34 
Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
principle: in accepting the benefit, one re-enunciates and 
reaffirms the principle violated by the original deed in ques- 
tion. 
As a plan for redeeming some good from embryo destruc- 
tion that has already taken place, while not encouraging em- 
bryo destruction in the future, the administration’s policy 
appears at least to seek to address each of these three condi- 
tions; (1) No federal funds have been or, by this policy, would 
be used in the destruction of human embryos for research. (2) 
By restricting research funding exclusively to embryonic stem 
cell lines derived before the policy went into effect, the policy 
deliberately refuses to offer present or future financial or other 
incentives to anyone who might subsequently destroy addi- 
tional embryos for research; this is the moral logic behind a 
central feature of the policy, the cut-off date for funding eligi- 
bility (though some argue that by failing to call for an end to 
privately funded research the policy does not altogether avoid 
complicity). And (3) the President, in his speech of August 9, 
2001, and since (as in the passage quoted above and else- 
where), has reaffirmed the moral principle that underlies his 
policy and the law on the subject: that nascent human life 
should not be destroyed for research, even if good might come 
of it. The policy as a whole draws attention to that principle by 
drawing a sharp line beyond which funding will not be made 
available. 
Of course, since these terms from the parlance of moral phi- 
losophy were not those explicitly employed by the policy’s 
authors, they can go only so far in helping us to imderstand 
the policy’s foundation. As in any public policy decision, pru- 
dence is here mixed with principle, in the hope that the two 
might reinforce (rather than imdermine) each other, and a 
variety of moral aims are brought together. The desire to afford 
some aid to a potentially promising field of research moderates 
what might otherwise have been an at least symbolically 
stauncher stance against embryo destruction: no public fund- 
ing whatsoever, even for work on stem cell lines obtained from 
embryos destroyed in the past. Moreover, the desire to show 
regard for established principles and standards of ethical 
research leads to an insistence that, to be approved, stem cell 
lines must have been drawn from embryos produced for repro- 
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