Madam, - In its report published last week, the Irish Council for Bioethics states: "On consideration of the various arguments relating to the moral status of the embryo, the council adopts a gradualist position, granting significant moral value rather than full moral status to human embryos".
It is curious that the council provides no argument to ground its stance. Whatever the "consideration" in question amounted to, it did not issue in any explicit weighing of reasons.
Given that most pre-report submissions favoured personhood status for the embryo, the council should have offered reasons for its conclusion, showing why its position is ethically sounder.
Good public policy, particularly on controversial issues, must be grounded in persuasion, and persuasion requires giving reasons. The council's report fails on that score, for it offers no ethical reasoning on the key issue.
Its ethical flavour appears post-modern, even relativist, as though its authors think there are only different moral opinions and no possibility of reasoned moral judgment. - Yours, etc,
Dr SÉAMUS MURPHY SJ,
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy,
Milltown Institute,
Dublin 6.
Madam, - I agree with Dr Stephen Sullivan (April 25th) that, in relation to the morality of embryonic stem cell research, the moral question is: "Is an embryo that has no access to the womb a person?"
Since the development of IVF, we now have the ability to put human life at the embryonic stage into a state of suspended animation outside the womb. However, it is not clear to me why having this ability entitles us to destroy the embryo.
Let us imagine that, at some point in the future, we develop the ability to put human life at a later stage of development, say 30 weeks, into a state of suspended animation outside the womb. Would we be comfortable destroying that human life, even in the interests of medical research? If not, then we have to find some inherent relevant moral difference between life at that later stage and embryonic life if we are to justify the destruction of the latter but not the former.
Having considered the various arguments in favour of such an inherent moral difference, I cannot find one that is persuasive. It is the case, admittedly, that life at a later stage of development is capable of engaging our empathy in a way that the embryo cannot. However going down the road of making the right to life conditional on our ability to empathise denies that the right to life is inherent in the individual and takes us into very treacherous territory indeed. - Yours, etc,
GERRY WHYTE,
Law School,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.
Madam, - Dr Stephen Sullivan from Harvard Stem Cell Institute accuses your columnist William Reville of "jumbled thought" on the status of the embryo before delivering a whole letter-full of the stuff himself.
Now that all sides of the stem-cell debate have finally agreed that an embryo "is human and alive", a new Orwellian justification has been manufactured to salve 21st-century consciences: a living human embryo, he asserts, is not a person so long as it is denied access to its mother's womb. Delicious! Just think of all the other rights we could conveniently render null and void by the denial of access to, say, clean water, food and shelter, to name but three things without which none of us would continue developing as human persons for very long.
And the jumbled thinking is catching - maybe it's a Dawkins meme. The following day, Trinity scientist Gavin Davey uses precisely the same reasoning to justify experimentation on human embryos, but adds the following staggeringly insightful gem of scientific logic:
"A two-week-old embryo is human tissue that may develop into a human, under certain conditions, but will not do so if left in liquid nitrogen. . ."
I dare say Gavin Davey would have trouble writing to The Irish Times, let alone "extracting stem cells from IVF-generated embryos" in the course of his research, were he to find himself immersed in liquid nitrogen too. - Yours, etc,
BRENDAN G CONROY,
Mulvey Park,
Windy Arbour,
Dublin 14.