I defer to the expertise of others that this is the big deal scientifically it appears to be. What I find fascinating about this — indeed, what I find fascinating about the role of technology generally (I’ve long wanted to write a big think piece on this) — is how necessity is not only the mother of invention, it’s the father of immorality.
Because President Bush wisely placed limitations on one scientific path, scientists needed to come up with another route to the same goal. It now sounds like they found it. Huzzahs to everyone (Memo to the Communications Director: Bush should give a speech on this taking his share of the credit).
So now let’s assume the best case scenario. Let’s assume that creating embryos to destroy them is no longer “necessary” for the relevant science to proceed. As this truth sinks in, suddenly a lot more people are going to concede that there’s something immoral or at least icky about creating embryos just to cannibalize their parts. Of course, because of the abortion debate, we won’t get anything like unanimity on this point (some pro-choicers will never concede that there’s much moral worth to embryos). But, since it’s not necessary to create the embryos in order to proceed with stem cell research, most people will be much more likely to condemn the very idea of creating big eugenicky labs full of embryos. Imagine what a pro-life Hollywood could do with such dystopian fodder.
Or to change the example, look at child labor. America banned child labor only after mechanization, industrialization and education had progressed to a point where most people didn’t need to put their kids to work. Once the necessity was gone for most Americans — particularly urban Americans — the ability to condemn the last vestiges of the practice as immoral increased enormously (which is why it was banned only when the practice had almost died out). As a philosophical point, if child labor is evil, it should have been more evil when, say, 95% of kids worked in dangerous conditions. And yet, socially and politically, the opposite was the case. Only when a mere 5% worked in dangerous conditions did the public suddenly become shocked that it was happening at all. In other words, only when kids don’t need to work does it seem wrong to put them to work. Similarly, only when you don’t need to create embryos to poach stem cells can a consensus form around the proposition that it is evil to create them to poach stem cells.
This is a very Whiggish point I’m making here about the nature of moral progress — or the perception of it — but I think it’s really just a fascinating topic (with implications for everything from war to torture to even gay marriage) even if I’m not explaining it as well as I’d like. Perhaps some day.