Among the many ludicrous testimonies and articles on the "ethics" of stem cell research, Michael Kinsley's recent pieces in the Washington Post ("Reason, faith and stem cells", 8-29-00) and in The Daily Yomiuri in Japan ("Faith crucial in stem cell research", 9-5-00) take the cake for pure unadulterated irrationality. Well, let me rephrase that: for purposefully being irrational.
In Kinsley's words: "Opposition to stem-cell research is the reductio ad absurdum of the right-to-life argument." That is, the "right-to-life" argument is totally irrational and absurd -- and such views based solely on "faith" should not be forced on our pluralistic, multicultural, democratic society. Why? Because, according to Kinsley, these early human embryos are not human beings, much less "people" with moral rights. "If faith tells you otherwise, listen. But do not mistake it for the voice of reason." The "voice of reason", of course, is Michael Kinsley. Or is it?
The great logician magician has masterfully sculpted an argument used since antiquity to win rhetorical battles in the courtrooms and fool citizens in the public squares -- the reductio ad absurdum. He cunningly applies it to the current political debates swirling around the use of human embryonic stem cells in experimental research. Just one small difference: he must purposefully fake one of the premises in his opponents' argument to make this technique work. No dope is he, Michael Kinsley.
Kinsley's wily deconstruction of the reductio argument is not new in these debates. Many others have used it in the persistent efforts to "ethically" justify such research and propagandize the public with bogus arguments. The real reductio ad absurdum argument goes something like this. Take your opponent's major and/or minor premise, and by demonstrating how fundamentally illogical and bizarre it is, reduce your opponent's conclusion to an all-out absurdity. The aim here is to make your opponent and his/her argument appear to be so ridiculously outrageous that no one in their right mind could possibly agree. Bingo! Argument won.
All is fair here, if one is accurately "pushing the logic" of the actual premise used by one's opponents. But what Kinsley does is purposefully fake the science in the opponent's premise, and then "push". He will claim that human embryos aren't really human beings at all, and therefore the opponents' conclusion is absurd.
What is the "right-to-life" argument (which, by the way, is hardly held only by pro-life activists)? It usually goes something like this: (1) It is always morally wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings in research. (2) Early human embryos are innocent human beings; (3) Therefore, it is always morally wrong to intentionally kill early human embryos in research. If it is true that these early human embryos are not real live human beings, then Kinsley is correct.
Kinsley knows that the real reductio cannot endure the truth of the known objective scientific facts, so he must substitute his own fake science fictions in the opponents' minor premise (2): "Opponents of stem-cell research believe that 'a microscopic clump of cells' (the New York Times description of an embryo at the stage when stem cells are removed) has the same moral claims as a fully formed human being. ... [T]he beginning of human life is not a factual question ... Biology will not solve this puzzle for us someday. ... Why is it so hard for them to accept ... [t]hat we each start out as something less than human, that the transformation takes place gradually ... ". Kinsley even appeals to his old (ancient?) high school biology texts: " ... ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the development of each individual human being resembles the evolution of the species" -- which also seems to give credence to his claim that, "A goldfish resembles a human being more than an embryo does." (emphases mine)
Now, Kinsley couldn't possibly be so biologically illiterate -- indeed, he is putting himself out as an "expert" by even commenting on the science of this issue. However, isn't it less than reassuring that he relies on the New York Times and his old high school biology textbook (which he admits is out of date and erroneous) for his "scientific facts"? Kinsley understands perfectly the stakes. If these early human embryos are "just stem cells" (as then-Director of NIH Harold Varmus indeed testified before Senate Subcommittees), if they are just "clumps of cells", if they are just transient evolutionary natures en route to "humanhood" (via frogs and goldfish), if they are "less than human", if what they are "depends on how we want to define them" -- then his substitute "premise" is set, and the absurd conclusion he wants will necessarily follow from his opponents' argument. If, however, these early human embryos are really living human beings, then Kinsley is not only wrong, his own argument is absurd.
