14 
Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
on terminological grounds, in this case, by the naming of the 
embryo “spare.” Rather it should be decided on the basis of a 
direct moral appraisal of the rights and goods involved: on the 
basis of what we owe to suffering humanity and the obliga- 
tions we have to seek the means of its relief; and on the basis 
of the nature of human embryos, what we owe them as proper 
respect and regard, and whether and why such respect or re- 
gard may be overridden.* For many people, the moral question 
depends, in other words, on what some bioethicists call — and 
we ourselves will sometimes call — “the moral status of the 
embryo.” If embryos lacked all “moral status,” there would be 
little moral argument about their use and destruction. 
Yet the notion “moral status” is problematic, even though it 
is easy to understand why it has come into fashion. For many 
people, the central ethical question regarding embryonic stem 
cell research is whether an embryonic organism from which 
cells may be removed to develop ES cells is fully “one of us,” 
deserving the same kind of respect and protection as a new- 
born baby, child, or adult. What they want to know is the 
moral standing of these organisms — entities that owe their ex- 
istence, their extra-uterine situation, and their “spare-ness” to 
deliberate human agency — at such early stages of develop- 
ment. As we shall see, some people try to find structural or 
functional markers — for example, the familiar human form or 
the presence or absence of sensation — ^to decide the moral 
worth of a human embryo. Others use an argument from conti- 
nuity of development to rebut any attempt to find a morally 
significant boundary anywhere along the continuum of growth 
and change. But, to judge from countless efforts to provide a 
biologically based criterion for ascribing full human worth, it 
seems certain that we shall never find an answer to our moral 
question in biology alone, even as the answers we give must 
take into account the truths of embryology. At least until now, 
philosophical attempts to draw moral inferences from the bio- 
* Some Members of this Council (including Alfonso Gomez-Lobo and Robert 
George) hold that the moral question should be decided on the basis of the 
prior consideration of the rightness or wrongness of intentionally destroying 
human beings for the sake of further goals, and then on whether or not hu- 
man embryos are human beings in the relevant sense. 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
