Our good friend Dr. Robert George delivered the annual Erasmus lecture for the Institute on Religion and Public Life at the Union League Club in New York City on October 29. I was delighted to attend. The lecture—presented to a standing room only crowd of over five hundred guests—was entitled "On the Purposes of Law and Government: First Principles and Contemporary Challenges." You can read more about it on the Mirror of Justice blog, at a posting by Rick Garnett. Eventually, it will be published in First Things.

Dr. George began by reminding us that “the obligations and justifying purposes of law and government are to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare –including, preeminently, protecting people's fundamental rights and basic liberties.” Though public well-being requires that the role of government be limited, Dr. George emphasized that government has an inalienable responsibility to maintain “a reasonably healthy moral ecology.” Indeed, history has demonstrated over and over again that democracies can only flourishing in the fertile soil of a vibrant moral culture—or moral ecology. A properly functioning—limited—government achieves this, he affirmed, by supporting “the work of the families, religious communities, and other institutions of civil society that shoulder the primary burden of forming upright and decent citizens, caring for those in need, encouraging people to meet their responsibilities to one another, and discouraging them from harming themselves or others.”

He then went on to explore how our resolution of the two most fundamental moral questions of the day—our understanding of the nature of marriage, and our convictions regarding the moral status of the human embryo—will constitute a remarkable bellwether test of the vibrancy of American moral ecology.

Now, I think we can all agree that debate on these two great moral issues of the day is on-going, especially with regard to the latter. Debate over the status of the human embryo is, in fact, two-pronged. First there is the metaphysical question: what is the human embryo. Dr. George—who will soon be publishing a new book on the human embryo—articulating a view held by millions of Americans, responds that the embryo is an individual human being, a member of the species homo sapiens.

The second is a moral question: what is the moral status—or worth—of the human embryo, especially when considered prior to implantation in the womb, a circumstance artificially contrived when embryos are created in the laboratory.

In answer to this question, again, millions of Americans share the conviction that, even in an embryonic state, human beings bear a moral worth which precludes any possibility of their being deliberately submitted to harm or destruction.

I find today that secular bioethicists more often than not will concede to our insistence on the metaphysical question. On the moral question, however, they quite consistently hold to the party line: embryonic stem cell research is no more controversial than once was organ donation or the derivation of vaccines from aborted fetal tissue. Science has often been controversial in the past, but was generally allowed to move ahead; today’s controversial science—particularly embryonic stem cell research—should be treated no differently. And after all, this is about the pursuit of life-saving cures isn’t it?

And with breathtaking matter-of-factness many of the most vocal proponents of embryo-destructive research address the debate over the moral status of the human embryo as if it were not on-going, as if millions of Americans did not happen to disagree with them, or as if the debate—if ever there really was one—has been since resolved in their favor.

But we know things could not be further from the truth. Embryo destructive research is not merely “controversial,” and embryo-destructive research cannot be simply allowed to proceed on the grounds that “well, you can’t please all the folks all the time, therefore…”

I think a close collaborator and dear friend of ours, Dr. William Hurlbut, is quite right when he asserts, as I have heard him insist on a number of occasions, that a one-sided or “purely political solution [to this issue] will leave our country bitterly divided, eroding the social support and sense of noble purpose that is essential for the public funding of biomedical science." Dr. Hurlbut sees a long-term benefit for all of us as a nation in striving patiently to achieve some kind of consensus. As he cogently insists:

We're entering the age of developmental biology. The embryonic stem-cell conflict is just the beginning. It's the first symbolic argument between science and moral concerns (in a new era). We need to get this right.

We need to get his one right, indeed. We have every reason to believe, in fact, that our resolution to the question of the metaphysical and moral status of the human embryo will mark either the latent vibrancy or proximate extinction of our American experiment in ordered freedom.

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