This is a question addressed to pro-lifers. I believe that I first heard some version of it several years ago when Ira Flatow hosted Chris Mooney on Science Friday to discuss his book, The Republican War on Science.
Consider the following two scenarios.
- Imagine that you find yourself at a building that is burning down. You know that some people are trapped in this burning building, behind some locked doors, all of whom are strangers. You find that you have time to get to one of two doors to unlock. You can get to either Door A, where you can free 20 people who are trapped, or you can get to Door B, where you can free one person who is trapped. You do not have time to get to both doors. Where do you choose to go, Door A or Door B? Keep your answer in mind while you consider the second scenario.
- Imagine that you find yourself at a stem cell clinic that is burning down. You have the option of either safely grabbing 20 embryonic stem cells from the lab behind Door A, or freeing one 13-year-old girl trapped behind Door B. This girl is a stranger. You do not know her personally, and you do not know anything about the origin of the stem cells. You do not have time to both get the stem cells and free the girl. Which do you choose?
The questions is whether or not you choose the same door across the two scenarios. If you don’t choose the same door, I think it’s clear, if you’re really a pro-lifer, that your morality has a serious flaw.
I’m not a pro-lifer, but have to point out that’s a pretty flawed question. In the second scenario you’re saving twenty active, conscious, sentient and purposeful moral actors, at the cost of one similar quantity.
In the first you’re only saving potential life, at the cost of actual life. As the old Italian saying goes, a living 13-year-old girl in the hand versus a pile of flaming stem cells in the bush…
But seriously, don’t trade known quantities for theoretical future intangibles, unless you can accept the responsibilities. My problem with so much legislation.
You’ve missed my point somewhat. This is meant to prod people who believe that a single cell is morally equivalent to a real person, and that a single cell should have full legal protection.
What if we consider the girl’s future potential as a source for more embryonic stem cells?
That’s not really the point…
I know… I jest. But maybe if you specify the girl’s beliefs on reproductive freedom you may elicit a different instinctual response from the pro-lifers, people who seem to reserve their rights to determine which life forms are more valuable than others without philosophy or science.
I think your point is well-received with those who already agree with you, but those who you’re trying to prod have not set their ideals by logic, and logic will certainly not sway them to abandon their quest for regulation.
Well, whenever I’ve presented this thought experiment to pro-lifers, they become completely flabbergasted. It gets them to really consider the extreme, patently unpalatable implications of their position. So far, it has worked every time!
And my point is there’s a difference between full legal protection and full moral equivalence. You don’t have to choose only one or the other. Legal protection acknowledges the baseline of moral standing. Moral equivalence goes far beyond that baseline.
You’re wrong. The whole point of the political debate for pro-lifers is aligning morality with legality. I actually think this is a good, consistent goal. Aside from individual choices that don’t affect others, the law should tightly correlate with morality. If killing a single embryonic stem cell really is morally equivalent to murder, then the law should reflect that. Of course, the point of this exercise is to illustrate that it is completely ridiculous to consider the moral status of a single cell as equivalent to a person.
Law should only “tightly correlate with morality” when there’s a wide-to-universally-accepted standard. Legal protections are not the highest possible standard; they’re the lowest.
You can do all kinds of horrible emotional things to a person and it’s not a crime, but crossing into physical harm triggers the minimal protection of the law. It’s a decreasing scale. You’re looking at it as an equivalence issue, which it isn’t. In the question posed, active murder versus passive destruction are being conflated. That’s bad logic, and bad morality.
No, this is a red herring.
The point of this thought experiment is to really test the intuition about what the value of a single embryonic stem cell is. Scenario 1 exists to calibrate utilitarian intuition. I am supposing everyone chooses Door A. Scenario 2 should corroborate that utilitarian intuition. Pro-lifers claim that a single embryonic stem cell is fully equivalent to a human being, so a pro-lifer should choose Door A in both situations, but I doubt that’s the case. This forces pro-lifers to concede that the stem cells, even 20 of them, aren’t equivalent to one actual person.
The question of duty to rescue is completely tangential; both scenarios just assume that the actor does actually want to help, but prompts the question of whether or not a stem cell really is morally equivalent to a person. If it is, then abortion really is murder.
Equivalence isn’t a red herring. When you say “full equivalent”, you’re using their imprecise language to compare a lower bound with an upper or unlimited bound.
And besides that issue, the purposeful action of the rescuer is important. An actual realized person (not a potential person) has a lot more associated with their existence besides their tautological being.
If you’re actively choosing to let someone die, you’re incurring all kinds of costs. Odds are they have a family, odds are they have friends, odds are they have some existence in a community and some value to and commitments from others. All this is easy to intuit without even really thinking rationally about it. These are basically the default states of being, even before you factor in our animal instincts to protect the herd, be emotionally vulnerable to our species young, etc. Even being coldly rational about it, there’s still too much going on here to make the comparison directly to stem cells valid.
Stem cells don’t have any of these entanglements and commitments, but they potentially could. So the question again becomes justifying potential benefits over actual costs, through affirmative action.
I’m not saying one couldn’t make that justification, I’m saying I think it’s not inconsistent to claim that stem cells have similar moral standing to qualify for the lowest acceptable legal treatment for life; ie not being ‘murdered’.
OK, I think I see your point. Entanglements do complicate the matter, but I still think the exercise draws out what a person would find morally, and therefore legally, sound. Pro-lifers might not argue that the stem cells have the kinds of entanglements that people do, but that’s not the dimension on which they’re operating.
So, I’ll grant that the question of legalization has been about what minimum status should trigger the protection of the law. Even granting that though, pro-lifers’ position has been indeed to equate abortion with murder. If that were true, would it be better to prevent one murder or twenty?
Moral is not equivalent to legal. And shouldn’t be. Legal standards should be universal and equally applied; moral standards are fundamentally not subject to those qualifications.
A better question for pro-lifers might be to posit the stem cells are their own…