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Thanks, all of you for coming in, particularly looking forward to our exchanges.

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And it looks like we'll have some substantial time for it.

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I'm still suffering from a bit of jetlag coming from New York, so I apologise in advance for how this may or may not affect my presentation.

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As you may know, we're in presidential debate season in the US and watching the news each day provides a new lesson on how to keep expectations low.

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So there's my attempt. So before talking about abortion, let me just say something about religious and secular interaction in general.

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And if I can offer my own experience, I hope you'll permit me to do that.

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In America, we have both robust religious and robust secular discourses trying to work things out in our public spheres.

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I come to these discussions specifically as a Christian ethicist who wants to

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speak on the most controversial issues in bioethics and ethics more generally.

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Some of my colleagues are very pessimistic about the possibility of such interaction and with good reason.

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Our culture is more polarised now than at any time since our civil war and divides largely along secular and religious approaches much of the time.

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But I'm actually more hopeful than many about this kind of interaction, especially given my recent interactions with Julian's mentor, Peter Singer.

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I've actually come to know Peter Singer rather well.

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I've debated Peter and lectured in his classes at Princeton. Last year he came to my doctoral seminar in bioethics at Fordham,

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and he came to dinner with some of us afterwards, which is kind of fun to to interact.

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It was a little bit difficult finding vegan options in the old school, Little Italy in the Bronx.

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But we managed to do that. We we plan to meet Peter and I planned a major international conference together at Princeton,

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trying to find common ground and ways to talk together about abortion.

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And next month, he will join a panel at Fordham that I put together,

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which puts him and I in conversation with a diverse group of Christian theologians about nonhuman animals,

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which I'm really looking forward to on the basis of these and other experiences.

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I want to argue that religious and secular discourse can go a million times better if the following three things can happen.

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First, religious folks like myself need to acknowledge the critiques that often come from secular folks,

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that our arguments rest on first principles for which we simply do not have arguments.

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They grab us or claim us by some kind of authority.

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They are based on faith. Second, secular folks need to acknowledge the critique that often comes from theologians,

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that their arguments also rest on first principles for which they do not have arguments.

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They also simply grab or claim them by some kind of authority,

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whether it is the utilitarian dogma that one person counts as one and not more than one,

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or the supreme libertarian doctrine of personal freedom and autonomy,

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or even simply general claims that we can recognise flourishing and well-being at all.

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These ideas come from a fundamental understanding of the good for which there simply cannot be arguments.

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They come from a narrative, a story, an intuition, an a priori commitment.

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In short, they are also based on faith. Third,

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armed with the knowledge that both religious and secular folks have faith based understandings

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of the good we if we and if we take the time and intellectual solidarity with each other,

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we can map out places where we agree and disagree. And my experience is that we often find the agreement is quite substantial.

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I would argue, though, would take longer to make the argument.

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I would assert, I guess for now that it is in particular because understandings of the good.

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Even in our secular discourse, are indebted to the Abrahamic religions for much of what they believe about the good.

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We could talk about that in question, answer if you like. This is an especially promising methodology, however,

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when we can find a way to talk in similar ways about where we agree about flourishing and well-being.

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And Julia and I are trying to work on a paper together on this right now, actually.

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It's slow going, but we're working on it together. At any rate,

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I found precisely this kind of substantial agreement in my systematic exploration of the

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thoughts of Peter Singer when combining them or comparing them with Christian ethics.

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In some ways, it is sad that this series will focus on abortion and euthanasia alone,

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because even though there is broad overlap in the premises of our arguments with these two issues,

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the ultimate conclusions are in fact quite different. But on issues like ethical concern for non-human animals and for poverty, for instance,

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the striking overlap is both with regard to premises and with ultimate conclusions.

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If you'd like to know more of what I think about those, I have a book that I just write.

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But let's turn to abortion,

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and I will use my interaction with Peter Singer as sort of a hermeneutic to both outline my argument and show the possibility of religious secular.

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Interaction. And let me say at the outset that I,

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I realise that abortion is not an uncommon procedure and my argument today is not meant to critique the

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decisions of anyone here or the decision of anyone else that you may know who hasn't had an abortion.