There is no question whatsoever that the physical material dimension of every human being normally begins at fertilization. This is not a "political", "faith", or "prolife" subjective opinion that anyone has to "believe". This is an objective scientific fact that is agreed to by 100% of the human embryologists around the world: [emphases mine]
"A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo). (p. 2) ... "Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm ... unites with a female gamete or oocyte ... to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual" (p. 18) ... "Human development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte (ovum) from a female is fertilized by a sperm (or spermatozoon) from a male." (p. 18) [Keith L. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (6th Edition) (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998).]
"In this text, we begin our description of the developing human with the formation and differentiation of the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual. ... Embryonic development is considered to begin at this point." (p. 1) ... "This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development." (p. 17) [William J. Larsen, Human Embryology (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997)].
"Fertilization is an important landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed." (p. 5) ... Fertilization is the procession of events that begins when a spermatozoon makes contact with a secondary oocyte or its investments ..." (p. 19) [Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Muller, Human Embryology & Teratology (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1994).]
"Human pregnancy begins with the fusion of an egg and a sperm ... finally, the fertilized egg, now properly called an embryo, must make its way into the uterus ...". (p. 3) [Bruce M. Carlson, Human Embryology and Developmental Biology (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1994)].
And this is just the tip of the scientific iceberg. So Kinsley is objectively wrong. The objective scientific truth is that these early human embryos that he and NIH want to justify the destruction of are already existing innocent human beings from fertilization on -- and that is a scientific fact -- not a "belief". Therefore his opponents' premise is scientifically correct, as is their conclusion that necessarily follows from it: It is morally wrong to intentionally kill these innocent living human beings. The factual line has been drawn by science: at fertilization. Why is it so hard for Kinsley to accept these objective scientific facts?
Nor can the "evolution" card be played here either, such as it is. The idea that we "gradually become human beings" is just as absurd -- scientifically -- as the suggestion that we can just make up our own "biology labels":
"The theory that successive stages of individual development (ontogeny) correspond with ("recapitulate") successive adult ancestors in the line of evolutionary descent (phylogeny) became popular in the 19th century as the so-called biogenetic law. This theory of recapitulation, however, has had a "regrettable influence on the progress of embryology"[citing de Beer]... Furthermore, during its development an animal departs more and more from the form of other animals. Indeed, the early stages in the development of an animal are not like the adult stages of other forms, but resemble only the early stages of those animals." [O'Rahilly and Mueller 1994, pp. 8-9]
No, this line of "evolutionary" argument is DOA -- on the authority of science itself. Nor are these early human embryos in any way deficient when compared to goldfish. Early human embryos look the way human beings are supposed to look at that stage of growth and development. They aren't supposed to look like goldfish. I am quite confident that even Kinsley didn't look like a goldfish when he was an early embryo. He looked the way he was supposed to look -- at that stage of growth and development.
Finally, does Kinsley realize that even the physical human brain is not fully developed until early adulthood? Probably not. If the New York Times doesn't know, who does? Try any human embryologist: "Although most developmental changes occur during the embryonic and fetal periods, some important changes occur during later periods of development: infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. ... The brain triples in weight between birth and 16 years, most developmental changes are completed by the age of 25." [Moore and Persaud 1998, p.2] Does Kinsley, like NIH Director Varmus, really think that they were not human beings until they were 25 years of age? I guess anything is possible -- in Disneyland.
Without a shred of valid scientific evidence to sustain him, Kinsley's "substitute premise", that early human embryos are not real live human beings, is absolutely not true. The opponent's actual premise, if not corrupted, is documented by scientific evidence agreed to by virtually 100% of the human embryologists in the world. Therefore their premise does not lead to an absurd conclusion at all.
What to do? Well, these debates have been here before. Strategy: Conjure up a batch of confusion. Kinsley-the-politician-logician will illicitly conflate the scientific with the philosophical question, and shift the issue to "personhood" -- the moral philosophy card. "Maybe they are human beings, but they are not human persons with moral rights and protections." But that depends on how one defines a "person". For Kinsley it is only in terms of actively expressed functions, i.e., "rational attributes" (choosing, willing, self-consciousness, awareness, etc.), and/or "sentience" (the ability to feel pain/suffer or pleasure) -- the typical bioethics definition of a "person" pace Peter Singer et al. Quoting Kinsley: "Proponents [like Kinsley] believe that a clump of cells has no serious moral claim compared with people who 'feel want, taste grief, need friends' (Shakespeare's description of a human being) ... An embryo feels nothing, thinks nothing, cannot suffer, is not aware of its own existence ... What matters is when it develops a sense of self, an ability to suffer ...". The shift from "human being" to "human person" has been accomplished.
Convinced? Well, aside from the fact that it is now Kinsley who is the one who expects that his Shakespearean belief-system should be forced on the rest of us as public policy, just consider for a moment where Kinsley's "logic" necessarily leads us. If only those who actively express such functions as "rational attributes" or "sentience" are "persons", then the following list of adult human beings are not "persons": Alzheimer's and Parkinson patients, the mentally ill and retarded, alcoholics and drug addicts, comatose patients, diabetics and paraplegics -- in fact, all the disabled -- in fact even Michael Kinsley himself when he is sleeping, or fantasizing.
It all sounds pretty absurd to me. But if you think absurdity isn't considered seriously in bioethics, read the celebrated works of bioethicist Richard Frey who pushes this "logic" and advocates the use of such adult human populations in purely experimental research in place of animals that are "people", or of bioethicist Norman Fost who argues that the "cognitively disabled" are "brain dead". (Now, we all know what "brain death" justifies.) Is that what we want?
Kinsley's conflation of the scientific and the moral questions is clever, but surely risky for him. As someone familiar with these risks so bluntly put it: "The reproductive biologist cannot assign moral status to the sperm or the egg or the fertilized egg or any of the subsequent products that may result from this fusion ... The reproductive biologist can help, however, by assuring that other scientists or those who wish to assert a moral status, and use a biological term or concept to do so, know what they are talking about". [D. Gareth Jones, "Brain birth and personal identity", Journal of Medical Ethics 15(4), 1989, 178]. Does Kinsley really know what he is talking about?
But Kinsley's "philosophical" problems don't stop here. As any halfway decent philosopher knows, any definition in which a "human being" is separated from a "human person" commits the great Cartesian crime of the "mind/body split". Chief of all such criticisms is that if the "human body" is separated -- in time or space -- from the "human mind", then there is no possible way that there can be any real causal interaction between the two. Descartes tried desperately; but he failed so miserably [see his Sixth Meditation] that he was laughed out of the academy for centuries. With bioethics, he's back! But so are his critics. Kinsley, like Descartes, must successfully explain to all of us precisely how "rational attributes" and "sentience" can get into a body that is separate from it and cause it to "think" and "feel". Like Descartes, he can't. "Evolution" within a single individual of a species, is nothing more than 'scientific' myth -- as even science now demonstrates. His mental meanderings lead us only to a mythical two-tier cast of humanity -- those who are "human persons", and those who are just "human beings." Haven't we been that route before?
No, human "persons" are defined in terms of the objectively known kind of thing they are, not in terms of any currently expressed functions -- mental or physical. Otherwise we must accept the inevitable conclusions such as those of Singer, Frey and Fost. And if you think about it, functions don't just pop up out of thin air; they are caused by something else that is already there before them -- the objective nature of the thing. It is the inherent capacity or nature of human beings that cause them to be what they are and to do what persons do -- whether or not that capacity is fully expressed or exercised at any particular point in time.
And if one chooses to speak in terms of a "rational soul", and if the inherent powers of that "rational soul" cannot be split among themselves, and if that whole "rational soul" cannot be split from the "body" that it is animating (at least, we have no empirical evidence of such splits!), then "personhood" must begin when the human being begins to actively express itself by producing specifically human proteins and enzymes -- at fertilization. This is scientifically verifiable. If the "vegetative" functions and activities are there, the rest must be there too.
Yet Kinsley persists that not only biological terms, but also moral terms, are simply "labels we give them" (pace lawyer bioethicist John Robertson). Kinsley-the-politician-logician will illicitly conflate the scientific with the philosophical question, and shift the issue to "personhood" -- the moral philosophy card. "Maybe they are human beings, but they are not human persons with moral rights and protections." But that depends on how one defines a "person". For Kinsley it is only in terms of actively expressed functions, i.e., "rational attributes" (choosing, willing, self-consciousness, awareness, etc.), and/or "sentience" (the ability to feel pain/suffer or pleasure) -- the typical bioethics definition of a "person" pace Peter Singer et al. Quoting Kinsley: "Proponents [like Kinsley] believe that a clump of cells has no serious moral claim compared with people who 'feel want, taste grief, need friends' (Shakespeare's description of a human being) ... An embryo feels nothing, thinks nothing, cannot suffer, is not aware of its own existence ... What matters is when it develops a sense of self, an ability to suffer ...". The shift from "human being" to "human person" has been accomplished. So, like Humpty Dumpty muses in Through the Looking Glass, for them, "when_I_ use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less. ... The question is, which is to be master -- that's all."
George Weigel's poignant observation leaps to mind: "That personhood is a status 'we confer' was the argument made in the 1920s by German legal scholar Karl Binding and eminent German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche to promote the notion that the state had an obligation to rid itself of those whose lives were 'unworthy of life' -- the radically handicapped, for instance. The notion of 'life unworthy of life' helped set the cultural ground for the holocaust." ["Stem Cells and the Logic of the Nazis," Los Angeles Times, 9/3/00].
Conceptual definitions of things that actually exist outside our minds are determined by our experience of the objective natures possessed by those things themselves, not by how we "choose to define them" -- look in any biology textbook. Otherwise all scientific experiments and efforts themselves would be reduced to pure absurd subjectivity -- including those experiments of stem cell researchers themselves. To arbitrarily "label" a thing that exists outside our minds as something other than what it objectively is is both absurd and irrational. True, we can choose to be so -- that is a given. But why would anybody want to choose to be so absurd and irrational?
Another variation of the subjectivist's argument is, "Besides, I can be as irrational with my "labels" as I want, as long as it doesn't harm anybody else, right?" Wrong. Such fake "labels" not only fail the test of objective truth, "merely" allowing us to deceive ourselves and others; they also can and do cause considerable irreparable harm -- even death -- to innocent others. In the case of stem cell research, actual living human beings are intentionally destroyed, their innocent lives extinguished forever. Why can't Kinsley see this? No turning back. Not even Kinsley the magician-logician-politician can do that.
Furthermore, women are being pressured into giving false "informed consent" since they are never accurately informed of what the objectively true natures are of the "clumps of cells" that they are donating. They are only given objectively untrue and arbitrary mental "labels" imposed on them by the likes of Kinsley. What about these people's moral and legal rights? And surely such irrational absurdities should not be incorporated into any country's public policies.
Without a shred of valid scientific or empirically grounded philosophical evidence to sustain him, Kinsley's "substitute premise", that early human embryos are not real live human "persons", is also absolutely not true. The opponent's actual premise, if not corrupted, does not lead to an absurd conclusion at all.
Michael Kinsley has the right to choose to be absurd and irrational, but he doesn't have the right to impose his absurdities on the rest of us. The "voice of reason" he is not.
Michael Kinsley's Article: (http://slate.msn.com/Readme/00-08-28/Readme.asp)
Posted Monday, Aug. 28, 2000, at 4:00 p.m. PT
Opponents of the new rules for government-funded stem-cell research are right that the rules are irrational. The rules forbid government-funded researchers to extract stem cells from human embryos, but they allow those researchers - on alternate Tuesdays when the wind is from the northeast and at least three members of five different review boards have dreamed of a fish - to use stem cells extracted by others.
