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Spring 2006

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Are Embryos Persons?
Philosopher considers the question at the heart of the stem cell research debate

—Lynne Rudder Baker




	illustration by Nicole Caulfield

AMERICANS ARE IN A QUANDARY about stem cell research. On the one hand, research holds promise for treating debilitating diseases, such as Parkinson’s; on the other hand, stem cell research destroys pre-implantation embryos in pursuit of the hoped-for medical advances. I’ve made it my task to consider what kind of beings preimplantation embryos are.

My interest in this topic springs from my work on the nature of persons in a book Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. I thought that the reigning views of what persons are—simply animals, or animals plus immaterial souls—were inadequate. So I developed a third alternative. I argued that the relation between persons and bodies (or organisms) is constitution: A human person is constituted by a human body without being identical to the body that constitutes her—just as a marble statue is constituted by a piece of marble without being identical to the piece of marble that constitutes it. After all, the piece of marble existed before the statue did.

Just as exists a difference in kind between pieces of marble and marble statues, so too is there a difference between human bodies and human persons. The difference is that persons have first-person perspectives. Nothing that lacks a first-person perspective is a person; if a person ceased to have a first-person perspective, she would go out of existence.

A first-person perspective may be robust or rudimentary. A robust first-person perspective is the ability to think ‘I’, to evaluate one’s desires, to think about the past and future. A rudimentary first-person perspective requires that a being be conscious and engage in behavior that can be explained only in terms of beliefs and desires. A being with a rudimentary first-person perspective is a person only if it is of a kind that normally develops robust first-person perspectives.

When an organism develops a rudimentary first-person perspective, a new being—a person—comes into existence. Although no one knows when a human organism comes to constitute a person (there is no exact moment), it must have a fairly developed brain that can support consciousness and intentional behavior in order to constitute a person. Recent research suggests that a human fetus cannot feel pain until about week 29. So, it is clear that no human embryo, what we call a fertilized egg and ensuing cell cluster up to ten weeks after fertilization, constitutes a human person. In that case, the destruction of a human embryo is not destruction of a human person.

But is it the destruction of a human organism? In the first weeks after fertilization, it is possible for a human embryo to “twin.” As long twinning is possible (whether it happens or not), an embryo is not a human individual, but simply a cell cluster. Since an organism is an individual, a frozen embryo that is still capable of twinning is demonstrably not yet an individual—a defining quality of a human organism.

There are good reasons to be cautious about stem cell and other biomedical research. For example, we must have reason to believe that we know what we are doing and not just opening a Pandora’s box. But I don’t believe that stem cell research should be curtailed because of destruction of pre-implantation embryos. In my view, destroying embryos is not the same as destroying human persons, or even human organisms.

Lynne Rudder Baker
Distinguished Professor, Philosophy www.umass.edu/philosophy

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Are Embryos Persons?

Are Embryos Persons?: larger image