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As we will see, abortion is a very complex topic,

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and we need to make an important distinction between an ex in morality and someone being blameworthy for committing a particular act.

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Lots of mitigating circumstances would be would need to be take into consideration and move from one to the other.

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Also, at first glance, it looks as if abortion is a terrible place to start religious secular interaction.

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Right. And it's such a polarising issue, especially in my country, and especially in the context of Peter Singer's thought,

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who not only supports abortion but the right to infanticide.

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Though it's not unclear now whether he thinks it should be legally available, he certainly supports the moral arguments for it.

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While my tradition as a Catholic claims that even discarding an embryo is the equivalent of killing a person, it seems, why would we start here?

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But as anybody who has studied the issue knows, arguments about abortion have many premises and done well.

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They are incredibly complex, so I cannot hope to do justice to that complexity in the time I have remaining.

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But I can highlight the premises on which Peter Singer and the Catholic Church agree when it comes to abortion and then make a

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short argument about where I think they disagree and it's quite a narrow disagreement in the context of this really complex issue.

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So both agree that abortion cannot be justified on the basis of a right to privacy,

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which is currently the legal basis of it being permitted in the United States.

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Both Peter Singer and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops would like to see the Supreme Court

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overrule Roe versus Wade and have the matter decided by a public argument and a legislative process.

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I think that's remarkable right there. Both agree that if the foetus is a person, it would be wrong to kill that person.

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All things being equal, both agree that if the foetus is a person, one has a duty to sustain that person with one's body.

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In other words, both agree that Thomson's Violinist's argument fails.

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Both disagree with the unintended consequences. Argument about legal protection of the law for foetuses acknowledged to be persons.

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Whether we are talking about the claims that such laws are unenforceable or they would an unacceptable harm women,

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or that it would create a far too intrusive government. All those arguments are dismissed by both approaches, though there are serious arguments.

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Both agree about a logical conclusion or a connection between abortion and infanticide.

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Singer claims that the same thing which justifies abortion also justifies infanticide.

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While the church claims the same thing which prohibits infanticide also prohibits abortion.

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They disagree about which way the reasoning goes, but they don't disagree about the logical connection where Singer and the church disagree.

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Unsurprisingly, is on the moral status of the foetus.

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But even within this sub argument, there are substantial number of premises that both have in common.

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For instance, both agree that the foetus is like us and that she is a human animal, a member of the species Homo sapiens.

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Both agree that there is no reasonable basis for claiming that an older foetus is a person and a younger foetus is a non-person.

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Even viability from both traditions adds no moral value. Both reject the concept.

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Both reject speciesism or the view that a foetus is a person merely because she is a member of the species homo sapiens.

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Or the view that only human organisms can be persons. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the Christian tradition, it may come as that.

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That may come as some surprise to you. But angels were considered persons throughout the tradition.

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Still are. And in an interesting development,

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an official from the Vatican Observatory recently said that he would baptise an alien if he had the opportunity and the alien asked,

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though they might have different. And finally, as an area of overlap they might have, they might mean different things by the term.

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But both think the argument about the moral status of the foetus turns on whether she can appropriately be described as rational.

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Okay, this then is where the disagreement lies. But isn't it just absurd to think of a foetus as rational?

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Right? If a foetus. If it is. It is no more absurd, I would argue, than it is to think of an infant as rational.

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I think Peter Singer is profoundly correct to claim that a newborn infant is no more rational than as a chicken.

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But there is an obvious distinction to be made between an infant and a chicken.

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The infant, if she is healthy and in the proper environment, will develop her traits such that she will become rational.

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The chicken will not. This, then, is the reason we should.

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In my view, we should consider both prenatal and neonatal human children to be persons because of their potential to be rational.

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And again, to qualify rationalist, not in the Enlightenment sense of rational. It's in the sort of medieval sense of rational.

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Which meant the. Our city to know and love God and therefore implied a relationship.

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So it's sort of, I would want to say rational and relational, but let's just stick with rational because both use the term.

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Now what I've just outlined for you is the famous for those of you that study this argument for

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potential and those of you that know about it probably know a lot of the objections to it.

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So let's just quickly go through them. Most of the arguments are reductive you out absurdum arguments, trying to give counter-examples to say,

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well, if you think that those are potential rational creatures, count as rational creatures.

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What about these examples? So Peter Singer offers one of them and he says the AFP, I'll just call it the AFP,

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arguing for potential can't work unless we are willing to consider fertility

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lab technicians blameworthy for rinsing spare sperm and over down the drain.

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Right. Because they have the potential to be rational and that's absurd, right?

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That's not the argument for potential fails that example. Let me give you two more.

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Michael Tooley, who some of you may know is an important philosopher, also a proponent of infanticide,

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says that the AFP can't work unless we are willing to say it at a future time where

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we have a drug available which can turn non-rational mammals into rational animals.

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Thought Experiment. We would consider animal control technicians blameworthy for euthanizing kittens.

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Right, because given this drug, they have the potential to be rational.

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I love analytic philosophy about experiments they just make.

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My day are altered.

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Charo says that the AFP can't work unless we are willing to consider me right now blameworthy as I scratch my skin and kill my skin cells.

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Why? Because in light of cloning, these cells that I'm killing right now have the potential to be rational.

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Right. We can turn these. We could, in theory, turn these skin cells into embryos.

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But that's absurd. All three are absurd and that's pretty devastating.

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Right. All all one needs is one counterexample to refute an argument.

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And then you got it. But we have three to deal with here. But in my response to all three,

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I want to say that what is going on here is actually a confusion of two different ways you might understand the concept of potential,

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and it's an important confusion. So let me try to unpack it. Aristotle passed on to Aquinas and then passed on to to the church.

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The distinction between passive potential on the one hand and active potential on the other.

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A thing has passive potential.

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If a thing has passive potential, it should not be considered right now the kind of thing it has the potential to become.

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For instance, a tree is a possible podium, right?

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But a tree should not be considered a podium. In order for a tree to become a podium, it would have to be cut down into pieces.

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It would have to be acted upon by an outside force that would change the kind

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of thing that it is would undergo and what I call a nature changing event,

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by contrast. So that's passive potential.

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By contrast, a sprouting acorn is a potential oak tree,

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but biologists already recognise that a sprouting acorn is already properly considered an oak tree.

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Here the sense of potential is active. There is no nature changing event.

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All the sprouting ACORN needs to do is mature as the kind of thing it already is.

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And this is how making this distinction helps us deal with the counterexamples.

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So whether we are talking about spare sperm and ova or pre drug to kittens or skin cells,

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it would take a nature changing event to make them into rational persons.

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Right? They only have passive potential for rationality.

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They would have to undergo a nature changing event. But foetuses and infants already have a rational nature.

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They just need the right energy, environment and time for this to happen.

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They have active potential for rationality and thus already should be considered

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persons already been having a technical moral theology substance of a rational nature.

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Now the Church is going to consider all means with this kind of nature, including angels and aliens.

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And I would want to I argue in the book that maybe some nonhuman animals should be considered persons as a result of their rational capacities.

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But and this includes but this includes not only all these not only prenatal and neonatal children, but as we will see tomorrow,

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I want to talk about those in a persistently unconscious state, various persistently unconscious states,

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as well as having the same kind of nature, such persons, because they often suffer.

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Let's face it, in my view anyway, of systematic discrimination and violent deaths deserve not only equal protection of the law,

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but the kind of preferential option for the most vulnerable that the Abrahamic religions insist upon.

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Let me also note in passing that the AFP is also the reason we should consider other

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non-rational humans to be persons such as those of us who are in non-REM sleep last.

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Night, or maybe you were drunk or otherwise intoxicated, or those who are even enraged or the mentally disabled.

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These are Homo sapiens that are rational, but there are they remain substances of a rational nature.

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Now, I could I could go on to another topic here. Do you want me to finish or get on one more topic?

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One place that I think both singer and the Catholic Church falls short in talking

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about abortion is with regard to feminist feminist issues and women's issues.

