A recent NYT article about Orchid’s embryo selection program triggered a surprising to me backlash on X where people expressed disgust and moral disapproval at the idea of embryo selection. The arguments generally fell into two categories:
(1) “The murder argument” Embryo selection is bad because it involves creating and then discarding embryos, which is like murdering whole humans. This argument also implies regular IVF, without selection, is also bad. Most proponents of this argument believe that the point of fertilization marks a key point when the entity starts to have moral value, i.e. they don’t ascribe the same value to sperm and eggs.
(2) “The egalitarian argument” Embryo selection is bad because the embryos are not granted the equal chance of being born they deserve. “Equal chance” here is probably not quite the correct phrase/is a bit of a strawman (because of course fitter embryos have a naturally higher chance of being born). Proponents of this argument believe that intervening on the natural probability of any particular embryo being born is anti-egalitarian and this is bad. By selecting for certain traits we are saying people with those traits are more deserving of life, and this is unethical/wrong.
At face value, both of these arguments are valid. If you buy the premises (“embryos have the moral value of whole humans”, “egalitarianism is good”) then the arguments make sense. However, I think it’s hard to justify moral value beginning at the point of fertilization.
On argument (1):
If we define murder as “killing live things” and decide that murder is bad (an intuitive decision), then “the murder argument” holds up. However, I don’t think we actually think of murder as “killing live things” in real life. We don’t condemn killing bacteria as murder. The anti-IVF people don’t condemn killing sperm or egg cells as murder. So the crux here is not whether the embryo is alive, but rather whether it is of moral value. Proponents of this argument claim that the embryo is basically equivalent to a full human life. But to make this claim, you must appeal to its potential. It’s clear that in its current state, an embryo is not a full human. The bundle of cells has no ability to function as a human, no sensations, no thoughts, no pain, no happiness, no ability to survive or grow on its own. We just know the given the right conditions, the potential for a human life exists. But as soon as we start arguing about how the potential of something grants it moral value, it becomes difficult to draw the line arbitrarily at fertilization. From the point of view of potential humans, you can’t deny sperm and eggs moral value. In fact, every moment a woman spends not pregnant is a moment she is ridding the world of potential humans.
On argument (2):
If you grant the premise that any purposeful intervention on the probabilities of embryos being born is unethical because it violates some sacred egalitarian principle then it’s hard to refute argument (2). Scott Alexander has argued that encouraging a woman to rehabilitate from alcoholism before getting pregnant is equivalent to preferring the healthy baby over the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome, something argument (2) proponents oppose. However, I think this is a strawman. The egalitarians think every already-producedembryo should be given as equal a chance as possible. They are not discussing identity changes of potential embryos. However, again we run into the “moral value from potential” problem. Sure, you can claim that embryos have moral value for some magical God-given reason. But my intuition is that in their hearts, the embryo-valuers are using some notion of potential full human life to ground their assessment. In which case again we run into the arbitrariness of the fertilization cutoff point.
So in summary, I think it’s difficult to justify valuing embryos without appealing to their potential, which leads us to value earlier stages of potential humans. Under this view, it’s a moral imperative to not prevent the existences of any potential humans, which looks like maximizing the number of offspring you have. Or as stated in this xeet
every combo of sperm + egg that can exist should exist. we must get to the singularity so that we can print out all possible humans and live on an incredibly alive 200 story high coast to coast techno favela
People like to have clear-cut moral heuristics like “killing is bad.” This gives them an easy guide to making a morally correct decision and an easy guide to judging other’s actions as moral or immoral. This requires simplifying multidimensional situations into easily legible scenarios where a binary decision can be made. Thus you see people equating embryo disposal to first-degree murder, and others advocating for third-trimester abortion rights.
Regarding egalitarian-like arguments, I suspect many express opposition to embryo selection not because it’s a consequence of a positive philosophy that they state and believe and defend, but because they have a negative philosophy that tells them what positions are to be attacked.
I suspect that if you put together the whole list of what they attack, there would be no coherent philosophy that justifies it (or perhaps there would be one, but they would not endorse it).
There is more than zero logic to what is to be attacked and what isn’t, but it has more to do with “Can you successfully smear your opponent as an oppressor, or as one who supports doctrines that enable oppression; and therefore evil or, at best, ignorant if they immediately admit fault and repent; in other words, can you win this rhetorical fight?” than with “Does this argument, or its opposite, follow from common moral premises, data, and logical steps?”.
In this case, it’s like, if you state that humans with blindness or whatever have less moral worth than fully healthy humans, then you are to be attacked; and at least in the minds of these people, selecting embryos of the one kind over the other is close enough that you are also to be attacked.
Sure, you can claim that embryos have moral value for some magical God-given reason. But my intuition is that in their hearts, the embryo-valuers are using some notion of potential full human life to ground their assessment. In which case again we run into the arbitrariness of the fertilization cutoff point.
Some people believe embryos have souls which may impact their moral judgement. Soul can be considered as “full human life” in moral terms. I think attributing this to purely potential human life may not be accurate, since the intuitions for essentialist notions of continuity of selfhood can be often fairly strong among certain people.
