And this is an example of attempting to color the argument through the use of misleading terminology. Very little, if any, research involves obtaining stem cells from fetuses.
Embroynic stem cell research is of far greater interest, and involves no fetuses.
You are right, I used the wrong term. I was in no way trying to color the argument through the use on misleading terminology. Personally, the terms are interchangable to me in the sense that I believe there is no ethical difference between a fetus and an embryo, but I should not have used the term fetus in this instance. In subsequent posts, I changed the terminology I used to embryonic stem cell research, or ESC.
Taking the lives of innocent human beings is inevitable in war. It’s also inevtible in certain forms of stem cell research (at least if you accept a definition of human so wacky that it basically is like a big sign saying “I’ve completely missed the point of morality in the first place!”). I don’t see how any waffling about countries and needs and so on changes any of that.
Defending our country from attack (and thus saving lives) may or may not be a worthy reason to kill innocent people. Saving lives from disease may or may not be a worthy reason to kill zyotes. But in either case, you are treating human lives as means to an end. Same thing with the death penalty.
I don’t think it’s impossible to hold a position that is against stem cell research and for war (in fact, I don’t see how anyone could be against all war period). But someone who claims that it’s always wrong to kill the few to save the many when it comes to stem cells and then forgets this “principle” when it comes to war is clearly full of it. Likewise the bland pronouncement of our President that its always wrong to use human life as a means to an end. Or that zygotes are morally equal to people (just try facing someone with a choice between saving a child and saving a vat of an infinite number of zygotes from a fire, and we’ll see how long that lasts).
They don’t really mean this stuff, because they haven’t really thought through the implications of what they are saying. It’s merely a rhetorical club with which to attack others, not a well thought out position.
Isn’t the typical distinction that soldiers are aiming at legitimate targets, such that the deaths of innocent civilians are ‘collateral damage’?
If you’re a bomber pilot who lines up a peach of a shot over an enemy military base, what with soldiers and tanks and a whole shipyard of destroyers, you’d blow it up for its own sake – and if I tell you that there’s a little kid playing there, you’d still blow the base up for its own sake. You’re not aiming at the kid. The kid is irrelevant to you. You’d be just as happy if the kid were somewhere else; happier, even. You blow up the base in spite of the unexpected kid being there.
By contrast, with stem cells, your target is the innocent; you wouldn’t be, uh, aiming in that direction at all except that there’s an innocent life you’d like to end. This is, as it were, expecting a kid to be there, and then firing because there’s a kid there.
Only if you are warped enough to equate stem cells with people.
Er, yes, but that’s not the question. As it happens, I’m pro-choice and wholly endorse stem cell research; I merely point out that folks who disagree can still support war without contradicting themselves.
Don’t you do that regularly with Republicans?
How is that any different from “All things equal, I don’t want to have to kill stem cells, but I’m aiming at a legitimate target (medical research) and they are collateral damage. I’ll try to avoid destroying them as much as possible, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.”
Thus choosing to KILL THE KID. It’s part of the moral calculation you are making. The death of the kid is what you are willing to see happen in order to acheive your ends. Would it be nice if the kid weren’t there? Sure. It would also be nice if candy gumdrops fell into my mouth on my spoken command. But back in the real world, we make choices with known consequences, trading off some things for others.
The kid is innocent, the stem cells are innocent (well, and also nerveless, without feeling, never having had feeling, and so on).
The difference is, though, that with stem cells it’s inextricable. It’s entirely possible that, on your first six or seven bombing runs, you hit nothing but the valid targets on a military base – and that, on the eighth, an innocent is killed as well. With stem cells, there’s an innocent killed every time.
On those bombing runs, there really are times when the kid won’t be there; with stem cells, there aren’t. “Would it be nice if the kid weren’t there?” is a question that actually makes sense in the first scenario, but is a silly “candy gumdrops” hypothetical in the second.
So hypothetically, if the process to make stem cells only destroyed random embryos, and sometimes no embryos, but was still known to over time destroy the same amount of embryos as our current system, it was be morally different than our current system?
I meant “it would be morally different” of course. Dammit, why can’t I make a single post without a really bad grammatical error any more?
I’d imagine so, yes. Just like how we routinely break out the statistics and reason about how many more people a year will die if we raise the speed limits – even though we don’t similarly start asking, “Hey, what if we lined up that number of people and just shot 'em?”
This is such a paper thin rationalization that it’s almost not worth responding to. When we engage in a war, we know that civilians, innocent civilians will be killed as a price. There is no question that will happen, and pretending that it’s different because we wish this wouldn’t happen and try to minimize is simply lying to oneself.
In particular bombing runs, we know that the kid will be there, and we go anyway. It happens all the time in war. Heck, Israel shoots missles into CROWDS to target terrorists. Hiroshima was a much celebrated targeting of JUST civilians, justified, supposedly, by the needs and special demands of war.
Well, look, I might be doing a poor job of presenting it – in part because I don’t agree with it, I’m an ends-justifies-the-means guy, I think a Hiroshima-style attack on civilians is worth celebrating if the demands of war are right, and so on. It’s just that, from folks who actually do enshrine means above ends, I’ve heard the aforementioned reasoning: that there really is an all-important difference between “the kid will be there, but we go anyway” and “the kid will be there, which is why we’re going”.
Nobody else was bringing it up, and I figured it deserved to mention; maybe someone with genuine enthusiasm can do more than just point at it.
I don’t know how much better I would be at explaining this difference than you are…I actually thought you explained it quite well. So, I will just say that I agree with you. There is a fundamental difference between these two things:
Fighting a war in which civilians are accidentally or inadvertently killed because they are in the line of fire, because they are somewhere they shouldn’t be, (for example because the people we are actually fighting put them somewhere they shouldn’t be, or hide amongst them).
Creating and destroying embryos in order to get stem cells that may help cure a disease.
In the first instance, it is preferable even on the part of the people/soldiers engaged in the war to avoid killing civilians. It isn’t necessary to the war effort and maybe more importantly, it doesn’t help with the war effort. In the second instance, the embryos are necessarily killed…ESC research wouldn’t be possible without destroying them.
Killing the stem cells isn’t why we do stem cell research either. We’re doing it to save lives.
I don’t even see how YOU could believe this. When civilian deaths are a matter of course, they aren’t being accidentally or inadvertently killed: they are inevitably killed, and we KNOW they will be. It’s part of the process of war, and one of the things we have to accept in a war. Shooting a missle or firing from a gunship into an apartment block to get a terrorist will kill other civilians. We know this. Initiating policies to shoot speeding vehicles near checkpoints that don’t respond immediately to commands is a policy that will inevitably, and has, ended up in the deaths of men trying to speed to the hospital with their pregnant wives. I’m not saying that such policies are wrong, but pretending that they don’t predictably cost the lives of innocents is simply playing games to avoid moral responsibility (and the fact that people play such games is what keeps me from taking seriously their judgements as to the costs of war: they basically count all the inevitable predictable costs of innocent life as if they counted for nothing since they are all “unwanted” outcomes, as if that made any difference at all to whether or not the people will die)
Whether or not it helps is irrelevant. In both cases, it’s one of the things we ACCEPT by undertaking some goal that is considered the greater good.
Of course, I can’t help but add that I find comparing stem cells to children to be morally abhorrent to an extreme degree, but I’m doing my best to operate under the assumptions given.