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Let me talk a little bit about that before before I conclude.

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This is a real concern. The history of men controlling women's bodies is horrific.

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And we should be sceptical of any attempts which look like it might do the same thing.

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And again, this is a personal nature for many, many women, and I want to respect that.

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But it must be said,

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I think if I'm going to make this argument today that I want to highlight some arguments that many of my pro-life feminist friends point out.

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And one of the things they start with is that the abortion rights rights regimes in the West came into existence under men,

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and it largely suits the social structures which favour men.

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It is seen as necessary for women to function in society.

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But that functioning seems to be as a cog in a market driven, capital producing wheel created by men.

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Many feminists are also sensitive to how mere choice magnifies social injustice.

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So in this case, when sexual sexual power still favours the male and it favours the male, especially in marginalised communities,

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abortions, availability and its expected use becomes a tool by which men exert power over women.

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Also, when women are not given the resources to care for their children,

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the access to abortion choice is not really a choice at all, but another form of coercion.

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I realise you guys here in the UK, in Europe don't have the same issues with this.

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We have the United States, but given the some of the situations of entrenched poverty that women find themselves,

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the choice for abortion is not really a liberating choice at all.

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Given this ban, it is hardly surprising that in the United States at least,

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that women are only slightly less likely than men to describe themselves as pro-life.

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This is despite the fact that women are told at every stage of their education that abortion,

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that the right to abortion is essential for their flourishing. Incidentally, this sort of compares, interestingly, at least in my view,

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to the numbers overall where we're going with this in the United States in 1996,

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according to Gallup, 56% of Americans describe themselves as pro-choice and 33% describe themselves as pro-life.

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In 2012, 50% describe themselves as pro-life.

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And only 41% is pro-choice, which was a record low.

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So even from 1996 to 2012, the numbers seem to be moving in this direction.

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And actually, it's especially true among young people, among the millennial generation, who also dramatically support gay marriage.

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So there's a little bit of interesting, interesting confluence there or maybe dissonance.

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But let me just conclude and get to Julianne. Let's go back to the big picture.

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So Peter Singer believes in infanticide, the church believes in protecting embryos, but the whole ballgame, at least on abortion.

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With all the complexity and premises involved, comes down to the very narrow and technical just disagreement that I just described.

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This is an important debate to have, and I wish we are able to have it more honestly and openly,

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but I'm confident that we can move forward if we engage our opponents in the spirit of intellectual solidarity.

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And that's why I feel so unfortunate to go with someone like Julian this way here today.

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I look forward to hearing what he has to say. So I'm very keen on this project.

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Some of my best friends are Catholics, so I think that it's it's correct to say that we are all individuals, and these groups,

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like Catholics or Utilitarians, often don't accurately represent the views of people within that tradition.

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So, for example, many of the the the positions that Charlie claimed that that Peter supports,

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I don't personally support as somebody who's broadly a consequentialist.

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And as I said, many of my best friends are Catholics.

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They don't have the same position as the pope or fundamentalist elements of the the Catholic Church.

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And I think one of the important projects today is to try to find a consensus in that

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middle ground of people who are willing to revise their views and find common ground.

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So I've actually written a new talk for this size, a sort of tribute to Charlie's kind of I.

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Years. And and it's it's one example of where I revise my own views.

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And I think they're in some ways closer to two.

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To a Catholic position. And certainly they began with.

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But let me first give you the backgrounds of how I arrived at this position and then the implications.

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So in March, I will make some remarks if there is time on on Charlie's arguments about potentiality.

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I think they're wrong, but I think there's a grain of truth in them and again, a common ground that we can share.

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But let me start off with my journey towards reconciliation.

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In March 2006, a 21 year old Cleveland man, Christopher Charles Anson, was driving home from a party with his 17 year old girlfriend, Jessica Cross.

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She was four months pregnant. They began to argue about her ability to care for their child challenged son who had been drinking,

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became angry and began to weave in high speed through the traffic.

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He lost control of the car and crashed. Cross was left paralysed from the chest down and the baby died.

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Challenge Son was unhurt because he killed the baby.

