RITE AND REASON:IN ITS "Opinion on Stem Cell Research", published last week, the Irish Council for Bioethics is right not to base its conclusions on the results of polls.
Instead, recommendations for policy proposals need to be founded on convincing arguments.
The outcomes of polls depend, eg, on the way questions are framed, on the prior information and reflection of the respondent, which in turn depends on the existence and quality of a sustained public debate.
The position the council arrived at unanimously against the views expressed by a majority in the polls conducted in 2007, namely to ask the State to allow research on embryonic and foetal stem cells, has to be evaluated by the strength of its arguments.
The council's 2007 "Opinion on Advance Care Directives" indicated its philosophical basis by referring to John Stuart Mill in its "Ethical Framework". In the new document's ethical discussion, references to Locke and Kant are interspersed.
What emerges as the guiding framework, however, and becomes clear by reference to the "strict conditions of informed consent" (p. 51), in this case of IVF couples becoming embryo donors, is the continued reliance on Mill's empirical understanding of autonomy as independence from external influence.
In the council's argument, the crucial difference between two opposite types of argumentation is lost: between Locke's definition of the person by her empirical consciousness and Mill's corresponding view of autonomy as independence, on the one hand, and Kant's insistence that human dignity is not at our own disposal, and that each human being (not just those at the height of their rational, conscious, intelligent, autonomous powers) is an irreplaceable end in itself, on the other.
On what else could a universalist ethics of human rights be founded?
For the Irish Council for Bioethics, all that is needed to make embryos left over from IVF attempts available for stem cell research is the individualised "informed consent" of the couple involved.
They ignore the extent of ethical and feminist debate of the category on which it is based, autonomy, as in the Cambridge philosopher Onora O'Neill's 2002 book, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, which is missing in the extensive bibliography.
For her, the progressive reduction first of Kant's principled autonomy to Mill's individualism, and then of Mill to consumer choice, marks a "breathtaking simplification of ethical justification in and beyond medicine.
"The single requirement of respect for individual autonomy, under a strikingly weak interpretation that demands no more than respect for informed consent requirements, is seen as a complete basis for all ethical justification in medicine (perhaps also in science and biotechnology)."
With a strong concept of autonomy which demands the recognition and fostering of the other's freedom also when they cannot yet or no longer respond, questions asked in other EU member states appear urgent:
• How can the research industry's desire for future surplus embryos be prevented from adding pressure on couples desperate for IVF to "donate" their unused sibling embryos if no deadline for existing stem cell lines is mentioned?
• Is there a moral difference between death by unfreezing (which is as tragic as every human life ending in death), and turning surplus embryos into research material?
• If the shelf life of international declarations not to create human-animal hybrids has been less than 10 years, which limit will fall next?
At a time when a real "scientific breakthrough" has become available, namely to reprogramme adult cells to earlier stages of greater plasticity, the Irish Council for Bioethics advocates the morally divisive path of embryo-wasting research which continues to split the EU on the use of taxpayers' money.
Its basis is the canonisation of a Utilitarian understanding of autonomy for the future of Irish biotechnological research policy, and for the lifeworld it will shape for its citizens.
Prof Maureen Junker-Kenny teaches Christian ethics in the school of religions and theology at Trinity College Dublin
