Fuchs and Tiefel diverge on medical ethics
Though
Shelley’s scientist “dislikes scouring the charnel houses and the
graveyards for the parts he needs, there is nothing troublesome about
his quest and his research materials except for a certain
unpleasantness—an aesthetic, not a moral, matter,” Tiefel, professor of
religious studies, told approximately 150 people gathered in the
Botetourt Gallery of the Swem Library for the forum “Recreating
Frankenstein? Ethical Reflections on Contemporary Biotechnology.”
As to the possibilities of creating life through modern stem-cell
manipulation, the professors, weighing damage to the “human-related
material” against potential medical breakthroughs, diverged in their
opinions. Tiefel turned to U.S. patent law to argue that a distinction
exists between a “person” and “assorted body parts,” which served as
research material for Frankenstein as well as serve for modern-day
scientists. Patents are issued for gene-altered animals and for
cultured human cells, but they cannot be issued for entities that have
human potentiality. “That would violate the 13th amendment [to the U.S.
Constitution] prohibiting slavery,” Tiefel said. The rights of
personhood extend through the chain of human development to include
human stem cells, he argued.
Countered Fuchs, professsor of philosophy, such rights gradually are
bestowed upon the cells that develop into human beings. The potentials
for good arising from experimenting with, and ultimately destroying,
stem cells are so great that one could say we “have a moral imperative”
to pursue the research. Related ethical decisions should be measured
against the “test of public reason” involving “logical consistency,”
“clarity of argumentation” and “reliance upon values that are shared by
all reasonable members of [our] pluralistic society,” he said.
Indeed, Tiefel, while stressing his advocacy of societally sanctioned
law-based rights for potential persons, decried society’s loss of
respect for the physical body. “In Shelley’s 19th century, and in our
own, science no longer pursues forbidden knowledge,” he said. “Earlier
taboos that refused dissection of human cadavers or that hesitated to
cut into the human breast because that was thought to be the seat of
the soul [are] recognized as superstitious and as marked by the
darkness of earlier times.” He accepted, yet questioned, how well such
a “dualistic self-understanding” would serve mankind. At one point, he
reminded the audience that major religious communities “insist that
human bodies are not our own” and that “we belong to God and to each
other, but none of us is property, no matter how young or how old.” At
another point, he charged, Frankenstein’s “sin” was not in the creation
of the monster but in his “abandonment” of it—the same thing scientists
are doing today.
Fuchs suggested that rights for human-related material accrue with
“status,” of which stem cells and deceased bodies have little. He,
however, called for treating each with “respect” by pointing out that
“there is a difference between utilizing corpses for research” and
“hacking them up for the fun of it.” He further argued that development
of the individual parallels that of evolution. Since we cannot know
when the first human appeared or when a developing cluster of cells
becomes a person, he called attempts to pinpoint those moments a result
of “logical confusion.”
“My response is that it is a gradual process,” he said, describing
development in terms of “potentiality” and “actuality.” So far, use of
“reason” to determine rights for cells with human potential supports
what we intuitively understand, he added. “We recognize that there is
something morally different between the eighth-month abortion and the
eighth-day abortion.”
Fuchs called for continued reliance upon reason, as exercised within a
pluralistic society to balance the rights of human material and humans.
The alternative, which admits “sectarian” perspectives—unreasonable in
that one group cannot reasonably be expected to understand them as
normative—will, he said, “lead us to tragedy.”
“Is [such consensus] a possibility? Is this a pipedream?” he asked rhetorically. “I’m optimistic,” he concluded.Frankenstein had every moral right to create
the monster in his attempt to advance medical science, Hans Tiefel and
Alan Fuchs agreed, as they used Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern
Prometheus to discuss the ethics of stem-cell cloning.