Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
85 
are not already dead, but they are in a so-called “terminal 
situation" from which no rescue is practically possible. In view 
of this situation, one commentator proposes extending to these 
embryos the principle that sometimes, he argues, permits the 
killing of innocents. That is, killing may be morally permissible 
in cases where the person will soon die for other unavoidable 
reasons and where there is another person who can somehow 
be rescued through or as a result of such a normally impermis- 
sible act of killing (thus, as he puts it, “nothing more is lost"). 
He admits that the case of cryopreserved embryos stretches 
the application of the “nothing is lost" principle beyond its 
previous uses, because the embryos in question are alive and 
at risk of death only because of human choices and designs 
specifically directed toward them. The principle is also 
stretched because the lives that might someday be saved 
through today’s embryo deaths are quite remote. The potential 
lives saved are those of unspecified future persons with dis- 
eases that might be treated by therapies that as yet do not ex- 
ist and may or may not exist in the future. However, against 
the weight of all these ifs, which some find formidable, there is 
the present fact that (like the embryos used to create stem cell 
lines derived before August 9^ of 2001) the cryopreserved em- 
bryos are already here, with little or no prospect of rescue— 
they are, in this observer's description, already lost.^^® 
Presumably, if destruction of “spare embryos” for human 
embryonic stem cell research were generally agreed to be 
permissible through this “nothing is lost” principle, it could be 
federally funded, subject to such routine secondary considera- 
tions as the need for free and informed consent by donors. 
Yet this argument, not surprisingly, has met with opposi- 
tion. Some critics have claimed that it employs circular moral 
reasoning. The embryos, they argue, are in a “terminal situa- 
tion" because of human choice and design; thus to then decide 
that, since they are going to die anyway, they may as well be 
put to good use is to ignore the moral implications of the origi- 
nal decision to create and freeze them. Critics argue, moreover, 
that when thinking about our responsibilities to those who are 
soon to die, we would normally say that it makes a consider- 
able moral difference whether we simply accept their dying or 
whether we positively embrace it as our aim.“’ Yet some pro- 
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