Thanks, all of you for coming in, particularly looking forward to our exchanges.
And it looks like we'll have some substantial time for it.
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.
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.
So there's my attempt. So before talking about abortion, let me just say something about religious and secular interaction in general.
And if I can offer my own experience, I hope you'll permit me to do that.
In America, we have both robust religious and robust secular discourses trying to work things out in our public spheres.
I come to these discussions specifically as a Christian ethicist who wants to
speak on the most controversial issues in bioethics and ethics more generally.
Some of my colleagues are very pessimistic about the possibility of such interaction and with good reason.
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.
But I'm actually more hopeful than many about this kind of interaction, especially given my recent interactions with Julian's mentor, Peter Singer.
I've actually come to know Peter Singer rather well.
I've debated Peter and lectured in his classes at Princeton. Last year he came to my doctoral seminar in bioethics at Fordham,
and he came to dinner with some of us afterwards, which is kind of fun to to interact.
It was a little bit difficult finding vegan options in the old school, Little Italy in the Bronx.
But we managed to do that. We we plan to meet Peter and I planned a major international conference together at Princeton,
trying to find common ground and ways to talk together about abortion.
And next month, he will join a panel at Fordham that I put together,
which puts him and I in conversation with a diverse group of Christian theologians about nonhuman animals,
which I'm really looking forward to on the basis of these and other experiences.
I want to argue that religious and secular discourse can go a million times better if the following three things can happen.
First, religious folks like myself need to acknowledge the critiques that often come from secular folks,
that our arguments rest on first principles for which we simply do not have arguments.
They grab us or claim us by some kind of authority.
They are based on faith. Second, secular folks need to acknowledge the critique that often comes from theologians,
that their arguments also rest on first principles for which they do not have arguments.
They also simply grab or claim them by some kind of authority,
whether it is the utilitarian dogma that one person counts as one and not more than one,
or the supreme libertarian doctrine of personal freedom and autonomy,
or even simply general claims that we can recognise flourishing and well-being at all.
These ideas come from a fundamental understanding of the good for which there simply cannot be arguments.
They come from a narrative, a story, an intuition, an a priori commitment.
In short, they are also based on faith. Third,
armed with the knowledge that both religious and secular folks have faith based understandings
of the good we if we and if we take the time and intellectual solidarity with each other,
we can map out places where we agree and disagree. And my experience is that we often find the agreement is quite substantial.
I would argue, though, would take longer to make the argument.
I would assert, I guess for now that it is in particular because understandings of the good.
Even in our secular discourse, are indebted to the Abrahamic religions for much of what they believe about the good.
We could talk about that in question, answer if you like. This is an especially promising methodology, however,
when we can find a way to talk in similar ways about where we agree about flourishing and well-being.
And Julia and I are trying to work on a paper together on this right now, actually.
It's slow going, but we're working on it together. At any rate,
I found precisely this kind of substantial agreement in my systematic exploration of the
thoughts of Peter Singer when combining them or comparing them with Christian ethics.
In some ways, it is sad that this series will focus on abortion and euthanasia alone,
because even though there is broad overlap in the premises of our arguments with these two issues,
the ultimate conclusions are in fact quite different. But on issues like ethical concern for non-human animals and for poverty, for instance,
the striking overlap is both with regard to premises and with ultimate conclusions.
If you'd like to know more of what I think about those, I have a book that I just write.
But let's turn to abortion,
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.
Interaction. And let me say at the outset that I,
I realise that abortion is not an uncommon procedure and my argument today is not meant to critique the
decisions of anyone here or the decision of anyone else that you may know who hasn't had an abortion.
As we will see, abortion is a very complex topic,
and we need to make an important distinction between an ex in morality and someone being blameworthy for committing a particular act.
Lots of mitigating circumstances would be would need to be take into consideration and move from one to the other.
Also, at first glance, it looks as if abortion is a terrible place to start religious secular interaction.
