54 Ethical and Policy Developments 
cause even the policy debates — as understood and engaged in 
by participants on all sides — are clearly directed to a set of 
underlying moral issues and informed by ethical beliefs and 
opinions. Critiques (and defenses) of the present policy, and 
proposals of alternatives, are almost without exception based 
on moral grounds. 
This chapter will, of course, revisit several of the themes 
raised in the previous chapter. There, our aim was to present 
some basic facts regarding the current policy, its context, and 
its execution. Here, we take up arguments on all sides of the 
issue — including those that dispute the understanding of the 
policy put forward by its authors and those that raise other is- 
sues or alternative courses of action. 
While we will raise these arguments and counterargu- 
ments, examining problems, questions, and concerns, our pur- 
pose is not finally to assess the validity of the competing 
claims or to arrive at a conclusion, but — ^in line with the Coun- 
cil’s charge to monitor developments in this area — ^to present 
them more or less as they have appeared in the public debates 
of the past several years. This way of proceeding suffers from 
one especially prominent drawback: it tends to present all ar- 
guments as equal in importance or prevalence. We will seek to 
avoid this whenever possible, by offering some sense of which 
arguments have been most crucial for the public debate. 
I. THE NATURE OF THE MORAL ARGUMENT 
Before entering upon a detailed review of the debates, we 
take a moment to consider the character of the moral reason- 
ing and argumentation we will confront. Different participants 
in the stem cell debates tend to hold different views not only 
regarding individual substantive judgments, but also regard- 
ing the kind of moral question, in the most general terms, we 
are facing in deciding about stem cell research policy. At first 
glance, people seem to be disagreeing about whether a bal- 
ancing of competing interests and goods is called for, or 
whether some one overriding moral duty ought to shape our 
judgment, though of course that dichotomy is not in every case 
quite so stark. 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