Opponents of stem-cell research believe that "a microscopic clump of cells" (the New York Times' description of an embryo at the stage when stem cells are removed) has the same moral claims as a fully formed human being. Proponents believe that a clump of cells has no serious moral claim compared with people who "feel want, taste grief, need friends" (Shakespeare's description of a human being). No one believes that a clump of cells is just a clump of cells in private hands but becomes a full human being in the hands of a government grantee. You don't absolve yourself of murder by hiring a hit man.
The answer to this objection (which the authors of the regulations cannot make) is: Of course it's not rational. It's a compromise between two logically irreconcilable positions. And it stretches democracy as far as it can be stretched in deference to the strongly held views of the losing side of an argument. It says: "You cannot have your way. You cannot impose the burden of your views on others. But at least you can know that your own tax dollars won't be spent directly on something you find immoral." This is quite a concession. It's more than opponents of wars, for example, are allowed.
Even the burden of this compromise is heavy on those awaiting the tremendous promise of stem-cell research. That promise has already been delayed for years by the congressional ban these new rules are designed to accommodate. The breakthroughs will be slowed by more years because of all the elaborate safeguards built in to protect those clumps of cells. Imagine being paralyzed by a spinal cord injury in your teens, watching for decades as medical treatment progresses but not quite fast enough, and knowing that it could have been faster.
In the endless right-to-life debate, compromise is difficult for pro-lifers because the strength of their side of the argument comes from its absolutism. (Unless it comes from faith, about which there can be no argument.) Absolutism is their logical trump card. If you don't protect every human being from the moment of conception, where do you draw the line? Anywhere you draw it is another irrational distinction, conferring humanity - and, possibly, life itself - on one organism and denying both to another that is nearly identical.
But absolutism is also a great weakness, because it puts you at the mercy of your own logic. Opposition to stem-cell research is the reductio ad absurdum of the right-to-life argument. A goldfish resembles a human being more than an embryo does. An embryo feels nothing, thinks nothing, cannot suffer, is not aware of its own existence. Embryos are destroyed routinely by the millions in the natural process of human reproduction. Yet opponents of stem-cell research would allow real people, who can suffer, to do so in service of the abstract principle that embryos are people too. If faith takes you there, fine. Reason can't.
Ronald Reagan used to play the logical trump card this way: If we don't know for sure when human life begins, we're like rescue workers after a mine explosion who don't know if anyone has survived. Shouldn't we assume there is life to be saved, rather than assuming there isn't?
The problem with this analogy is that the beginning of human life is not a factual question to which we "don't know" the answer. Biology is not going to solve this puzzle for us someday. "Human life" is a label we confer, and the uncertainty is in how we choose to define it, not in some missing bit of information. Furthermore, the definition depends on why you're asking. In the context of abortion, it doesn't matter when a fetus develops hands or feet or a heartbeat. What matters is when it develops a sense of self, an ability to suffer, or - if you go that route - an immortal soul.
And the fact that these conditions (except for the soul) don't arrive at any clear-cut moment is not the logical argument for absolutism that pro-lifers seem to think. We used to learn in high-school biology that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": The development of each individual human being resembles the evolution of the species. Apparently, these days that is regarded as unhelpful, if not inaccurate. But even most right-to-lifers do believe in evolution and are comfortable with the idea that humanity is one end of a continuum, not a thing apart.
They are comfortable drawing a crisper line than nature does between humans and lesser beasts and denying human rights to animals that share many human attributes. Why is it so hard for them to accept something similar about the development of an individual human being? That we each start out as something less than human, that the transformation takes place gradually, but that it's morally acceptable to draw a line somewhere other than at the very beginning. Not just acceptable, but necessary.
If faith tells you otherwise, listen. But don't mistake it for the voice of reason.