the use of surplus IVF embryos for research, in contrast with cloning. See "The Ethics of Human Stem Cell Research," 194, 197, 205.
11. See J. Bennett, Morality and Consequences, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values II (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981), 45-116, at 110-11, and The Act Itself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 11. For discussion, see W. Quinn, "Actions, Intentions and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect," in Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 175-93, at 176 and 178. Quinn's response is to shift the focus of the intend/foresee distinction, but I will offer another way around these difficulties.
12. Sandel has made this argument-as an objection to trying to use the intend/foresee distinction to view IVE practices more favorably than practices such as therapeutic cloning-in a personal correspondence (29 May 2002).
13. P. Foot, "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect," reprinted in Killing and Letting Die, ed. B. Steinbock and A. Norcross (N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 1994), 266-79, at 268-9. Foot was responding to Hart's claim was that the harm to the fetus in a craniotomy abortion might be treated as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of the procedure, no less than in the case of an emergency hysterectomy performed on a pregnant woman-a claim reiterated by Bennett in Morality and Consequences, 105-109.
14. G.E.M. Anscombe, "Medalist's Address: Action, Intention and 'Double Effect'," in The Doctrine of Double Effect, ed. P.A. Woodward (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 50-66, at 63.
15. Foot, 270. For a good discussion of the further questions about the nature of the justification in this case, see J.J. Thomson, "The Trolley Problem," in Rights, Restitution and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1986).
16. See G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, 2d ed., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), and Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
17. See Foot, 268, and also Anscombe, 61-3.
18. Foot, 268.
19. I am grateful to Eugene Mills for this example.
20. Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, Executive Summary.
21. Doerflinger, 145.
22. I am indebted to Melissa Balmain, Joseph Pitt, Lee Zwanziger, and audience members at the 2002 Virginia Philosophical Association meeting at the University of Richmond, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.