Embryo Research :: Science Arguemtative Argument Papers

Embryo Research as a Paradigm of Ethical Pragmatics Research on the human embryo is one of the most obstinately controversial issues of international bioethical debate. There has not been enough of a consensus on this issue to allow for more than a formal compromise within Europe. I argue in this paper for a pragmatic approach to the problem which accords priority to "want-regarding" considerations but does not fail, as most utilitarian approaches do, to give due weight to the "morality-dependent harms" caused by the practice of embryo research to those rejecting it from other than want-regarding principles. I suggest that in deeply controversial bioethical issues a consistent want-regarding perspective should be prepared, under certain narrow conditions, to make pragmatic trade-offs between the inherent merits of the practice in question and the averse emotions of the public. These conditions are that the averse emotions are widespread, felt to be of existential importance, and stable under additional information, and that the costs in terms of reduced freedom and foregone humane progress do not seem excessive. Research on the human embryo is one of the most obstinately controversial issues of international bioethical debate. There has been not enough of a consensus on this issue to allow for more than a formal compromise even within Europe. In Germany, embryo research has been strictly prohibited since the Embryo Protection Act came into force in 1990. In other countries, such as Great Britain, research on the human embryo is permitted under certain narrowly defined conditions. But even in the countries with a ban on embryo research so much political pressure is exercised for a less rigid policy especially by medical and biological researchers that there is reason to doubt whether the ban on embryo research will be maintained in the long run. What is interesting about the debate from a philosophical point of view is the remarkable absence, for most of the time, of clear and stringent principles. Thus, there is some kind of consensus, at least in Europe, that human embryos should not be produced for research purposes. If embryos are made the objects of research at all they should be "supernumerary" embryos coming from in vitro fertilisations which have aimed at implantation in the maternal womb but which, for some reason or other, have not been used for this purpose. Even if there is an obvious moral difference between, one the one