I appreciate the pursuit of non-strawman understandings of misgivings around reprogenetics, and the pursuit of addressing them.
I don’t feel I understand the people who talk about embryo selection as “killing embryos” or “choosing who lives and dies”, but I want to and have tried, so I’ll throw some thoughts into the mix.
Hart, IIUC, argues that wanting to choose who will live and who won’t means you’re evil and therefore shouldn’t be making such choices. I think his argument is ultimately stupid, so maybe I still don’t get it. But anyway, I think it’s an importantly different sort of argument than the two you present. It’s an indictment of the character of the choosers.
Second: When I tried to empathize with “life/soul starts at conception”, what I got was:
We want a simple boundary…
… for political purposes, to prevent…
child sacrifice (which could make sense given the cults around the time of the birth of Christianity?).
killing mid-term fetuses, which might actually for real start to have souls.
… for social purposes, because it causes damage to ….
the would-be parents’s souls to abort the thing which they do, or should, think of as having a soul.
the social norm / consensus / coordination around not killing things that people do or should orient towards as though they have souls.
The pope said so. (...But then I’d like to understand why the pope said so, which would take more research.) (Something I said to a twitter-famous Catholic somehow caused him to seriously consider that, since Yermiahu says that god says “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you...”, maybe it’s ok to discard embryos before implantation...)
(My invented explanation:) Souls are transpersonal. They are a distributed computation between the child, the parents, the village, society at large, and humanity throughout all time (god). As an embryo grows, the computation is, gradually, “handed off to / centralized in” the physical locus of the child. But already upon conception, the parents are oriented towards the future existence of the child, and are computing their part of the child’s soul—which is most of what has currently manifested of the child’s soul. In this way, we get:
From a certain perspective:
It reflects poorly on would-be parents who decide to abort.
It makes sense for the state to get involved to prevent abortion. (I don’t agree with this, but hear me out:)
The perspective is one which does not acknowledge the possibility of would-be parents not mentally and socially orienting to a pregnancy in the same way that parents orient when they are intending to have children, or at least open to it and ready to get ready for it.
...Which is ultimately stupid of course, because that is a possibility. So maybe this is still a strawman.
Well, maybe the perspective is that it’s possible but bad, which is at least usefully a different claim.
Within my invented explanation, the “continuous distributed metaphysics of the origins of souls”, it is indeed the case that the soul starts at conception—BUT in fact it’s fine to swap embryos! It’s actually a strange biodeterminism to say that this clump of cells or that, or this genome or that, makes the person. A soul is not a clump of cells or a genome! The soul is the niche that the parents, and the village, have already begun constructing for the child; and, a little bit, the soul is the structure of all humanity (e.g. the heritage of concepts and language; the protection of rights; etc.).
On people’s arguments against embryo selection
A recent NYT article about Orchid’s embryo selection program triggered a surprising to me backlash on X where people expressed disgust and moral disapproval at the idea of embryo selection. The arguments generally fell into two categories:
(1) “The murder argument” Embryo selection is bad because it involves creating and then discarding embryos, which is like murdering whole humans. This argument also implies regular IVF, without selection, is also bad. Most proponents of this argument believe that the point of fertilization marks a key point when the entity starts to have moral value, i.e. they don’t ascribe the same value to sperm and eggs.
(2) “The egalitarian argument” Embryo selection is bad because the embryos are not granted the equal chance of being born they deserve. “Equal chance” here is probably not quite the correct phrase/is a bit of a strawman (because of course fitter embryos have a naturally higher chance of being born). Proponents of this argument believe that intervening on the natural probability of any particular embryo being born is anti-egalitarian and this is bad. By selecting for certain traits we are saying people with those traits are more deserving of life, and this is unethical/wrong.
At face value, both of these arguments are valid. If you buy the premises (“embryos have the moral value of whole humans”, “egalitarianism is good”) then the arguments make sense. However, I think it’s hard to justify moral value beginning at the point of fertilization.
On argument (1):
If we define murder as “killing live things” and decide that murder is bad (an intuitive decision), then “the murder argument” holds up. However, I don’t think we actually think of murder as “killing live things” in real life. We don’t condemn killing bacteria as murder. The anti-IVF people don’t condemn killing sperm or egg cells as murder. So the crux here is not whether the embryo is alive, but rather whether it is of moral value. Proponents of this argument claim that the embryo is basically equivalent to a full human life. But to make this claim, you must appeal to its potential. It’s clear that in its current state, an embryo is not a full human. The bundle of cells has no ability to function as a human, no sensations, no thoughts, no pain, no happiness, no ability to survive or grow on its own. We just know the given the right conditions, the potential for a human life exists. But as soon as we start arguing about how the potential of something grants it moral value, it becomes difficult to draw the line arbitrarily at fertilization. From the point of view of potential humans, you can’t deny sperm and eggs moral value. In fact, every moment a woman spends not pregnant is a moment she is ridding the world of potential humans.