Right. And it's such a polarising issue, especially in my country, and especially in the context of Peter Singer's thought,
who not only supports abortion but the right to infanticide.
Though it's not unclear now whether he thinks it should be legally available, he certainly supports the moral arguments for it.
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?
But as anybody who has studied the issue knows, arguments about abortion have many premises and done well.
They are incredibly complex, so I cannot hope to do justice to that complexity in the time I have remaining.
But I can highlight the premises on which Peter Singer and the Catholic Church agree when it comes to abortion and then make a
short argument about where I think they disagree and it's quite a narrow disagreement in the context of this really complex issue.
So both agree that abortion cannot be justified on the basis of a right to privacy,
which is currently the legal basis of it being permitted in the United States.
Both Peter Singer and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops would like to see the Supreme Court
overrule Roe versus Wade and have the matter decided by a public argument and a legislative process.
I think that's remarkable right there. Both agree that if the foetus is a person, it would be wrong to kill that person.
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.
In other words, both agree that Thomson's Violinist's argument fails.
Both disagree with the unintended consequences. Argument about legal protection of the law for foetuses acknowledged to be persons.
Whether we are talking about the claims that such laws are unenforceable or they would an unacceptable harm women,
or that it would create a far too intrusive government. All those arguments are dismissed by both approaches, though there are serious arguments.
Both agree about a logical conclusion or a connection between abortion and infanticide.
Singer claims that the same thing which justifies abortion also justifies infanticide.
While the church claims the same thing which prohibits infanticide also prohibits abortion.
They disagree about which way the reasoning goes, but they don't disagree about the logical connection where Singer and the church disagree.
Unsurprisingly, is on the moral status of the foetus.
But even within this sub argument, there are substantial number of premises that both have in common.
For instance, both agree that the foetus is like us and that she is a human animal, a member of the species Homo sapiens.
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.
Even viability from both traditions adds no moral value. Both reject the concept.
Both reject speciesism or the view that a foetus is a person merely because she is a member of the species homo sapiens.
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.
That may come as some surprise to you. But angels were considered persons throughout the tradition.
Still are. And in an interesting development,
an official from the Vatican Observatory recently said that he would baptise an alien if he had the opportunity and the alien asked,
though they might have different. And finally, as an area of overlap they might have, they might mean different things by the term.
But both think the argument about the moral status of the foetus turns on whether she can appropriately be described as rational.
Okay, this then is where the disagreement lies. But isn't it just absurd to think of a foetus as rational?
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.
I think Peter Singer is profoundly correct to claim that a newborn infant is no more rational than as a chicken.
But there is an obvious distinction to be made between an infant and a chicken.
The infant, if she is healthy and in the proper environment, will develop her traits such that she will become rational.
The chicken will not. This, then, is the reason we should.
In my view, we should consider both prenatal and neonatal human children to be persons because of their potential to be rational.
And again, to qualify rationalist, not in the Enlightenment sense of rational. It's in the sort of medieval sense of rational.
Which meant the. Our city to know and love God and therefore implied a relationship.
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.
Now what I've just outlined for you is the famous for those of you that study this argument for
potential and those of you that know about it probably know a lot of the objections to it.
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,
well, if you think that those are potential rational creatures, count as rational creatures.
What about these examples? So Peter Singer offers one of them and he says the AFP, I'll just call it the AFP,
arguing for potential can't work unless we are willing to consider fertility
lab technicians blameworthy for rinsing spare sperm and over down the drain.
Right. Because they have the potential to be rational and that's absurd, right?
That's not the argument for potential fails that example. Let me give you two more.
Michael Tooley, who some of you may know is an important philosopher, also a proponent of infanticide,
says that the AFP can't work unless we are willing to say it at a future time where
we have a drug available which can turn non-rational mammals into rational animals.
Thought Experiment. We would consider animal control technicians blameworthy for euthanizing kittens.
Right, because given this drug, they have the potential to be rational.
I love analytic philosophy about experiments they just make.
My day are altered.
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.