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He was charged with homicide in the state of the United States, as well as assault for ruining her life, as her father put it.

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So here we have a case where a man is charged with homicide for killing a foetus in January 2005.

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Allison Miller and Todd Parrish sued their fertility clinic, the Centre for Human Reproduction, in Chicago.

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They'd been having IVF in 2002 and had stored nine embryos, one of which was mistakenly discarded by the clinic.

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The clinic apologised and offered the couple a free cycle of IVF, but they sued the clinic for the wrongful death of their embryo.

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Now contrast those two cases with the fact that in countries like the United States,

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the United Kingdom, Australia, hundreds of thousands of abortions of foetuses occur every year.

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The foetuses are killed and these are not deemed to be crimes.

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Nearly all of these abortions are for healthy, normal babies.

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No one is charged with murder or negligence over these deaths.

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Thousands of embryos are destroyed. In Australia, the United Kingdom, America every year.

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In fact, the law in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom requires their destruction after a certain period, usually 5 to 10 years.

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So how can killing a foetus, on the one hand be homicide and on the other hand, no crime at all?

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How can the destruction of embryos at the same time be required by law and widely practised,

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but also in some places be the crime of wrongful death and a moral abomination?

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How can one act the killing of early human life be both right and wrong?

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We are polar opposite attitudes, moral norms and laws relating to embryos and foetus.

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How can this conflict be reconciled?

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Now, one solution, which has been proposed by the Christian right, including fundamentalist elements of the Catholic Church,

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pro-life movements and some politicians, is to give the embryo from the moment of conception a full right to life to treat it like a child.

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This proposal has been championed, in fact, by the current Opposition Leader of the Australian Liberal Party, Tony Abbott.

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Now the strategy of giving an embryo or a foetus a full right to life certainly resolves this conflict in the practices relating to early life.

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Killing embryos and foetuses would then always be wrong.

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But it also leaves us in a world with no abortion, even after rape or when the woman's life is at stake.

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Now, effective contraception, the most common methods, the IUD and the pill, both destroy early human life.

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No IVF and ultimately no control over reproduction.

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And this appeal to the potentiality would create enormous problems for society because the greatest loss of human beings occurs before birth.

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Huge numbers of embryos, four out of five embryos perish before even producing a baby.

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If they were human beings, this would dwarf all disease that currently exists amongst, you know, existing persons.

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And we should devote all of our medical resources, as Toby Ord argues, to the scourge of early foetal loss.

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Now, many conservative, religious and political leaders joyfully embrace these these consequences.

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They seek to impose these values on the rest of society because they believe on

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faith and without consideration of any revision of their views to be right.

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This is just the sort of disrespect for liberty,

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intolerance and moral pike headedness that we find so contemptible in regimes like that of the Taliban.

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Now in Australia, our own aspiring Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, once wrote of the importance.

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Some Christian values in public life and lauded Australian Christian politicians now over the

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kinds of Christian values which claim that the embryo and foetus have the same right to life,

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exactly the same rights of life as other humans accounts for poorly accounts poorly for the way in which modern liberal society actually functions,

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and the conflict with widely accepted and valued practices.

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Now there is a value to controlling our reproduction,

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to deciding how many children we will have and when to have them go forth and multiply was a biblical injunction, but there is a limit to that.

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Every human life has a value when it's a part of a plan, sometimes a well-formed plan in the context of a blissful,

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loving marriage, but sometimes an inarticulate intention in a chaotic or immature relationship.

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To have a child is the wrong thing. And sometimes there are too many people in the world.

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The moral reason that challenged Son was wrong to act in a way which killed his girlfriend's baby was because she wanted to have the baby.

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Challenge Sin is more like a drunk driver who recklessly kills an innocent child than a doctor who performs an abortion at a woman's request.

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It should have been Miller and Parrish who decided the fate of their embryos, not the Chicago clinic, no matter what the law.

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The destruction of embryos is a moral crime when parents want to have them, if they don't want them.

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I'd like to say there's nothing wrong, but I'm going to go argue and argue that there is something wrong, but nothing hugely wrong in destroying them.

