Ethics: the Emergence of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

In the November 6, 1998, issue of the journal Science, James Thomson, et al, from University of Wisconsin, announced the successful derivation of hES cells.5 The scientific announcement was accompanied by two ethically significant pronouncements. The first was that derivation of hES cells represented a revolutionary step in the treatment of degenerative diseases. The cells offered the potential of permanent repair of failing organs—“regenerative medicine,” as it was coined. The prospect of regenerative medicine, as one researcher framed it, constitutes “a totally new value paradigm for clinical therapeutics.”6 The second pronouncement came from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, given as testimony to the U.S. Congress. Because hES cell research entails the destruction of the embryo, the Bishops pronounced the research morally illicit. The therapeutic potential of the research represents a “good end” pursued by way of “an evil means.” Embryonic stem cell research must be judged “fundamentally wrong.”7 Ten years later, both pronouncements remain contested. Nevertheless, both indicate the way in which hES cell research has been figured as a matter of ethics from the start.

Among the researchers who recognized the therapeutic potentials of early work on mouse stem cells was Michael West, who, in 1990, founded the Geron Corporation. Geron funded Thomson’s breakthrough research, and it held proprietary rights for the use of hES cells in core therapeutic domains. The company and its research portfolio constituted West’s response to what he took to be a core set of ethical-theological challenges. West was raised as a Christian Fundamentalist. And though, for quite specific theological reasons, he has distanced himself from Christianity, he continued to frame his scientific vocation in strikingly biblical terms. West took as a scientific calling “the defeat of death.” The “highest calling,” as he put it, is “to find and control the biological basis of the immortality of life, and to alleviate the suffering of our fellow human beings.”8

The selection of the name “Geron” reflected West’s vocational self-understanding. The name is derived from the Greek, meaning “old man.” It is found in the New Testament in the famous passage in John 3:4 in which Jesus is asked by Nicodemus, “How can a man be born again when he is old [geron]?”9 In the course of Jesus’ response, he identifies the spiritual terms on which renewed life is possible. West, moving in quite a different direction, looked to renew life on strictly biological terms. West took these verses to be concerned with immortality. English translations refer to “everlasting life.” Stem cell research, in West’s view, made such a proposition biologically feasible. It bears noting that a more accurate translation of the biblical passage might read “abundant life” or “fullness of life” rather than “everlasting life.” As embryonic stem cell research began to unfold, the question of the extent to which it might contribute to abundant life and not only extended life became a matter of central concern.

Pluripotent and Immortal: the Ontology of Stem Cells

In 1996, while seeking venture capital for Geron, West was persuaded to seek the council of ethicists and theologians at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. The motives for doing so centered, no doubt, on his desire to preempt ethical and political fallout concerning the use of embryos in research. His motives, however, are far less significant than the fact that the technical aspects of stem cell research were interfaced with ethical reflection a full two years before Thomson successfully derived his hES cell lines. At the initial meeting of Geron biologists and GTU ethicists, West laid out the basic program for regenerative medicine. That research program remains more or less unchanged, though techniques have certainly been refined. In addition, the ethical problems and opportunities elaborated by the GTU scholars in response to Geron’s program have persisted as sites of primary concern. Which is to say that the ontological and ethical elements that would subsequently be taken up and arranged in various figurations were more or less conceptually in place by the time hES cells were derived.10

Human embryonic stem cell research is, in the first place, ontologically significant. In the 1850s, Rudolph Virchow articulated a basic biological truism: “All cells come from cells.” Developmentally speaking, the cell is a basic organismal unit. All organisms begin as single cells, or the union of single cells, and through the process of cell division, cell differentiation, and cell determination, take complex and multifunctional form. The large majority of the cells in the human body can be described as “highly differentiated” or developmentally “fated.” These cells have highly specialized functions within specific systems, limited life spans determined by a certain number of cell divisions, and, with each division, produce two cells with an identical differentiated function.