Why? Because in light of cloning, these cells that I'm killing right now have the potential to be rational.
Right. We can turn these. We could, in theory, turn these skin cells into embryos.
But that's absurd. All three are absurd and that's pretty devastating.
Right. All all one needs is one counterexample to refute an argument.
And then you got it. But we have three to deal with here. But in my response to all three,
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,
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.
The distinction between passive potential on the one hand and active potential on the other.
A thing has passive potential.
If a thing has passive potential, it should not be considered right now the kind of thing it has the potential to become.
For instance, a tree is a possible podium, right?
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.
It would have to be acted upon by an outside force that would change the kind
of thing that it is would undergo and what I call a nature changing event,
by contrast. So that's passive potential.
By contrast, a sprouting acorn is a potential oak tree,
but biologists already recognise that a sprouting acorn is already properly considered an oak tree.
Here the sense of potential is active. There is no nature changing event.
All the sprouting ACORN needs to do is mature as the kind of thing it already is.
And this is how making this distinction helps us deal with the counterexamples.
So whether we are talking about spare sperm and ova or pre drug to kittens or skin cells,
it would take a nature changing event to make them into rational persons.
Right? They only have passive potential for rationality.
They would have to undergo a nature changing event. But foetuses and infants already have a rational nature.
They just need the right energy, environment and time for this to happen.
They have active potential for rationality and thus already should be considered
persons already been having a technical moral theology substance of a rational nature.
Now the Church is going to consider all means with this kind of nature, including angels and aliens.
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.
But and this includes but this includes not only all these not only prenatal and neonatal children, but as we will see tomorrow,
I want to talk about those in a persistently unconscious state, various persistently unconscious states,
as well as having the same kind of nature, such persons, because they often suffer.
Let's face it, in my view anyway, of systematic discrimination and violent deaths deserve not only equal protection of the law,
but the kind of preferential option for the most vulnerable that the Abrahamic religions insist upon.
Let me also note in passing that the AFP is also the reason we should consider other
non-rational humans to be persons such as those of us who are in non-REM sleep last.
Night, or maybe you were drunk or otherwise intoxicated, or those who are even enraged or the mentally disabled.
These are Homo sapiens that are rational, but there are they remain substances of a rational nature.
Now, I could I could go on to another topic here. Do you want me to finish or get on one more topic?
One place that I think both singer and the Catholic Church falls short in talking
about abortion is with regard to feminist feminist issues and women's issues.
Let me talk a little bit about that before before I conclude.
This is a real concern. The history of men controlling women's bodies is horrific.
And we should be sceptical of any attempts which look like it might do the same thing.
And again, this is a personal nature for many, many women, and I want to respect that.
But it must be said,
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.
And one of the things they start with is that the abortion rights rights regimes in the West came into existence under men,
and it largely suits the social structures which favour men.
It is seen as necessary for women to function in society.
But that functioning seems to be as a cog in a market driven, capital producing wheel created by men.
Many feminists are also sensitive to how mere choice magnifies social injustice.
So in this case, when sexual sexual power still favours the male and it favours the male, especially in marginalised communities,
abortions, availability and its expected use becomes a tool by which men exert power over women.
Also, when women are not given the resources to care for their children,
the access to abortion choice is not really a choice at all, but another form of coercion.
I realise you guys here in the UK, in Europe don't have the same issues with this.
We have the United States, but given the some of the situations of entrenched poverty that women find themselves,
the choice for abortion is not really a liberating choice at all.
Given this ban, it is hardly surprising that in the United States at least,
that women are only slightly less likely than men to describe themselves as pro-life.
This is despite the fact that women are told at every stage of their education that abortion,
that the right to abortion is essential for their flourishing. Incidentally, this sort of compares, interestingly, at least in my view,
to the numbers overall where we're going with this in the United States in 1996,
according to Gallup, 56% of Americans describe themselves as pro-choice and 33% describe themselves as pro-life.
In 2012, 50% describe themselves as pro-life.
