Search This Blog

Friday, January 19, 2007

Blinding Us with Science

Jonah Goldberg has a new essay out that has some amazing quotes and raises some thought provoking issues:

First the quote:
Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), declared this month, “It is scandalous that eight years have passed since we have known about stem cell research and the potential to conquer all known maladies, and federal funds have not been available for the research.”

All . . . known . . . maladies? Really? Before that, John Edwards all but promised that a vote for John Kerry was a vote for Christopher Reeve to walk again.

The promises made by the embryonic stem cell research advocates are breath taking, and scandalous!

Now some thoughts:
Simply because science can do something is in no way an argument that it should (or shouldn’t) do it. Science is morally neutral. Science kills and science cures. Which is why it’s so disturbing that both left and right have bought into the rhetoric of science as a source of morality. Scientists themselves tend to understand the moral ambiguity of science, which is why they spend so much time arguing about professional ethics.

For example, everybody agrees that life-ending experimentation on a 5-year-old boy would be wrong. But what if such research could solve “all human maladies?” Would it be wrong then? More relevant, would it be “anti-science?”

Yes, yes, ESCR advocates reject comparing embryos to fully developed humans.
But that misses the point on two scores.

First, the determination that embryos have no moral worth is not a scientific conclusion but a moral one. Second, rejecting the comparison doesn’t answer the question: Is it anti-science to bar certain procedures on moral grounds?

No comments: