Yep.
I’m not in this thread trying to make the case that you should care about the lives of veal calves or any other animal that experiences an excrutiatingly horrid life for the service of passing and not-at-all-necessary pleasure.
However, I am making the case about priorities.
Stem cells (or, for that matter, even very early stage fetuses) feel nothing, care for nothing, have no hopes or dreams to be shattered, have no prior expectations they hope to see carried out. They might some day grow into one or more functioning human beings, but they have not yet. In fact, they are litterally and essentially the plans and SOME of the construction equipment for building a functioning human being, but the process has simply not been carried out to a stage where anything yet works in any functional way relevant to the particular life of a human person or any feeling animal. Most of the materials have yet to be shipped in. None of the major systems are set to functioning in any way relevant to making the being think or feel (stem cells, indeed, have no nervous system at all, nor even any differentiated tissues. Even gastrulation has yet to occur!)
I think it’s unarguable that it is the particular sorts of functioning (giving rise to thoughts, feelings, expectations for the future, etc. all the capacities that are directly related to rights) that certain beings have that are the bare minimums for having moral concern for what happens to them. That is why we don’t charge a second murder for cremating a loved one’s corpse: we recognize that once a body has ceased to function in a certain way, it no longer has what it is that we empathize with and worry about harming. So too when that functioning has yet to come into being, as it certainly has in the case of stem cells. Harming them harms nothing that can possibly have any concern whatsoever for the treatment to which they are put.
PETA is often maligned on these boards (albiet as much for their goofball tactics as for their values), but at least as I understand it, PETA is at least less insane than those that think stem cells need protection and rights. Their priorities are at least one step less completely backwards up and morally empty. Shrimp and bugs have more valuable and vivid internal lives than stem cells or even young fetuses (perhaps even older ones, but to make the case as clear as possible, I’m limiting it to outside the gray areas).
And at least PETA seems to have some sense that moral values are not simply totally empty rules and carefully managed defintions with no meta-ethic behind them. Lives are valuable for some REASON, not simply because hey, we value human life (but we have no idea why!) stem cells are genetically human, so we must protect them from “harm.” (which is even more odd, considering that stem cells are not necessarily themselves harmed by stem cell research: they may in fact go on to live and divide and live even longer than whatever other individuals they may have developed into if implanted into a womb directly).
I do continue think that PETA are nutcases who end up harming their own cause. But what does that make people who think that stem cells are tiny people that need police and state protection? At least PETA people have some at least partially working moral center, some hint of an idea that morality and ethics are supposed to be ABOUT something rather than a set of inane and meaningless categories. They actually care about REAL harm done to REAL beings that can actually feel and care about it.