And only 41% is pro-choice, which was a record low.
So even from 1996 to 2012, the numbers seem to be moving in this direction.
And actually, it's especially true among young people, among the millennial generation, who also dramatically support gay marriage.
So there's a little bit of interesting, interesting confluence there or maybe dissonance.
But let me just conclude and get to Julianne. Let's go back to the big picture.
So Peter Singer believes in infanticide, the church believes in protecting embryos, but the whole ballgame, at least on abortion.
With all the complexity and premises involved, comes down to the very narrow and technical just disagreement that I just described.
This is an important debate to have, and I wish we are able to have it more honestly and openly,
but I'm confident that we can move forward if we engage our opponents in the spirit of intellectual solidarity.
And that's why I feel so unfortunate to go with someone like Julian this way here today.
I look forward to hearing what he has to say. So I'm very keen on this project.
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,
like Catholics or Utilitarians, often don't accurately represent the views of people within that tradition.
So, for example, many of the the the positions that Charlie claimed that that Peter supports,
I don't personally support as somebody who's broadly a consequentialist.
And as I said, many of my best friends are Catholics.
They don't have the same position as the pope or fundamentalist elements of the the Catholic Church.
And I think one of the important projects today is to try to find a consensus in that
middle ground of people who are willing to revise their views and find common ground.
So I've actually written a new talk for this size, a sort of tribute to Charlie's kind of I.
Years. And and it's it's one example of where I revise my own views.
And I think they're in some ways closer to two.
To a Catholic position. And certainly they began with.
But let me first give you the backgrounds of how I arrived at this position and then the implications.
So in March, I will make some remarks if there is time on on Charlie's arguments about potentiality.
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.
But let me start off with my journey towards reconciliation.
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.
She was four months pregnant. They began to argue about her ability to care for their child challenged son who had been drinking,
became angry and began to weave in high speed through the traffic.
He lost control of the car and crashed. Cross was left paralysed from the chest down and the baby died.
Challenge Son was unhurt because he killed the baby.
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.
So here we have a case where a man is charged with homicide for killing a foetus in January 2005.
Allison Miller and Todd Parrish sued their fertility clinic, the Centre for Human Reproduction, in Chicago.
They'd been having IVF in 2002 and had stored nine embryos, one of which was mistakenly discarded by the clinic.
The clinic apologised and offered the couple a free cycle of IVF, but they sued the clinic for the wrongful death of their embryo.
Now contrast those two cases with the fact that in countries like the United States,
the United Kingdom, Australia, hundreds of thousands of abortions of foetuses occur every year.
The foetuses are killed and these are not deemed to be crimes.
Nearly all of these abortions are for healthy, normal babies.
No one is charged with murder or negligence over these deaths.
Thousands of embryos are destroyed. In Australia, the United Kingdom, America every year.
In fact, the law in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom requires their destruction after a certain period, usually 5 to 10 years.
So how can killing a foetus, on the one hand be homicide and on the other hand, no crime at all?
How can the destruction of embryos at the same time be required by law and widely practised,
but also in some places be the crime of wrongful death and a moral abomination?
How can one act the killing of early human life be both right and wrong?
We are polar opposite attitudes, moral norms and laws relating to embryos and foetus.
How can this conflict be reconciled?
Now, one solution, which has been proposed by the Christian right, including fundamentalist elements of the Catholic Church,
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.
This proposal has been championed, in fact, by the current Opposition Leader of the Australian Liberal Party, Tony Abbott.
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.
Killing embryos and foetuses would then always be wrong.
But it also leaves us in a world with no abortion, even after rape or when the woman's life is at stake.
Now, effective contraception, the most common methods, the IUD and the pill, both destroy early human life.
No IVF and ultimately no control over reproduction.
And this appeal to the potentiality would create enormous problems for society because the greatest loss of human beings occurs before birth.
Huge numbers of embryos, four out of five embryos perish before even producing a baby.
If they were human beings, this would dwarf all disease that currently exists amongst, you know, existing persons.
