Morals of Stem-Cell Research

To the editors:

The Crimson reported the expected executive order permitting the federal funding of medical research involving the destruction of human embryos (“Stem Cells to get Federal Funding” news story, March 9). The judgment by the author that the previous arrangements imposed “onerous restrictions” on research seemed to dismiss out of hand the moral good which the now lapsed rules sought to promote. The article did not mention a second executive order, which is intended to unfetter science from restriction by any narrow political ideology. These two acts are intimately linked. What then is the “ideology” which has heretofore obstructed the progress of science in this area? It is precisely this: that human beings have intrinsic rights rather than just those which the state condescends to grant them. That human embryos are human beings is a “scientific fact” that anyone may read in an embryology textbook. Indeed it sounds rather like a tautology. However, that human beings might have rights by virtue of their very nature rather than being granted them by the state at some point in their development, is apparently mere ideology.

If human rights are not intrinsic, where might they come from, that is by whom or what are they granted? The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not arrogate for themselves or for their respective governments such a power, but merely recognized certain rights to be God-given. Even the drafters of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights appear by their language to have recognized certain natural rights, though the distinction between these and legal rights is less clear there.

The quotes from various researchers in the article betray a lack of interest in the moral questions surrounding embryonic stem-cell research. By relegating to the category of ideology the principle that natural rights place some bounds on acceptable human behavior and scientific investigation, the current administration weakens the protection of the innocent against the whim of the powerful. Human nature being what it is, the assumed benevolence of the strong can be but a temporary check on the descent of our civilization into savagery.

ALAN C. O’CONNOR

Cambridge, Mass

March 9, 2009