LIFE TO SAVE LIFE
BRITISH FERTILITY SOCIETY
6th JANUARY 2004
One of the difficulties when addressing the issue of ethics in any area of life today is whether there is any consensus as to the ethical system we are imagining.
In a pluriform, multicultural and multi faith society people are reasonably content to allow individuals their own personal and private moral opinions and even to acknowledge that these are important for them to hold. Yet when it comes to proposing that there is some ethical system that is binding on the whole community this suggests of a degree of absolutism which sits uncomfortably with the mood of relativism and the culture of subjectivism. Today we encourage people to do what they think to be right which is very different from being told to do what is right.
The phrase 'what they think' reveals the relativism of the age. It's a form of democratic morality where everybody votes for their own moral opinion and where nobody's moral opinion is better or worse than anybody else's.
The ultimate expression of relativism is found in an alleged saying of President Richard Nixon:"if two wrongs don't make a right, try three!"
But here you are as academics and clinicians in the vanguard of medical research and handling the essence of human life and doing so in a world that bandies about ethical words such as right, wrong, better, worse, as you do your work. How are you and we the public to make sense of this language?
My colleague the Rev Stephen Bellamy who is my adviser on bioethics will address some of the specific issues. I simply want to offer a canvass against which to have the debate.
In particular I want to suggest that although we live in an age of opinions there is a moral consensus and that we would do well to emphasise it as a means of recovering to public debate a sense of moral awe.
I define this ethical quality by reference to four particular characteristics:
1. Firstly, we recognise that all moral actions spring from and shape our characters.
2. Secondly, we acknowledge that all our actions have consequences, both individually and socially even though it may take time for them to be revealed.
3. Thirdly we presume that just as we judge our own antecedents, all our actions will be judged by future generations.
4. Fourthly, we are all responsible for our actions to whatever or whoever is the source of our moral intuition.
These four hallmarks of moral awe provide us with a minimalist set of criteria which both form and express a moral attitude. I am not suggesting there is a set of pat moral answers that can be applied in a 'one size fits all' manner to every ethical dilemma, not least because, as the technology develops at such speed, we are constantly finding ourselves in new situations for which previously received moral categories are now inappropriate. What I am proposing is that to subscribe to these hallmarks of moral awe creates a moral atmosphere in which we can do our work with a due sense of reverence and humility before the mystery of life.
Although obviously I speak from an explicitly Christian position I offer these four hallmarks as moral pointers which can be embraced by people of every faith and by people of none As such they can become a basis for a moral consensus and on which the moral discourse can take place.
Perhaps one of the greatest fears among lay people is that the scientist has so much knowledge that is inaccessible to ordinary people, that they simply do not understand the complexities of the arguments. We feel blinded by science. In order for the community to trust the scientist we need to be assured and reassured that the scientists approach their task with humility and reverence. Recovering a sense of moral awe to all decision-making creates greater confidence in the community that scientific research and experimentation is indeed for the common good.
In conclusion I go to some Hebrew poetry, to the Psalms of the Old Testament
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
You knit me together in my mother's womb
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
That I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
When I was being made in secret,
Intricately woven in the depths of the earth
These verses have often been referred to by Jewish and Christian ethicists in the debate about the status of the embryo.
As Stephen has indicated, if the embryo has no independent moral status apart from the mother then there is no ethical debate; similarly if on the other hand embryos are possessed of a moral status equivalent to that of a human being then there is no moral ambiguity about how they should be treated and no case for them being treated differently from human beings.
I approach this passage in rather a different way. Instead of using it to ascertain when it might be said that life actually begins, I read it as a description of a process. The issue is not to spot the point when life begins so as to caution any who might trespass that boundary. The thrust of the poetry is that God is in the whole process of creation - forming, knitting, making and doing so "in secret" and "wonderfully". The whole process is a divine one. God is at work in and through the human being and the becoming human. The divine process actually involves human agency. When the poem talks about it being done 'in secret' it suggests that there are aspects of it that are hidden from our sight. Although we know through science much about different episodes of human formation we find a veil drawn over the whole process so that it is difficult for us all to agree on when exactly human life is said to begin. We are left to marvel at the mystery of human becoming. This serves to underline my introduction that we should approach the debate and the scientific enquiry and research with awe. I suspect that as much will be achieved by inculcating in ourselves that reverence and humility as by prescribing the rules which will need adapting as the technology advances.