Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
55 
In casual conversation, and sometimes in more theoretical 
reasoning, moral questions are often analyzed in the language 
of “weighing" and "balancing," or else in terms of overriding 
concerns, inviolable principles, or fundamental “rights." These 
two sets of terms and metaphors point to two distinct ways of 
making difficult moral judgments. In some circumstances there 
need be no irresolvable conflict betv^een the two approaches. 
Those who seek to respect fundamental rights and adhere to 
inviolable principles need not ignore the complexities of moral 
situations or the consequences of our actions when they form 
their judgments. Likewise, those who seek to weigh or balance 
competing goods may think of those goods as involving not 
only benefits to be realized but also principles to be upheld. 
There may also be circumstances, however, in which those dif- 
ferences that do exist between these two approaches consti- 
tute a fork in the road, constraining our decision. Thus, to take 
an example from outside the domain of bioethics, the principle 
that civilians should be safeguarded from direct, intended at- 
tack in time of war may be understood to trump all other com- 
peting goods (without denying the importance of those goods), 
or it may be understood as one good to be balanced against 
others. Which fork in the road of moral reasoning one takes at 
such a point will have a decisive influence on the character of 
the arguments employed and the conclusions reached. 
This has often also been the case in the public debate over 
federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research. Many 
observers have agreed that federal policy must seek a certain 
balance between two competing goods or interests: the pro- 
gress of medical research and therapy, and respect for nascent 
human life. Indeed, President Bush himself framed the issue in 
these terms, saying a few weeks before his decision was an- 
nounced that his policy would “need to balance value and re- 
spect for life with the promise of science and the hope of sav- 
ing life."^ But not all participants in the debate have had the 
same idea of what such balance should entail and, therefore, 
how weight should be assigned to the competing demands. 
For some, the degree of medical promise should profoundly 
affect the degree of government support for embryonic stem 
cell research. For them, the critical element (though of course 
not the exclusive one) in establishing policy must be scientific 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
