36 
Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
been spent on such research. To go further — say, by funding 
research on the currently ineligible lines derived after August 
9, 2001 — would not extend the logic of the policy or of the law, 
but rather contradict them both: it would be a difference not of 
degree but of principle. By implying that research using em- 
bryos destroyed in the future might one day be supported with 
public funding, such a policy shift would at least implicitly 
encourage the very act (embryo destruction) that the current 
policy aims not to encourage. Of course, such a change might 
well be in order, but the case for it must address itself to the 
moral argument and its principles, and not only to the state of 
research and its progress or promise. 
Rather than focus on this principled aspect of the policy, the 
public debate has tended to concentrate on the precise bal- 
ance of benefits and harms resulting from the combination of 
the administration’s policy and the state of the relevant sci- 
ence. It has focused on whether there are “enough” cell lines 
or on whether the science is advancing as quickly as it could. 
And it has proceeded as though the administration’s aim was 
simply to maximize progress in embryonic stem cell research 
without transgressing the limits of the letter of the law. 
Had the decision been based on that aim alone, then claims 
or evidence of slowed progress alone might, in themselves, 
constitute an effective argument against it on its own terms 
(on the ground that the law technically permits federal funding 
of research on cells derived from embryos whose destruction 
was underwritten by private funding). But if one accepts the 
premise that the decision was grounded also in a discernible 
(albeit highly controversial) moral aim, one cannot show that 
the policy is wrong merely by pointing to the potential benefits 
of stem cell research or the potential harm to science caused 
by restrictions in federal funding. The present policy aims to 
support stem cell research while insisting that federal funds 
not be used to support or encourage the future destruction of 
human embryos. To argue with that policy on its own terms, 
therefore, one would need to argue with its view of the signifi- 
cance of that aim. Concretely, this means arguing with its 
ethical position regarding the destruction of nascent human 
life, and with its ethical-political position regarding the signifi- 
cance of government funding of a contested activity. 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
