Appendix G. 
261 
To signal the decisive break that I think we may need from the 
usual bioethics frame, I want to draw attention to Martha 
Nussbaum’s recent article in the journal Daedalus entitled, 
“Compassion & Terror" (Nussbaum, 2003). Discussing Euripides’ 
play, Troian Women . Nussbaum reflects on the fact that the Greek 
poets returned obsessively to the sacking of Troy and the acts of the 
“rapacious and murderous Greeks.” She explores the poets’ 
compassionate imagining of the fate of Trojan women and children to 
reflect on the conditions and limits of a compassionate vision. 
Although Nussbaum is ultimately concerned about engendering a 
compassionate vision for Americans in the face of terror and 
particularly compassion for innocent women and children far from 
our shores, her analysis of compassion is thought-provoking in 
relation to stem cell research. 
Nussbaum notes that compassion is a complex emotion 
requiring a series of judgments involving another person’s suffering 
or lack of well-being. We must judge that someone has been 
harmed, that the harm is serious, and that it was not deserved. 
Moreover, says Nussbaum, Western tradition has stressed what 
could be called the “judgment of similar possibilities.” In other 
words, “we have compassion only insofar or we believe that the 
suffering person shares vulnerabilities and possibilities "with us” 
(Nussbaum, 2003, 15). 
Now surely in just about everyone’s catalogue of human 
vulnerabilities are illness, old age, and death. Yet, as we have just 
seen, stem cell research might significantly transform the “human” 
experience of illness and death, at least for some. If stem cell 
therapies were to erode the notion of human nature or species 
membership, might they not also erode some basic moral 
sensibilities? Mary Midgley, for example, has argued that both the 
notion of human nature and that of human rights are importantly tied 
to membership in our species because rights are “supposed to 
guarantee the kind of life that all specimens of Homo sapiens need” 
(Midgley, 2000, 9). 
Although Nussbaum avoids the language of human nature, it is 
precisely this sort of point that she highlights when she argues that 
compassion requires the belief that others share vulnerabilities and 
possibilities with us. Indeed, like Midgley, Nussbaum ties the notion 
of universal human rights to important human functions and 
capabilities. 'The basic idea, she says, is to ask what constitutes the 
characteristic activities of human beings. In other words: 
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