Transported to a scientific frontier, our moral machinery has been working hard. First we challenged it with the question whether investigators should exploit surplus human embryos stored in fertility clinics. No sooner had we gotten some leverage on that question than we introduced compelling scientific reasons to ask whether investigators should create embryos. In the public arena, the issue has now been joined on whether to permit somatic cell nuclear transfer. With an eye on the moral debate, advocates of the practice of somatic cell nuclear transfer in regenerative medicine have dubbed such practice 'therapeutic cloning,' or, in a recent invention, 'nuclear transplantation.' As noted below, the first phrase is a malapropism and the second masks the crux of controversy. After rooting about the linguistic storehouse, it has seemed to many that we lack an obvious mot juste to describe what beneficent scientists want to do. This semantic gap is the face of a deeper puzzlement. We are brought up short by a fundamental question. For moral purposes, how do we sort and classify embryo-like entities and related events? This is not a question of what to call a given x, but of what x's to call.
In the throes of this puzzlement, we can almost hear our decisionmaking machinery grinding its gears. Commentators gathered in the public arena ask, 'When does life begin?' That, as the philosopher Wittgenstein would say, is a pseudoproblem. Gametes are living cells. Life has begun before conception. The genuine problem is to understand what attributes of a life form bear upon how we ought to treat it. In our encounter with this problem, the pace is being set by, among all things, legislatures. These bodies have already given us a maze of enactments.
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