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Potential

An embryo could grow into a human being if it is allowed to gestate inside a viable woman, but should all embryos continue to gestate, regardless of other considerations? As Peter Singer once put it, killing an embryo is not like killing a human being in the same way that crushing an acorn is not the same as cutting down an oak tree, or boiling an egg is not the same as boiling a chicken (Singer, 1993). Many people feel that human embryos have equal (or more) moral importance than human beings because (aside from their biological necessity or the notion that embryos have souls) they have the potential to grow into a human being. If potential is all that is important, then the moral status of the embryo is not defined by what stage of growth the embryo is at - all that is important is that there is potential for a human being, regardless.

This potential has great moral weight if the embryo grows to be a future baby; to ensure a long and healthy life it must not meet with toxins and trauma during development. But the idea of potential has less moral weight if the people responsible for the embryo do not want it to grow and live. This is because an embryo does not command the same ethical considerations that a grown human being does precisely because it is only a potential human being.

Nevertheless, thwarting this potential is a significant matter, worthy of moral consideration. The argument of human potential must be put into this ontogenic perspective: is preventing the possibility of an individual from being alive harming that person, a person who does not yet exist? No wrong can be done to a person who does not exist, yet ensuring the non-existence of a person who might have been can seem like a death - an experience of aloneness and loss. However, this non-existence is not the same as the death of a human being who experienced life, an ending that is a real loss of a human being as opposed to the loss of potential and the imagined loss of who might have been. But because human life is usually felt as worth living, the non-existence of a potential human life is strange. This strangeness can evoke a variety of feelings in people, based on their expectations for the future, especially the future of their children and themselves. Continuity is at stake, and in the negation of potential life mortality looms large. This may lead a person to wonder about the non-existence before conception as well as the non-existence implied by death. Life after death (and life before life) beliefs may assuage these worries a little, but the loss of a non-existent thing can still create a feeling of loss.

Again it is useful to consider the contrast between possible future people and real present people for who there seems to be no life left, people who are almost considered past. A comatose person with a respirator brain seems to have no potential for living beyond the condition of life-support; here is reason to end an atrophying and dependant existence. But then, might not there be a chance that the life-supported person may live to a time that medical technology could improve their condition, especially if they were not suffering from a respirator brain? If a comatose person could be given an improved well-being, robustness, and health through the implantation of futuristic neural-surgery, it would then be wrong to deny life-support, even though the human life is only potentially a human being until such a neural-implant is developed. But in the present day, such technology can only be hoped for, so a comatose person cannot be proven to be a potential person. However, it might still be worth maintaining the life of that person, no matter how degraded - just in case.

Consider another thought experiment where one day humans developed technology that would give a human sense of being to other animals or to computers. In this scenario we could say that all animals and computers were potentially human. In such a scenario, the argument of Potential would condemn any failure to make them humans like us because doing so would result in the non-existence of potential human beings.

The problems of the "potential argument" illustrate that potential human being does not imply the immorality of embryonic destruction in stem-cell harvesting (or abortion). Rather, potential human being is a description that expresses the ethical significance of the developing cells/body involved. In actual fact, "potential human being" should not only refer to the developing human cells that might mature and be born, but also to those who are sick and potentially might regain their full human capacities by being healed through the use of stem-cells. It is certainly the case that embryos have more potential to be human beings compared to the potential for a comatose patient with extensive brain damage. But it is also crucial to consider that though the selfhood of the comatose patient may be in question, it is certain that the patient at least was a human being, whereas the embryo never has been a human being.

Nevertheless, the problem of morality remains because there is no clear biological point that indicates when the moral status of the embryo changes from one which is of moral concern as reproductively necessary and medically useful, into one which is of moral concern as a developing human being that should, increasingly, be allowed to grow and live. But if there is to be some consistency between declaring a patient dead when their brain can no longer be supported or the moral position that holds the euthanasia of brain-dead patients as tenable, then the brain activity of the fetus should also be one of the criteria for considering the right to life of the fetus and the morality of embryonic stem-cell research and abortion.

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