Getting Too Personal?

Abstract

For both cults, the challenge posed by embodied living couldn’t be starker: persons, after all, are souls or ends, and thereby alone bear self-awareness, an enduring self-identity, and an agential capacity. In distinguishing us from other animals, these capacities simultaneously comprise for both views the central element of human worth. On both views, rejecting metaphysical dualism threatens the transcendence of animality that marks human worth. This case is made extensively by cult of life defenders Moreland and Rae, who argue that only such a dualistic understanding of human persons can serve as normative basis for bioethics.¹ In the emotionally charged public debates surrounding not only euthanasia and PAS but also genetic engineering, cloning, human embryo research, and the like, the nature of personhood most often occupies center stage. This point is illustrated forcefully by the on-going furor over stem-cell research. Proponents deny that fetal tissue research involves human experimentation. Opponents, in contrast, affirm that life begins at conception, and that there is no other way to understand fetal tissue except as embodied humanity. This should be owed the full dignity appropriate to it, and experimentation upon these tissues is seen as putting some lives unconscionably at the service of others.