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So here is the solution to the puzzle of our conflicting attitudes towards the embryo and the foetus.

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Embryos have a special moral value when they're part of a plan to have a child, or at least desired by the people who made them.

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Embryos don't have special moral value when they're not desired by the people who form them.

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One of the greatest ethical advances has been to give people freedom to control their own reproduction,

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to decide how many children to have, when to have children.

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This is precisely something that the fundamentalist elements of the Catholic Church seek to deny this reproductive liberty.

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Fortunately, women no longer have to have ten or 20 children during their reproductive lives.

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So the two missing puzzles in the puzzle of early life are the value of reproductive liberty and the conditional moral status of early life.

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Now the implications of the foetus or embryo having conditional value, I view the embryo or the foetus as like a work of art.

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Now something like the Mona Lisa. It's wrong to destroy valuable art for no reason, and it will be wrong even to fail to produce that valuable art.

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If we had no good reason. Imagine that Da Vinci was sitting around with nothing special to do one day,

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and he thought, Well, maybe I could paint something that will become the Mona Lisa.

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He said, No, I prefer to go to the pub and have a drink with my friends.

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This would be, I believe,

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a wrong thing because of all the joy that he's brought to future people through their viewing of that art and numerous other values.

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Now he has a reason to produce that art, and we have a reason not to destroy it.

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But we don't have to ascribe an intrinsic moral value to the Mona Lisa to make those claims.

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We only have to client appeal to its conditional value.

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Conditional on its value to people who have been alive or will be alive or are alive.

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Now it seems trivialising to value earthly human life and to compare it to art.

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But one could make the extreme claim that every human life is more valuable than the Mona Lisa.

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Even so, I think few people would accept that.

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But even if it were true, we're still not under a strong obligation to have children or to refrain from abortion

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in the same way as Da Vinci is not under a strong obligation to produce such a thing.

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Other reasons could defeat the obligation to produce such works of art.

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Now, when it comes to spare IVF embryos for couples who have already had the number of children that they want,

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we're faced with a similar kind of problem. Other couples want to use them.

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Yet almost routinely those embryos are destroyed.

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This is like in many ways the destruction of a work of art for no good reason.

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Now consider abortion. People bring value to each other's lives.

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And when a couple decides or a woman decides to have an abortion,

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she's in many ways denying future people who will exist the value that that child would have brought to their lives.

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This is most obvious in those cases where there's a couple who wish to adopt the child.

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But in more general cases, that child brings value to society.

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People like Derek Parfit and myself have even argued that there are impersonal values or impersonal reasons that have to do with reproduction.

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But we needn't deal with that difficult issue here. We can simply concentrate on the value that a child, a baby, a foetus would bring to the future.

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In the same way as creating a piece of art or some other valuable object would bring to future people.

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Now, as I said, we have reasons to create objects, pieces of art, and also to bring into existence possible people.

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But this is only a prototype or prima facie reason or a feasible obligation.

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Nobody would argue that we have an overriding obligation to bring about whatever value we can into the future.

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Clearly, this has to be weighed against other reasons.

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Reasons to control the global population. Duties to oneself and one's existing children.

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Duties to the environment and so on. All of these obligations or reasons have to be weighed in order to decide whether one has,

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all things considered, a reason to have a child or not have a child.

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And given that the reasons to do with bringing art forms into existence or things that

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benefit other people are much smaller than the reasons we typically have to existing people.

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These obligations will will typically be quite weak, but nonetheless they exist.

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So in those cases where a giving up an embryo world foetus imposes very little

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cost on a couple the reasons to keep those embryos or foetuses up much stronger.

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So for example, a vector genesis, the ability to to bring to gestate embryos outside of foetuses outside of the female body

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were the case then the costs of giving up a foetus or an embryo would be much less.

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The costs are smallest in the case of spare embryos from IVF.

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So in these cases, the reasons to give them up are not out wide,

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typically by strong personal reasons that would would argue in favour of their destruction.

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So in some cases, a few cases, I think it can be all things considered wrong to destroy embryos or even foetuses,

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particularly those which are spare from IVF. I believe we have obligations, not utilitarian obligations, but obligations of a duty of easy rescue.

