Or – Does the end justify the means?
One of the principles at the heart of our justice system is that the end does not justify the means. A persons actions are judged according to the law not according to some perceived hypothetical circumstance.
Once you start justifying your actions according to the ends then you are able to justify almost anything. This is the excuse for Guantanamo Bay and the Nazi human experiments for instance.
In this article which talked about the new laws relating to therapeutic cloning contained the following quote from Professor Tom Faunce.
“It’s really not acceptable that theoretical arguments, which have plagued this sort of debate, are inhibiting the development of research that will alleviate the suffering of these people.”
So what he is saying, and many other besides, is that the alleviation of suffering is sufficient justification for therapeutic cloning. This is the classic end justifies the means argument. So in effect he is saying that we have to look at the morality of an issue merely by assessing the outcomes rather than the actual process to reach that outcome. I need no tell you how this argument has been used by scientists in the past to justify many types of research that is now considered unethical. Was the argument against painful and in some instances lethal testing of animals a “theoretical argument”?
The process and the morality of the process needs to be discussed independent of the outcome and to suggest that the moral arguments are “theoretical” and not acceptable is hypocritical narrow and inconsistent.
In fact it is the scientists who are being emotive, theoretical and irrational in this discussion and the moralists are actually on the high ground. You cannot separate morality from science as has been proven many times before.
What we need is an open and intelligent debate on the morality, not confused by the irrelevant and emotive cloud that tends to hide the real issues.