On argument (2):
If you grant the premise that any purposeful intervention on the probabilities of embryos being born is unethical because it violates some sacred egalitarian principle then it’s hard to refute argument (2). Scott Alexander has argued that encouraging a woman to rehabilitate from alcoholism before getting pregnant is equivalent to preferring the healthy baby over the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome, something argument (2) proponents oppose. However, I think this is a strawman. The egalitarians think every already-produced embryo should be given as equal a chance as possible. They are not discussing identity changes of potential embryos. However, again we run into the “moral value from potential” problem. Sure, you can claim that embryos have moral value for some magical God-given reason. But my intuition is that in their hearts, the embryo-valuers are using some notion of potential full human life to ground their assessment. In which case again we run into the arbitrariness of the fertilization cutoff point.
So in summary, I think it’s difficult to justify valuing embryos without appealing to their potential, which leads us to value earlier stages of potential humans. Under this view, it’s a moral imperative to not prevent the existences of any potential humans, which looks like maximizing the number of offspring you have. Or as stated in this xeet
People like to have clear-cut moral heuristics like “killing is bad.” This gives them an easy guide to making a morally correct decision and an easy guide to judging other’s actions as moral or immoral. This requires simplifying multidimensional situations into easily legible scenarios where a binary decision can be made. Thus you see people equating embryo disposal to first-degree murder, and others advocating for third-trimester abortion rights.
Regarding egalitarian-like arguments, I suspect many express opposition to embryo selection not because it’s a consequence of a positive philosophy that they state and believe and defend, but because they have a negative philosophy that tells them what positions are to be attacked.
I suspect that if you put together the whole list of what they attack, there would be no coherent philosophy that justifies it (or perhaps there would be one, but they would not endorse it).
There is more than zero logic to what is to be attacked and what isn’t, but it has more to do with “Can you successfully smear your opponent as an oppressor, or as one who supports doctrines that enable oppression; and therefore evil or, at best, ignorant if they immediately admit fault and repent; in other words, can you win this rhetorical fight?” than with “Does this argument, or its opposite, follow from common moral premises, data, and logical steps?”.
In this case, it’s like, if you state that humans with blindness or whatever have less moral worth than fully healthy humans, then you are to be attacked; and at least in the minds of these people, selecting embryos of the one kind over the other is close enough that you are also to be attacked.
(Confidence: 75%)
Some people believe embryos have souls which may impact their moral judgement. Soul can be considered as “full human life” in moral terms. I think attributing this to purely potential human life may not be accurate, since the intuitions for essentialist notions of continuity of selfhood can be often fairly strong among certain people.
I appreciate the pursuit of non-strawman understandings of misgivings around reprogenetics, and the pursuit of addressing them.
I don’t feel I understand the people who talk about embryo selection as “killing embryos” or “choosing who lives and dies”, but I want to and have tried, so I’ll throw some thoughts into the mix.
First: Maybe take a look at: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-anti-theology-of-the-body
Hart, IIUC, argues that wanting to choose who will live and who won’t means you’re evil and therefore shouldn’t be making such choices. I think his argument is ultimately stupid, so maybe I still don’t get it. But anyway, I think it’s an importantly different sort of argument than the two you present. It’s an indictment of the character of the choosers.
Second: When I tried to empathize with “life/soul starts at conception”, what I got was:
We want a simple boundary…
… for political purposes, to prevent…
child sacrifice (which could make sense given the cults around the time of the birth of Christianity?).
killing mid-term fetuses, which might actually for real start to have souls.
… for social purposes, because it causes damage to ….
the would-be parents’s souls to abort the thing which they do, or should, think of as having a soul.
the social norm / consensus / coordination around not killing things that people do or should orient towards as though they have souls.
The pope said so. (...But then I’d like to understand why the pope said so, which would take more research.) (Something I said to a twitter-famous Catholic somehow caused him to seriously consider that, since Yermiahu says that god says “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you...”, maybe it’s ok to discard embryos before implantation...)
(My invented explanation:) Souls are transpersonal. They are a distributed computation between the child, the parents, the village, society at large, and humanity throughout all time (god). As an embryo grows, the computation is, gradually, “handed off to / centralized in” the physical locus of the child. But already upon conception, the parents are oriented towards the future existence of the child, and are computing their part of the child’s soul—which is most of what has currently manifested of the child’s soul. In this way, we get:
From a certain perspective:
It reflects poorly on would-be parents who decide to abort.
It makes sense for the state to get involved to prevent abortion. (I don’t agree with this, but hear me out:)
The perspective is one which does not acknowledge the possibility of would-be parents not mentally and socially orienting to a pregnancy in the same way that parents orient when they are intending to have children, or at least open to it and ready to get ready for it.
...Which is ultimately stupid of course, because that is a possibility. So maybe this is still a strawman.
Well, maybe the perspective is that it’s possible but bad, which is at least usefully a different claim.
Within my invented explanation, the “continuous distributed metaphysics of the origins of souls”, it is indeed the case that the soul starts at conception—BUT in fact it’s fine to swap embryos! It’s actually a strange biodeterminism to say that this clump of cells or that, or this genome or that, makes the person. A soul is not a clump of cells or a genome! The soul is the niche that the parents, and the village, have already begun constructing for the child; and, a little bit, the soul is the structure of all humanity (e.g. the heritage of concepts and language; the protection of rights; etc.).