Morality and human embryo research

The readers of EMBO reports will be familiar with the broad outlines of the debate about whether it is morally acceptable to destroy human embryos for the purposes of medical research. The Talking Point articles published here exemplify the two sides of this debate: Robert George and Patrick Lee argue that such research is inherently wrong, whereas Thomas Douglas and Julian Savulescu contend that there are no sound moral objections to it. Both parties address the issue from within the broad framework of philosophical ethics; however, their approaches are different. George and Lee present a systematic way of thinking about human embryos and their development, according to which these embryos are no different in kind from young children—or other human beings—and should therefore be treated with the same respect. By contrast, Douglas and Savulescu begin with a more ‘intuitive’ approach: they present some hypothetical thought experiments and reflect on current practices to show that our “moral intuitions” are “incompatible with the view that embryos are persons”, although they also try to show that the type of argument used by George and Lee is not convincing. These papers represent two different conceptions of moral theory. The approach of George and Lee is rationalist—the moral value of something depends basically on its essential nature—and, therefore, appeals to our ordinary unsystematic moral convictions are largely irrelevant. By contrast, the approach of Douglas and Savulescu exemplifies a form of moral empiricism in which they consider our unsystematic moral responses—or ‘intuitions’—not only to have some initial plausibility, but also to constitute the main source for considerations that we refine into moral judgments. The old dispute between rationalism and empiricism is here played out within the context of moral theory.