The report of the President's Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity, addresses the central ethical, political, and policy issue in human embryonic stem cell research: the moral status of extracorporeal human embryos. The Council members were in sharp disagreement on this issue and essentially failed to adequately engage and respectfully acknowledge each others' deepest moral concerns, despite their stated commitment to do so. This essay provides a detailed critique of the two extreme views on the Council (i.e., embryos (...) have full moral status or they have none at all) and then gives theoretical grounding for our judgment about the intermediate moral status of embryos. It also supplies an account of how to address profound moral disagreements in the public arena, especially by way of constructing a middle ground that deliberately pays sincere respect to the views of those with whom it has deep disagreements. (shrink)

The term "human dignity" is the source of considerable confusion in contemporary bioethics. It has been used by Kantians to refer to autonomy, by others to refer to the sanctity of life, and by still others to refer—albeit obliquely—to an important but infrequently discussed set of human goods. In the first part of this article, I seek to disambiguate the notion of human dignity. The second part is a defense of the philosophical utility of such a notion; I argue that (...) there is nothing implausible about appealing to a deontological "principle of dignity" to solve bioethical problems, especially those concerning the development of new biotechnologies. There may, however, be problems associated with any attempt to use dignity as a basis for public policy. This sort of worry is explained and briefly addressed in the final section. (shrink)

Given the promise of stem cell therapies, scientists throughout the world are conducting stem cell research using various kinds of stem cells including human embryonic stem cells. However, HESC research is very controversial in some societies as the extraction of stem cells involves the destruction of the human embryo. The ethical concerns of this kind of research have led scientists to search for other methods to derive stem cells that do not involve the destruction of embryos. These different types of (...) stem cell research are said to sidestep the ethical dilemma associated with HESC research and so are considered as ethically acceptable ways to obtain stem cells; possibly, they may even mark the end of HESC research. However, each of these stem cell methods presents its own challenges, scientific and ethical, as this article explores. This paper examines the impact of the emergence of different types of stem cell research and discusses whether it is still necessary for scientists to conduct the contentious HESC research. (shrink)