Abstract
Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen argue that human beings have fundamental dignity and basic rights (“human rights”) in virtue of the kind of entity they are—creatures bearing a rational nature. The indicia of a rational nature are the basic natural capacities—which obtain from the point a rational creature comes into existence—for thinking, deliberating, and choosing, whether or not these capacities are immediately exercisable. All human beings, including those who are asleep, or under general anesthesia, or who are in deep comas or persistent minimally conscious states, are bearers of a rational nature. The same is true of those suffering even severe cognitive disabilities. A person with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, for example, has not undergone a change of nature—he is not a creature different in species or otherwise different in kind from what he was before the onset of the disease. Bearers of fundamental dignity and basic rights, which includes all human beings, must not be treated as mere objects or instruments by, for example, subjecting them to damaging or deadly experimentation designed for the benefit of others. So the question at the heart of debates over human embryo research is the empirical one, fully accessible to inquiry using scientific methods of analysis: Is the human embryo, from the formation of the zygote forward, a human being, viz., a living member of the species Homo sapiens. George and Tollefsen assess the evidence and conclude that the answer to that question is unambiguously yes.
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Notes
- 1.
See Wagner and Matthews (2019), for a helpful summary of the sources of our knowledge of embryological development, and the limitations of those sources for understanding the period between 14 days post-fertilization and 8 weeks of development.
- 2.
See Matthews and Marquez (2019), for a review of international policies regarding human embryo research.
- 3.
See George and Tollefsen (2011), for a fuller discussion of all the arguments presented here.
- 4.
We address such challenges at greater length in George and Tollefsen (2011), Chaps. 4 and 5.
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George, R., Tollefsen, C. (2023). Embryo Research Ethics. In: Zima, T., Weisstub, D.N. (eds) Medical Research Ethics: Challenges in the 21st Century. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 132. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12692-5_1
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