In his speech about why he’s vetoing funding stem cell research, [Shrub says:
](http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/125883462.html)Now, correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t the whole point of us invading Iraq is that it would enable us to save Americans from the imminent attack on US soil that Saddam was planning with WMDs? And therefore, isn’t the US, by Shrub’s own definition, an unethical nation? Am I right? Or is there some subtle thing that I’m missing?
Because if I’m not missing anything, then it sounds to me like Shrub’s speechwriters are basically a bunch of poo-flinging monkeys who’re throwing out whatever the hell they feel like, and damn the consequences. Hopefully, the press will call him out on this like they did on Kosovo.
Gotta agree with Tuckerfan here, this sounds like as unambiguous a statement of commitment to Gandhi-esque nonviolence as you could possibly get.
If it is not ethical to destroy human life even in an attempt to save human life, then how can it ever be ethical to destroy human life under any circumstances?
I think he needed to throw in the adjective “innocent” there somewhere to save his entire ethical position from buckling under the sheer weight of its own illogic.
That’s the best possible face of war - when you destroy life in order to save life. (Alternatively, war can be the destruction of life for territorial gain, for empire, for revenge, for misplaced ideals, or just for the sheer hell of it.) If that’s unethical, then war is never, ever ethical.
Ahhh, no you see you’ve missed the getout clause. There was no option on Iraq: if there wasn’t an invasion, 20 minutes later WMD’s would have annihilated the Western world. It was unethical to invade, but what could Shrub do?
Yes, but stem cells are made from laboratory created zygotes whose existence as an intelligent and sentient life form is beyond speculation. Whether US soldiers or Iraqi civilians have feelings or a soul or intelligence is strictly theoretical and up to opinion for there’s certainly nothing resembling proof for it and in fact all evidence would indicate the contrary.
Wait… I got something backwards…
I think it should be “Iraqi civilians or US soldiers”.
I started a Great Debate about this very subject, and somebody actually said the difference is that the stem cells are directly targeted, whereas the civilian casualties are not. When I postulated a hypothetical medical research situation where stem cells are not directly targeted, yet the same amount of them are guaranteed to be destroyed, this person (who was against current stem cell research) was OK with that.
I found this so bizarre that I couldn’t think of coherent response, and the thread died.
Even if that were a valid point, the fact remains that Iraqi insurgents and other enemy soldiers are directly targeted. The statement by Bush quoted in the OP says very clearly that “destroying human life” is not ethical, even if its purpose is to save other human lives. It doesn’t restrict that claim to any particular kind of human life.
By that reasoning, there is no escaping the conclusion that directly targeting the human lives of enemy soldiers for destruction is unethical, even for the purpose of saving the lives of others.
I ain’t saying I necessarily agree with this position. I’m just saying that, as Tuckerfan noted, that’s the position that Bush himself is taking, according to his own words in this speech.
And never mind the blatant hypocrisy of allowing IVF, with its’ routine over-production of doomed zygotes, as well as selective “pruning” in utero, lest the client have dodecatuplets.
Or the well established practice of organ donation–sure, the person may be brain dead and all that, but removing his heart really does make him well and truly dead…
Guess we shouldn’t do that, either.
Bush’s original stem cell research policy was no wonder of moral clarity, either.
After several days in which the White House let it be known that the Decider was struggling with the issue, Bush announced that federal funds could be used for research on extant stem cell lines, but not for any new stem cell lines created after a cutoff date. Therefore, Bush could support stem cell research and boast that he caused no embryos to be destroyed.
But if Bush believes that it is ethical to take advantage of an immoral act which has already been committed, why not do a periodic “'reset” of the policy and open up funding for all the the existing stem cell lines, since the embryos have already been destroyed without government approval or support.
I don’t see why this is so hard to understand. I’ve always understood this argument to assume that the we’re talking about the deliberate taking of an innocent human life. So, yeah, the speechwriters were sloppy to leave that out. Now, I don’t agree that an embryo is human life, so I disagree with Bush on that point. But he, and many other people do believe it is an innocent human life.
If it were OK to take a life to save someone else, and all we have to do is the math, then why not kill adults and harvest their organs. Kill one life and save half a dozen. Since this is never advocated, I think that helps us understand the meaning of what Bush has said.
I think the deeper irritation here is due to the implicit contempt that such sloppiness shows for any kind of logic or rational consistency in argument. Why the fuck should it be our job to figure out what the President’s ill-phrased and contradictory statements mean, instead of its being his job to actually say what he means in a way that’s not ill-phrased and contradictory?
I thought the difference was in the “not the only option” part. Of course war is unethical on the basic point of killing lots of people. But were all the other options worse? I personally wouldn’t say so, but Bush seems to, and so I think his statement works fine.
Have Bush’s speechwriters ever cared? I’ve always wondered how you can move on and get a job writing speeches for anybody else once you’ve written about ‘evildoers’.
The problem with that is, in the theological world that Bush claims to live in, “all have sinned, and all have fallen short of the glory of God.” There are no ‘innocent’ human lives; no one is good except God. There are just sinful people who’ve accepted God’s forgiveness, and sinful people who haven’t.
And I hardly want to find myself defending Bush, but I think a reasonable argument could be made that embryos are innocent.
The bigger problem I have is with the definition of who else is innocent. Bush probably feels that a jihadist is guilty, but a woman driving a car and harming no one is innocent. In Saudi Arabia they would beg to differ. The definition of who gets the protected status of “innocent” fluctuates too much for my comfort.
