The wooly thinking of the careless mind

If you want to raise the emotional pressure, just start a discussion on the morality of cloning human embryos for possible future therapeutic advantage. What you are likely to get is woolly thinking and some doubtful facts. But what is needed is some clear thinking and some clear facts.
So let me take a look, with you, at some of the strongest arguments against the Catholic position that are put forward by persons of substance like the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, a man of unquestionable good faith, who chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Stem Cell Research in 2002.
Naturally, we are all anxious to find answers to diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The experts argue about the effectiveness, or the necessity, of embryonic stem cells but from a moral point of view the answers are irrelevant.
If the embryo is a human person then no one has the right to produce and destroy it for the sake of another’s benefit; if it is not, then commensurate reasons will be a matter of judgment. However, the champions of cloning tend to sustain their case by assuming that the embryo is not a human person, which is exactly what they need to prove in order to justify their position.
This is known, in logic, as the fallacy of “begging the question” – a good example of the woolly thinking which needs to be eradicated.
Unfortunately, the Select Committee failed to demonstrate the essential characteristics that define a person. This meant that it had no reliable criterion for choosing a date, or a developmental event, that would establish personhood.
For example, to suggest that this is marked by the “primitive streak”, which is the precursor of the nervous system, is simply arbitrary. It could not show how this phenomenon relates to the criterion of personhood since it had no such criterion.
The elegant and irenic language could not conceal the vacuousness of its position – which is easily answered by the old philosophic tag: what is asserted without evidence may be denied without evidence. More woolly thinking.
But, surely, one may at least argue that the initial cluster of undifferentiated cells immediately following conception cannot be regarded as a person. Sorry, the cluster is not undifferentiated.
The body plan of the mammal starts being laid down from the moment of conception; within 24 hours, the position of the head, back and the limbs are settled (Nature, 4 July 2002). So now the woolly thinking is compounded by ignorance of recent research (which, in fairness, was not published when the Select Committee reported). But we can expect the experts on either side to be familiar with it by now.
The next argument we may encounter is an argument by emotional implication. The use of words like “tiny”, “microscopic” and “cluster” all carry the impli cation that the early conceptus could not possibly be regarded as human. But to prove this argument it is necessary to show that personhood is a function of size (putting the elephant into a strong position) or of shape (putting the Elephant Man into a weak position).
It might just past muster in a fourth form debate or in the House of Commons, but it is scarcely the stuff of serious discussion. The logician, Anthony Flew, calls this kind of woolly thinking “the fallacy of the pseudorefuting description”.
The fact of the matter is, that the blueprint of the person formed from the genes of its parents is present at conception, and the development from that plan (modified of course by environment) is continuous.
It continues in me today, albeit at a slower rate, influencing not only my shortsightedness but the age of my death. From the moment a new human life starts there is no biological before and after stage in personhood since it is not a physical characteristic, but comes with membership of the human race.
Personhood is in the embryo and in the infant, who are in the early stages of following their blueprint, just as it is in the aged person who is no longer rational through dementia. And there is continuity of identity.
Seventy years ago last March there was a minute conceptus in my mother’s womb. Had it been destroyed, you would never have read this article because I would not have seen the light of day.
That conceptus was me. And I feel as entitled to my life as any member of the House of Lords. Nor am I concerned that perhaps two thirds of all conceptions fail for natural reasons. God, who can number the hairs of my head (nowadays an easy task) or count the stars in the sky, will have no problems.
In fact, the Select Committee argued that the early embryo was only a “potential” person; since, as I have said, it offers no reliable criterion for judging personhood, we may disregard this view.
However it demonstrates its sloppy thinking by arguing that “potential” does not give full personhood rights, just as, to use their analogy, a medical student does not have the right to practise merely because he is a “potential” doctor. This is, of course, the classic fallacy of Equivocation, which means attempting to sustain an argument by conflating two different senses of a word. “Potential” for the student means to have the capacity to complete a purpose; “potential” for the conceptus means to be essentially ordered to complete a purpose. But I do not accuse the Select Committee of disingenuousness; it is simply back to the woolly thinking of the careless mind.
We should readily admit that the Church, while consistently condemning abortion from its earliest days, made, for a period, a distinction in gravity between the formed and unformed foetus, based on the flawed biology of Aristotle.
Once a modern understanding of conception started with the scientific discoveries of the 19th century, the Church refined the expression of its teaching accordingly.
It is imprudent to take part in a moral discussion without realising that morals must be based on facts as they are known, and may therefore be modified with the development of knowledge.
But the greatest danger we face is not sloppy thinking, it is the danger of the shallow gradient. The gradient began in the celebrated Bourne case of 1938, where a doctor was exonerated for performing an abortion on a woman because he acted in good faith for the purpose of preserving her life.
Next came the Abortion Act of 1967. Its champions, though denying that they were asking for abortion on demand, knew that it would turn out so.
Thus the foetus was dehumanised. Subsequently, embryos, the majority of whom were to be destroyed, have been produced for a variety of purposes. Now we have reached the stage where human embryos can be cloned.
In every case, the argument for greater human benefit has been used, and the opponents of change have been regarded as opponents of human progress.
But this road is only paved with good intentions, and we now do casually what would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Do you expect for a moment that it will stop here? To believe that would be the sloppiest and woolliest thinking of all.