Scriptorium Daily
President Obama, through presidential fiat, decided experimenting on potential human beings will expand. Without study and by proclamation, the President has created a monstrous policy that has no precedent in American history.
It is more radical than what was allowed under Bill Clinton or George Bush. President Obama has given no reasons why such a new course is reasonable other than his statement that it is reasonable. Because President Obama is a reasonable sounding man it is difficult to realize how radical his idea is.
An embryo is a human being or, at the very least, is a potential human being. We shall now kill that embryo by experimenting on it in the hope that it might help the rest of us. Obama’s medicine first will do harm to a growing human with the dream that such experiments might do some good for a dying one.
This would give a more modest man pause, but President Obama is not a morally modest man. The rest of us struggle to gain insight from way the world is to the way it ought to be, but President Obama sees ought in it so clearly that he sees no ideology at all in his decision.
Evidently Obama and his favored scientists are prophets to whom nature speaks without any need of an ethical interpreter.
If President Obama really wished to remove ideology from science, he would have to begin with the ideology that proclaims that science can be free from ideology. We cannot trust any group of people, including scientists, to act free from the restraints of ethics and common standards.
There is no science without scientists and scientists are humans and not gods. They are no more immune to hubris than any other social class. Scientists have no more insight into the ethics of a thing than anyone else.
The twentieth century was the most barbaric in the history of humankind partly because of perverted science. Numerous evils were done in the name of “science” including experimentation on human beings. Secularists in the Soviet Union tortured thousands of religious believers in the name of psychology. Disfavored races and ethnic groups were sterilized, experimented on, and butchered by men in white lab jackets who called what they did science.
Just because scientists can do a thing does not mean we must allow it to be done or that it ought to be done. We ought not to experiment on human beings, or even potential human beings, without their consent.
Why?
People have never shown the ability to restrain themselves once certain lines are crossed. The bright line of refusing to experiment on humans or potential humans is easy to maintain. No other moral line will be defensible.
When society allowed doctors to create embryos for infertile couples we were assured that this would be the end of it. Now we are told that “extra” embryos would be destroyed anyway and so should be used in experiments. This too will not be the “end” of demands on our conscience.
Secularists and the left may have idealistic fantasies of human restraint, but conservatives have bitter experience of the emptiness of those promises. Ours is the hard realism that places checks on every human institution. We don’t trust churches, states, business, or the mob with total power and we don’t exempt scientists from our caution.
Nation after nation has committed ever more monstrous crimes once the basic line of involuntary human experimentation has been crossed. This is not a “slippery slope” we might slide down, but a canyon into which we are falling, certain to hit the moral bottom.
When he lifted the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, President Obama said, “As a person of faith . . . I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research . . . and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.”
This is a dangerously Utopian vision and Utopian visions nearly destroyed humanity in the twentieth century.
President Obama has a misplaced faith in humanity that is blind to history and to the crimes of the twentieth century. Capacity is not permission. We might learn many things by any number of risky and barbaric experiments, but the foundational God given rights of life and liberty prevent us from doing them.
A desire to do a thing is not a good reason to do it. Our desires are easily manipulated and the loudest suffering too often draws our attention. It is so easy to do small evils, which accumulate to great wrong doing when we hope to benefit.
Tenderness to human life is in short supply in this age. We abort millions of children in the name of convenience. Socialist nations in Africa pursue policies that destroy their economies and starve their peoples. China engages in the brutal suppression of whole people groups and runs slave labor camps. Sudan practices slavery and terrorists blow up buildings in the name of God. This is not the age to be sanguine about our compassion.
The conscience is a frail guide when tempted by a desire to help others. Compassionate men like President Obama are particularly apt to do wicked things when they intend to do great good. Stem cell research might cure horrible disease and so everyone wishes it was moral. Any good man would wish to help, but only a wise man would restrain from evil to do it.
For a man of faith President Obama seems strangely sanguine about so momentous a decision that breaks with all the ethical traditions of the West. He risks a terrible judgment.
Fortunately, God’s judgments are tempered with mercy. No president has been immune to the temptation to allow short term good to cloud his judgment. President George W. Bush allowed the torture of terrorists and this assault on human dignity was a grievous wrong. This new presidency, however, was particularly marked by promises of hope and change and so the fall from grace is bitter. Sadly, the Obama presidency is now permanently tarnished by a rejection of moderation and a Frankenstein’s confidence in science.