And we should devote all of our medical resources, as Toby Ord argues, to the scourge of early foetal loss.
Now, many conservative, religious and political leaders joyfully embrace these these consequences.
They seek to impose these values on the rest of society because they believe on
faith and without consideration of any revision of their views to be right.
This is just the sort of disrespect for liberty,
intolerance and moral pike headedness that we find so contemptible in regimes like that of the Taliban.
Now in Australia, our own aspiring Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, once wrote of the importance.
Some Christian values in public life and lauded Australian Christian politicians now over the
kinds of Christian values which claim that the embryo and foetus have the same right to life,
exactly the same rights of life as other humans accounts for poorly accounts poorly for the way in which modern liberal society actually functions,
and the conflict with widely accepted and valued practices.
Now there is a value to controlling our reproduction,
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.
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,
loving marriage, but sometimes an inarticulate intention in a chaotic or immature relationship.
To have a child is the wrong thing. And sometimes there are too many people in the world.
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.
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.
It should have been Miller and Parrish who decided the fate of their embryos, not the Chicago clinic, no matter what the law.
The destruction of embryos is a moral crime when parents want to have them, if they don't want them.
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.
So here is the solution to the puzzle of our conflicting attitudes towards the embryo and the foetus.
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.
Embryos don't have special moral value when they're not desired by the people who form them.
One of the greatest ethical advances has been to give people freedom to control their own reproduction,
to decide how many children to have, when to have children.
This is precisely something that the fundamentalist elements of the Catholic Church seek to deny this reproductive liberty.
Fortunately, women no longer have to have ten or 20 children during their reproductive lives.
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.
Now the implications of the foetus or embryo having conditional value, I view the embryo or the foetus as like a work of art.
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.
If we had no good reason. Imagine that Da Vinci was sitting around with nothing special to do one day,
and he thought, Well, maybe I could paint something that will become the Mona Lisa.
He said, No, I prefer to go to the pub and have a drink with my friends.
This would be, I believe,
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.
Now he has a reason to produce that art, and we have a reason not to destroy it.
But we don't have to ascribe an intrinsic moral value to the Mona Lisa to make those claims.
We only have to client appeal to its conditional value.
Conditional on its value to people who have been alive or will be alive or are alive.
Now it seems trivialising to value earthly human life and to compare it to art.
But one could make the extreme claim that every human life is more valuable than the Mona Lisa.
Even so, I think few people would accept that.
But even if it were true, we're still not under a strong obligation to have children or to refrain from abortion
in the same way as Da Vinci is not under a strong obligation to produce such a thing.
Other reasons could defeat the obligation to produce such works of art.
Now, when it comes to spare IVF embryos for couples who have already had the number of children that they want,
we're faced with a similar kind of problem. Other couples want to use them.
Yet almost routinely those embryos are destroyed.
This is like in many ways the destruction of a work of art for no good reason.
Now consider abortion. People bring value to each other's lives.
And when a couple decides or a woman decides to have an abortion,
she's in many ways denying future people who will exist the value that that child would have brought to their lives.
This is most obvious in those cases where there's a couple who wish to adopt the child.
But in more general cases, that child brings value to society.
People like Derek Parfit and myself have even argued that there are impersonal values or impersonal reasons that have to do with reproduction.
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.
In the same way as creating a piece of art or some other valuable object would bring to future people.
Now, as I said, we have reasons to create objects, pieces of art, and also to bring into existence possible people.
But this is only a prototype or prima facie reason or a feasible obligation.
Nobody would argue that we have an overriding obligation to bring about whatever value we can into the future.
Clearly, this has to be weighed against other reasons.
Reasons to control the global population. Duties to oneself and one's existing children.
Duties to the environment and so on. All of these obligations or reasons have to be weighed in order to decide whether one has,
all things considered, a reason to have a child or not have a child.
And given that the reasons to do with bringing art forms into existence or things that
benefit other people are much smaller than the reasons we typically have to existing people.
