Saving the embryos: a new variation on the “trolley problem”

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm by Edwin Woodruff Tait

Saving the embryos: a new variation on the “trolley problem” 2020-05-15T12:35:23-05:00 Edwin Woodruff Tait

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My friend David Schell has asked me (and several other prolifers he knows) to respond to the viral post describing Patrick Tomlinson’s supposedly deadly challenge to the prolife position. Several good responses have already been written, including some fine posts on David’s FB page. Here’s mine.

In Tomlinson’s scenario, we have a choice between saving a five-year-old child or 1000 embryos from a fire. This is, of course, a variant of the “trolley problem,” and as in all such dilemmas, the situation is made artificially simple and stark. Tomlinson claims that no prolife person has ever said they would save the embryos, and that this proves that prolife people don’t really believe that life begins at conception.

First of all, as others have pointed out, it’s absurd to claim that if other people would act, under pressure, in ways that don’t seem compatible with their declared beliefs, then they don’t really hold those beliefs and you don’t need to deal with the intellectual arguments for them. That reflects a very shallow understanding of human psychology, and perhaps a certain desperation to dismiss the actual philosophical arguments for life beginning at some point before birth.

Tomlinson’s argument needs to be refined: rather than asking whether one would save the child or the embryos, he should ask which the prolifer thinks should be saved. That of course weakens the conflict he wants to create between prolifers’ instincts and their alleged principles. But the fact that Tomlinson’s original argument was specious isn’t my fault. And it’s still a dilemma–I feel considerable reluctance to say that it would be morally right to let a child die in order to save embryos. And here Tomlinson is right: this is because I, personally, am more certain a five-year-old child is a human being than I am that an embryo is a human being. It does not follow from this that there are no good reasons to protect embryonic life. Under pressure, in such a stark dilemma, I would most likely save (and think it right to save) the child. It does not follow that it is right to destroy embryos deliberately.

Like most polemicists on both sides, Tomlinson chooses the extreme example that suits his side of the argument. There is a wide range of room for “moderate” positions in which life begins at some point between conception and birth, and we aren’t sure which. Thus, even if his example proved everything he might wish, it would not follow that life does not begin until birth.

But the biggest problem with Tomlinson’s scenario, and with all variants of the trolley problem, it its utilitarianism. Tomlinson assumes that he’s made the point especially strong by using a thousand embryos instead of just one. Some counter-arguments assume that the moral situation would be radically altered if, for instance, the embryos were essential to the continuation of the human race, or if instead of a five-year-old child the alternative was to save an old and sick person.

One of the fundamental moral principles which secular moralists (and some religious moralists too) seem to have abandoned in our culture is that the value of human life is not numerate. (There is, for instance, an entire moral argument against empathy on the grounds that empathy is “innumerate.”) Of course, if we can save several lives rather than one, then all things being equal, we should do so. But because human life is of infinite value, multiplying the number of humans at stake does not fundamentally change the moral situation. Not only would it be legitimate, under many circumstances, to save one person rather than a thousand–but often it would be morally obligatory to do so.

If I had a choice between saving one of my daughters and saving a thousand people who were not close family members, I would save my daughter. And I would not think of this as an act of moral weakness. On the contrary, I would think it wrong to make the opposite choice. I have an overriding moral obligation to protect and nurture my children. That doesn’t mean that I think their lives are more valuable than those of others–but they aren’t less valuable either, and all human life is of infinite value.

A further basic error of a lot of modern secular ethics is the belief that action and inaction are morally equivalent. This stems from utilitarian consequentialism–the idea that what matters most is the result of our actions. Thus, if I let someone die or kill them, the result is the same so the moral quality of the act is the same. This is nonsense and leads to impossible moral dilemmas. And as Ben Shapiro has pointed out, it’s implicit in this scenario’s argument–that the choice to allow embryos to be destroyed in order to save a child makes moral objections to actively killing unborn children insincere.

In a real, plausible situation, the decision would almost certainly not boil down to two sharply opposed possibilities with the certainty that whichever I saved would live and whichever I didn’t would die. My decision as to which of two lives (or groups of human lives) to save would depend on all kinds of factors: my responsibility to one or the other party, the helplessness and vulnerability of the parties, the possibility that others might save one or other of them, the likelihood that I would be able to save them, my physical proximity to them, and, yes, the relative numbers involved and the probable effect of saving or not saving those particular lives.

In short, this argument does have some value in making prolifers question whether we are really as sure that an embryo is a human person as we are that a five-year-old child is a person. But it does not do the work that Mr. Tomlinson and his many fans want it to do. But it is doing something else valuable–provoking all of us to think through more carefully why we believe what we believe and just what we mean when we say that human life has value.

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