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So one minimal form of consequential ism is to argue that when the cost to you is small and the benefit to somebody else is large,

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you have a moral obligation to perform that act.

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Now, it's interesting that Peter, typically, when he goes to argue in public, doesn't argue from utilitarian considerations.

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He argues from this consideration, which is much more acceptable to everyone.

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So he's his arguments about alleviation of poverty are based on these sorts of duty of easy rescue considerations.

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So it's clear that people could be it seems to me clear that people could be

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under an obligation to have a child when it's a case of a duty of easy rescue,

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such as when it would be a matter of merely giving up embryos which are no longer required for reproduction

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to another couple who desperately want to gestate a child and have a have a child of their own.

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Now, this could even be a legal requirement.

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It seems to me that both conservatives about the moral value of embryos and foetuses and consequentialist such as myself,

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who see some value to bringing embryos and foetuses to the point of producing a

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live born person could agree that the law should require a duty of easy rescue.

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So my view the law should change to require couples who are engaging in IVF, who no longer acquire their embryos,

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to give those embryos to couples who are childless and who want them,

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and also to give them to scientists who are doing bona fide research on the embryo.

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So according to this argument, there is something wrong about abortion.

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It's not that it denies a future of value, as Donmar Keyser said, because that argument is obviously mistaken,

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because if you have an abortion, there is no future child is deprived of a.

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You have value, but it's a variant of that.

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It says that you deprive other people in the future of the value that this individual would bring to their lives,

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in the same way as you deny them the value that a piece of art would provide them.

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So there is something wrong with abortion and there is something wrong with destruction of embryos.

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And I think we can agree that the needless destruction,

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the reason this destruction of embryos as a part of IVF is something that's wrong and indeed probably should be legislated against.

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So I think I have a couple minutes.

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So let me make a couple of remarks about Charlie's argument from potential, because I think a lot of it hinges on this and a lot of it.

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I don't want to make this a debate around potential and the difference between active and passive potential.

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But I'll make this one point. Charlie made the telling point that that a tree is no podium because you have to do something to it.

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You have to modify it in order for it to become a a a podium.

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So to with IVF embryos and embryos sitting in a Petri dish is not going to produce a baby unless you transfer into a human uterus.

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And that's a human act, a technological act.

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So I can't see even if his argument applies, which I don't think it does,

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to foetuses and embryos that occur naturally, that the same argument would apply to two IVF embryos.

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Now, as I said, I don't accept this argument because as the recent research using EPA cells has shown every and he mentions Alta Charo.

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But I've made the same argument myself somewhere rather general medical ethics.

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One point a somatic cell has a complete genetic complement in the same way as an embryo.

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Yet, as Yamanaka has shown, a few of those genetic switches are turned in certain ways.

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How can you say that there's a huge moral difference between an embryo that occurs naturally and a skin cell

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when both of them have the same genetic complement and a few genetic switches are turned the other way.

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Surely if one has an active potential, the other has an active potential because they're both the same biological, some substance.

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In fact, they're genetically, you know, identical to each other.

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So I can't see how you can say you can make this argument that one has a passing potential and the other has an active potential.

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Both of them have the instructions for an entire human being.

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And it's a matter of chance or matter of circumstance or a matter of evolution that the switches happen to be in one way or the other.

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And as I said, I think Johnny Pew will have more to say about Charlie's arguments about potential.

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But as I said, the implications of this are devastating.

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If you really accept that we should give special moral consideration to embryos in virtue of their potentiality,

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our whole pattern of medical research and medical treatment should radically shift because we have an

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epidemic of an embryo death that kills many more people than die every year from any other disease.

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But I don't want to be intensely critical. I think that consequentialist such as myself,

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who accept a duty of easy rescue and accept considerations of value and non consequentialist such as Charlie can both agree

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that in certain circumstances there's something wrong about abortion and something wrong about the destruction of embryos.

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How we should respond to that in law is a separate question.

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I think the the revisions of law that are necessary on Syria are fairly limited.

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But I'll finish there.