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Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
‘What does the human being do, characteristically, as 
suchQand not, say, as a member of a particular 
group, or a particular local community?’ To put it 
another way, what are the forms of activity, of doing 
and being, that constitute the human form of life and 
distinguish it from other actual or imaginable forms 
of life, such as the lives of animals and plants, or, on 
the other hand, of immortal gods as imagined in 
myths and legends (which frequently have precisely 
the function of delimiting the human)? (Nussbaum, 
1995, 72) 
Nussbaum notes that this inquiry proceeds by examining a wide 
variety of self-interpretations and that comparing characteristic 
human activities with non-human activities and, through myths and 
stories, comparing humans and the gods is particularly helpful. For 
one thing, such an inquiry helps us to define limits that derive from 
membership in the world of nature. 
Indeed, although Nussbaum is particularly attentive to the wide 
variety of cultural interpretations of what it means to be human, she 
insists that to ground any essentialist or universal notion of human 
rights, one must attend to human biology. Although her account of 
the human is neither ahistorical nor a priori, it is linked to an 
“empirical study of a species-specific form of life" (1995, 75). When 
she develops her account of central human capabilities, she begins 
■with the body. She writes: 
We live all our lives in bodies of a certain sort, whose 
possibilities and vulnerabilities do not as such 
belong to one human society rather than mother. 
These bodies, similar far more than dissimilar (given 
the enormous range of possibilities) are our homes, 
so to speak, opening certain options and denying 
others, giving us certain needs and also certain 
possibilities for excellence. The fact that any given 
human being might have lived anywhere and 
belonged to any culture is a great part of what 
grounds our mutual recognitions; this fact, in turn, 
has a great deal to do with the general humanness of 
the body, its great distinctness from other bodies. 
The experience of the body is culturally shaped, to be 
sure; the importance we ascribe to its various 
functions is also culturally shaped. But the body 
itself, not culturally variant in its nutritional and other 
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