These obligations will will typically be quite weak, but nonetheless they exist.
So in those cases where a giving up an embryo world foetus imposes very little
cost on a couple the reasons to keep those embryos or foetuses up much stronger.
So for example, a vector genesis, the ability to to bring to gestate embryos outside of foetuses outside of the female body
were the case then the costs of giving up a foetus or an embryo would be much less.
The costs are smallest in the case of spare embryos from IVF.
So in these cases, the reasons to give them up are not out wide,
typically by strong personal reasons that would would argue in favour of their destruction.
So in some cases, a few cases, I think it can be all things considered wrong to destroy embryos or even foetuses,
particularly those which are spare from IVF. I believe we have obligations, not utilitarian obligations, but obligations of a duty of easy rescue.
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,
you have a moral obligation to perform that act.
Now, it's interesting that Peter, typically, when he goes to argue in public, doesn't argue from utilitarian considerations.
He argues from this consideration, which is much more acceptable to everyone.
So he's his arguments about alleviation of poverty are based on these sorts of duty of easy rescue considerations.
So it's clear that people could be it seems to me clear that people could be
under an obligation to have a child when it's a case of a duty of easy rescue,
such as when it would be a matter of merely giving up embryos which are no longer required for reproduction
to another couple who desperately want to gestate a child and have a have a child of their own.
Now, this could even be a legal requirement.
It seems to me that both conservatives about the moral value of embryos and foetuses and consequentialist such as myself,
who see some value to bringing embryos and foetuses to the point of producing a
live born person could agree that the law should require a duty of easy rescue.
So my view the law should change to require couples who are engaging in IVF, who no longer acquire their embryos,
to give those embryos to couples who are childless and who want them,
and also to give them to scientists who are doing bona fide research on the embryo.
So according to this argument, there is something wrong about abortion.
It's not that it denies a future of value, as Donmar Keyser said, because that argument is obviously mistaken,
because if you have an abortion, there is no future child is deprived of a.
You have value, but it's a variant of that.
It says that you deprive other people in the future of the value that this individual would bring to their lives,
in the same way as you deny them the value that a piece of art would provide them.
So there is something wrong with abortion and there is something wrong with destruction of embryos.
And I think we can agree that the needless destruction,
the reason this destruction of embryos as a part of IVF is something that's wrong and indeed probably should be legislated against.
So I think I have a couple minutes.
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.
I don't want to make this a debate around potential and the difference between active and passive potential.
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.
You have to modify it in order for it to become a a a podium.
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.
And that's a human act, a technological act.
So I can't see even if his argument applies, which I don't think it does,
to foetuses and embryos that occur naturally, that the same argument would apply to two IVF embryos.
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.
But I've made the same argument myself somewhere rather general medical ethics.
One point a somatic cell has a complete genetic complement in the same way as an embryo.
Yet, as Yamanaka has shown, a few of those genetic switches are turned in certain ways.
How can you say that there's a huge moral difference between an embryo that occurs naturally and a skin cell
when both of them have the same genetic complement and a few genetic switches are turned the other way.
Surely if one has an active potential, the other has an active potential because they're both the same biological, some substance.
In fact, they're genetically, you know, identical to each other.
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.
Both of them have the instructions for an entire human being.
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.
And as I said, I think Johnny Pew will have more to say about Charlie's arguments about potential.
But as I said, the implications of this are devastating.
If you really accept that we should give special moral consideration to embryos in virtue of their potentiality,
our whole pattern of medical research and medical treatment should radically shift because we have an
epidemic of an embryo death that kills many more people than die every year from any other disease.
But I don't want to be intensely critical. I think that consequentialist such as myself,
who accept a duty of easy rescue and accept considerations of value and non consequentialist such as Charlie can both agree
that in certain circumstances there's something wrong about abortion and something wrong about the destruction of embryos.
How we should respond to that in law is a separate question.
I think the the revisions of law that are necessary on Syria are fairly limited.
But I'll finish there.