Quote:
Originally Posted by duga
I can understand the moral dilemma here...but there will be abortions whether we like it or not. Why not honor that potential life by allowing it to provide life to someone else?
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One ethical argument against using embryos would be that it violates Kant's categorical imperative to not use others as a means to an end.
If one feels this is an important ethical stand, then the question becomes this: how do we define "others" and which "others" matter? In other words, which organisms have "moral standing?"
For example, consider medical knowledge gained through Nazi experimentation on child and adult victims: medical ethics may require (if I recall correctly) that the results of those experiments should *not* be used to add to the pool of human knowledge, because humans were used as a means to an end, which many view as unethical.
If someone feels an embryo has moral standing, then that person would probably similarly oppose any use of embryonic cells, regardless of the potential or actual benefits to others of doing so.
As a vegan, I often find the concern for minute embryos perplexing and speciest (speciesism being the belief that one species is better and more valuable than another), since many people who oppose the killing or use of embryos are not moved emotionally at all by the slaughter of fully-functioning, thinking, feeling, healthy, adult, non-human animals, whose sentience (sense of awareness) is, oh, probably 1 trillion times that of a human embryo, if not more.