Confronting deep moral disagreement: The president's council on bioethics, moral status, and human embryos

American Journal of Bioethics 5 (6):33 – 42 (2005)
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Abstract

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

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Author Profiles

Michael Meyer
Santa Clara University
Lawrence Nelson
Santa Clara University

Citations of this work

The scourge: Moral implications of natural embryo loss.Toby Ord - 2008 - American Journal of Bioethics 8 (7):12 – 19.
How Not to Argue That Embryos Lack Full Moral Status.Don Marquis - 2005 - American Journal of Bioethics 5 (6):54-56.
Special respect redux.John A. Robertson - 2005 - American Journal of Bioethics 5 (6):46 – 48.
Toward a full theory of moral status.Ronald Green - 2005 - American Journal of Bioethics 5 (6):44 – 46.

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References found in this work

The Case for Animal Rights.Tom Regan - 2004 - Univ of California Press.
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Collected papers.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edited by Samuel Richard Freeman.
The Case for Animal Rights.Tom Regan - 1985 - Human Studies 8 (4):389-392.

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