Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Thursday, May 26, 2005  

We part company

The Derb has let me down:

I guess no-one will be falling off his chair to hear that I don't have a problem with the use of embryonic stem cells for research, and consider the embryos thus used to be getting "destroyed," not "killed." The contrary point of view doesn't strike me as preposterous or ill-motivated; I just don't agree with it.



If you ask me what to do about the so-called "leftovers" of embryos at fertility clinics, I would say "nothing" unless someone wanted to "adopt" them to create a full term baby.

My initial thought is a bit like Derb's. It seems hard to care much about a pinhead of human life. But if you handed me a test tube of such souls and said I could destroy them at will, I would not do it.

I could kill a convicted murderer sentenced to death, I believe, as difficult as that may be, but I would not destroy embryos. The thought of people using them, destroying them for research angers me, for it is literally a case of moral "out of sight, out of minding it".

I also think that Derb is being cavalier and might not pass the test if handed test tube full of embryos and told to feel free to destroy them. People often detach themselves when thinking intellectually or hypothetically about what they would do, but when confronted with the thing itself, aren't as sanguine. Many don't mind killng for the sake of utility or prejudice, though.

posted by Mark Butterworth | 10:57 AM |

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