Rite and Reason: If there was even the slightest chance the human embryo was a human being, wouldn't one expect a doubt on the part of a scientist? asks Brendan Purcell
Though you can't keep me away from my weekly cinema fix, I've given Kill Bill, never mind Reservoir Dogs and Hannibal, a miss over the years. Still, some things I read in Prof David McConnell's piece in this paper (November 25th) gave me the kind of revulsion I avoid in those films. He wrote: "We need to understand that surplus embryos are produced by IVF and most are either killed or allowed to die before they reach 14 days of life after fertilisation."
Well, moral revulsion is deeper than reason. It arises from a level of our existence that's more fundamental, a level sometimes more usefully reached through myths and stories.
The first of two myths worth remembering here is the Cabbalistic dream of creating a "homunculus" or "golem", a little human being. What could be more useful than to have a miniaturised version of ourselves we can use for spare parts? Those spare human embryos may contain the magic of stem cells capable of curing some of our worst ailments.
The consequence, as we know from the stories about the golem, is that we will thereby cease being human ourselves. In the myth, when a human can ultimately decide for the existence of another human, he or she becomes the same as God. The dream becomes a nightmare once the meaning of this extremity of human arrogance is recognised.
But, Prof McConnell writes, everything depends on the question: "Is a fertilised egg or an early embryo a person who deserves the same respect as any other person?" He effectively answers it by noting: ". . . many biologists know that research on early embryos will contribute greatly to medical care", where that "research" means the killing of those embryos.
This brings us to our second story, which has to do with the motives behind our drive to limitlessly expand our power, motives explored in the Promethean class of myths. Because, even though he says "for me the moral balance is quite clearly weighted in favour of research on very early human embryos which have not been implanted", he doesn't put any argument in favour of the personhood of the human embryo on the other side of that weighing scales.
Yet if there was even the slightest chance that the human embryo was a human being, wouldn't one expect a scruple, a doubt, perhaps even a revulsion, on the part of a scientist? (And let's leave aside the word "person" which has different meanings for different people - for me, his acceptance of the fact that the embryos being discussed are human is more than enough.)
If someone wants to say that the human embryo is not a human being, the question a philosopher has to ask is, in a technical sense do they know what "human" and "being" mean? Walker Percy spoke of The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind, where "modern science is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to understand things, but when it seeks to understand man".
Prof McConnell may not have averted to the fact that he's asking questions that have been asked and answered ever since the French philosopher Henri Bergson characterised as "the opening of the soul", beginning about 1300 BC with Moses.
During that epoch, human beings from China through India, Persia, Israel and Greece, discovered what it was that made a human being human. Central to the answers to the question of what makes us human was an understanding that we're more than biological entities.
Of course that "more than" can't be seen with our eyes, no more than we can "see" that a human zygote is human, or "see" gravitation or evolutionary theory. That period defined us as embodied truth-questers, incarnate you-seekers, moving from bare capacity to ever fuller actualisation.
In direct continuity with those openings of the soul, while in Westerbork concentration camp the Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum says "my life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with you, my God". She experienced that what makes her human is that she is a "you" for an unending You.
When her body was destroyed in Auschwitz in September 1943, that body was in essential biological continuity with her original embryo conceived in 1913 and born in January 1914. When she died we don't say her "body" died, we say "she" died. Just as we don't say "it" was conceived, but "she", Etty, was conceived.
Rather than being worthy of the "opening of the soul" that still sets standards for humanity today, I'd find Prof McConnell's proposal that "Irish doctors and scientists" be allowed experiment on human embryos chillingly reminiscent of what Jonathan Swift suggested with savage irony in his Modest Proposal. There Swift resolved contemporary Irish problems by offering palatable menus for cooking surplus infants.
Fr Brendan Purcell is a senior lecturer in UCD's philosophy department