The Moral Status of Embryo

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The Moral Status of Embryo

• Hannah Chen

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Arguments In Support of Fertilization as The
Marker Event

• The Feature of Fertilization Process
• 1.the genetic argument
• 2.the discontinuity/continuity argument
• 3. and the individuality argument
• The Potentiality of Newly Formed Beings
• 1.respect for capacities of individuals
  argument
• 2.and consequentialist argument

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The Feature of Fertilization Process ? Genetic
Argument

• The only morally significant marker event is
  the formation of a human genotype.
• Since it is only at fertilization, not after
  or before, does a new genetic member of the Homo
  sapiens come into being, it is wrong to destroy
  early human life ever since that moment.

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The Feature of Fertilization Process ?
Discontinuity/Continuity Argument

• In contrast to fertilization event,
  post-fertilization development is constructed as
  a continuing process that is no way to isolate
  any one stage to attribute the attainment of
  moral status arbitrarily.

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The Feature of Fertilization Process ?
Individuality Argument

• It is because an individual human being with
  the unique genotype begins to exist after that,
  it is the same individual right to life through
  from that moment onto the end.

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The Potentiality of Embryos?Argument of respect
for capacities of individuals

• potential to become
• Since embryo is a potential human being, a
  being with potential to become an adult like us,
  it is worthy of respect at the very beginning.

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The Potentiality of Embryos? Consequentialist
Argument

• potential to produce
• Due to the potential of embryo to produce a
  future human subject as its consequence, the
  present embryo bears moral weight not to
  interfere with.

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A Substance-oriented View of Embryo

• the Declaration on Procured Abortion
• From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a
  new life is begun which is neither that of the
  father nor of the mother it is rather the life
  of a new human being with his own growth. It
  would never be made human if it were not human
  already.

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Person as Substance

• a person as subject is the substance, which
  serves as the transcendental foundation of any
  further development. If there were no unchanged
  substance behind the flux of permanent changes,
  the development of any personal characteristics
  would be impossible.
• The moral notion of a person and the
  metaphysical notion of a person are not separate
  and distinct concepts but just two different and
  unstable resting points on the same continuum.

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Epistemological Paradigm Shift

• From Substance-oriented View to Function-oriented
  View
• From View of Potential Individual Human Being to
  View of Material of Life

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Some Reasons for the Shift

• Triploid zygotes
• viable individuals with 47 chromosomes
• mutation, mosaic organism resulting from
  chromosomal non-disjunction
• identical twin, conjoined twin, fetus in fetu,
  and chimera
• embryo vs. embryo proper
• the suspected dichotomy of somatic cell and
  fertilized egg
• individual identity problem

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Metaphorical Thinking in ES Cells Research An
Example

• In Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem
  Cells, four different approaches are proposed by
  scientists to take place of traditional resources
  of human embryonic stem cells. It has been
  suggested to derive stem cells
• 1) by extracting cells form embryos already dead
  
• or 2) by non-harmful biopsy of living embryos
• or 3) by extracting cells from artificially
  created non-embryonic but embryo-like cellular
  systems (engineered to lack the essential
  elements of embryo-genesis but still capable of
  some cell division and growth)
• or 4) by dedifferentiation of somatic cells back
  to pluripotency.

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Approach I

• how can we identify the organismic death and
  justify the reasonable criteria?
• Even if arrested embryo is considered as death,
  since the vital cells abstracted from it, might
  resume dividing if extracted and placed in the
  proper milieu, since these cells can still be
  identify as the continuum of the original one
  according to the same genotype, can we be so sure
  that such an embryo is really dead?

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Approach ?

• It is not clear when in embryonic development
  such totipotency of the blastomere disappears.
• In terms of the potency, the very same blastomere
  might be viewed as only one cell of the embryo
  under one condition, or as another embryo under
  the other condition.

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Approach ?

• Even though the biological artifact is not an
  organism, lack of organized development form the
  earliest stages of cell differentiation, doubts
  still exist.
• People are concerned whether the artifact is
  defective embryo rather than non-embryonic
  entities.

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Approach ?

• It might lead to the converse argument of
  individual identity in embryo debate.
• In theory, within the round serial of both
  backward and forward developments, a somatic cell
  would be eventually established as a grown-up
  with the help of advanced bio-tech.

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Seven Conceptions of Personhood

• Appeal to Creation Conception
• Appeal to Rites Conception
• Appeal to Rights Conception
• 1 standard of species
• 2 potentiality
• 3 sentience
• 4 brain function
• 5 awareness of self as a continuing entity

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New Metaphorical Thinking on the Way

• We need to really think through and through what
  kind of respect is due for embryo. And this task
  could not be done without using moral
  imagination.
• Moral imagination needs to be metaphorical in the
  sense of being alerted to the constant necessity
  of stretching ourselves beyond the present
  identity and context that we have.

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• Metaphor, the locus of our imaginative
  exploration of possibilities for action, enters
  into our moral deliberations in three ways,
• 1) It gives rise to different ways of
  conceptualizing situations. 2) It provides
  different ways of understanding the nature of
  morality as such. 3) Metaphors also constitutes a
  basis for analogizing and moving beyond the clear
  or prototype cases to new cases.

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• What kind of implications might be induced from
  the function-oriented material of life view?
• event vs. substance
• limited status vs. full status
• beyond 14 days vs. before 14 days

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The End

• Thank you for your attention.