Meet Mr. Meilaender

Abridged excerpts from the Presidents Council on Bioethics, April 25, 2002.

DR. BLACKBURN: .... for me a helpful metaphor was thinking about, well, if one were, let's say, there with a blastocyst and you had to do something to keep it alive and then you saw a child drowning, who would you save, if it was a matter of you being in one or the other place and you knew that if you went and helped the child drowning, and I'm using a dramatic example, but if you helped the child drowning, you would have to let the blastocyst die because you couldn't carry out whatever next thing you had to do to keep it alive. So to me, then the choice -- it very much comes down to choosing between two things and making a choice as to what is the more morally imperative, so equating research with its goal of therapy isn't therapeutic benefit and other medical advantages to the idea of saving an existing life in some way that is a fully formed life. So to me, it sort of came down to an either/or. Which one does one weight....

........PROF. MEILAENDER: Well, a couple of things.... Elizabeth's original way of formulating it was a way of thinking about several goods, clearly in competition since you could only save one. Alfonso's way of reformulating it has to do with how he changed it into the question of respect and care, but it's really -- that's a form of the right and the good, in a way. And it's worth noting that there might be other factors that would enter in.... suppose the blastocyst is mine and the drowning child or whatever it was, is somebody else's? Does that count? I mean there are all sorts of factors that enter in here, in fact.

So the notion that we've only got one kind of thing, namely stages of development that makes a difference, when we weigh competing goods is not the case, in fact. It's considerably more complicated.

...............


DR. BLACKBURN: Well, I think it might be helpful to return to somewhat more the homely and something Gil said that he said to me, well, would you say the blastocyst, if it were yours versus the child and I think I wouldn't be able to look the parents of the child in the face if I hadn't made an attempt to save the child. And I think that also addresses the issue of should we be trying to do cures, even though we know that they're not inevitably going to work tomorrow, next year, 10 years or 20 years. I think we have to try and so I think this question of the fact that we don't have successful answers right now for whether embryonic stem cells or somatic cell nuclear cloning is going to work, I don't think that absolves us from the necessity to try when we see real human disease and suffering that we should try to act on, even though we know we may not be necessarily successful in every attempt.

CHAIRMAN KASS: Gil, and I then I think I would like to put my oar in and I'll give rebuttals, but we should probably wind up. We need a nap before we drink, right?

Gil, do you want to comment?

PROF. MEILAENDER: Well, just a couple of things quickly. To pick up Elizabeth's point again. The hypothesis was and I think it's worth thinking about, the hypothesis was that you could only save one of the two entities, so that I don't know how we set up this case the way the philosophers do it, but there's a fire and you can go up one stair to save the newborn in the crib who's not yours or you can go up the other stairs to save the blastocyst in vitro that is yours. Okay?

CHAIRMAN KASS: That's a copy of your dead child, if you want to make it --

PROF. MEILAENDER: Whatever. It's not -- it's not immediately apparent, kind of, that one choice must be made and that suggests that there are other considerations and it's not just stage of development....

I don't think that I like Professor Meilaender.


posted by Justin on 09.10.04 at 02:14 PM





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"I don't think that I like Professor Meilaender."

No one's asking you to be his drinking buddy. Have an argument against his views?

MDP   ·  September 10, 2004 03:09 PM


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