Stem cells, however, are distinctive in that they have differentiated function, prolonged life spans, and, when they divide, are capable of producing not only more stem cells, but are also cells that are differentially specialized. Stem cells are classed according to degrees of potency and plasticity. First are so-called adult stem cells. These cells are found in various organ systems, and function to renew and repair populations of cells in those organs throughout the life of the individual. Adult stem cells are termed precursor or progenitor cells. Adult stem cells are either multipotent or unipotent. That is to say, they either give rise to multiple types of specialized cells within the organ system or only one type. A second class of naturally occurring stem cells is fetal tissue stem cells. From the time of the earliest specializations of tissues in the developing fetus (approximately after two weeks) until approximately three months, when the organs of the human body form, stem cells can be found in all organ systems. These stem cells generate the tissues for formation of the organs. Fetal tissue stem cells are multipotent, only producing cells in a differentiated system. Some of these cells, however, are pluripotent.

Unlike these first two classes of cells, human embryonic stem cells (hES cells) are not naturally occurring. They are derived from a human zygote, a fertilized egg, in vitro. The zygote is allowed to develop for about five days, to the blastocyst stage. At this stage the developing cells of the zygote undergo their first substantial differentiation from one another: the cells from a spherical cavity consisting of two cell types, an outer layer (trophoblast) and an inner cell mass. Human embryonic stem cells are derived by chemically disaggregating the outer layer, manually removing the inner cell mass, and plating the cells of the inner cell mass on fibroblast feeder layers.11

Having passed through multiple changes of media and reworked with specified nutrients, the hES cell lines exhibit the distinctive characteristics of mES cells noted above. They do not suffer the mortality and genetic degradation normally associated with cell division. This characteristic is shared with adult stem cells. However, unlike adult stem cells which, in vivo, only survive in parallel with the life of the organism, and which, in vitro, tend to degrade over a number of population doublings, hES cells exhibit cellular immortality. This means that they are scalable to exponential degrees. A single cell line, given the right nutrients, will reproduce itself indefinitely.12 In the second place, when given the right growth factor, these cells can be directed to become any tissue type in the body, although effective control of differentiation remains a significant technical hurdle even in mES cells. This pluripotent characteristic is shared with some fetal stem cells. However, unlike fetal stem cells, which, in vivo, become fated to specific organ systems relatively early in fetal development, hES cells can be maintained in an undifferentiated state indefinitely.

If hES cells are interesting because they are ontologically distinctive, they have received much more attention because they may be medically useful. The logic of the concept of regenerative medicine has become familiar. It is not thereby less striking in its simplicity and potency. Thomas Okarma has pointed out what may appear to be an obvious biological fact, but which, in light of the derivation of hES cells, becomes rather more interesting. If all cells come from cells, then “the only way to restore cellular function in an organ is literally to replace the lost cells.”13 As noted, organs with populations of adult stem cells do this regularly. If hES cells could be effectively controlled, this function might be reproducible in any organ system by way of cell transplantation. Preliminary animal trials have been promising. Rats with severed spines who received transplantations of neural cells derived from hES cells regained lost mobility in their hindquarters. Injected hES- derived cells migrated to injured tissues and allowed the spinal cords to re- knit themselves.14

All the same, the now ten-year-old claims that human embryonic stem cell research would revolutionize medicine have not proven to be true (nor false, for that matter). Significant advances toward therapeutic proof-of-concept have been made, but have been rare. Differentiation is still not understood well enough to be managed. Stem cell transplants still result in cancers more frequently than is safe for regular experimentation in human subjects. And the problem of immune rejection, and its connections to nuclear transfer, remains a blockage point. Reasons of politics are often cited for this slow pace. Perhaps these reasons are accurate. Nevertheless, the revolution has not come. Regenerative medicine remains a provocative and plausible concept, but a concept whose applications have not born benefits equal to the prognostications.

Remediation

Despite this slow pace toward therapeutic application, hES cell research has already proven politically and ethically significant. Within a few short months of their derivation, stem cells were given pride of place alongside abortion and evolution as a political and moral litmus test in US politics. Given the polemics connected to the politics of stem cell research, another less obvious point of significance has often been overlooked. Stem cell research exemplifies the way in which living systems appear to be open to remediation. Recall that in the diagnostic remediation has two relevant aspects. First is a change of medium. Second is amelioration—to remedy, to make things better. By removing the inner cell mass cells from the blastocyst and by placing these cells into different media, researchers have been able to reconstruct the signaling pathways that function to direct the vitality and differentiation of the cells. This reworking is such that these cells are given new forms and subsequently new functions. Why is this significant? Ontologically, this means that engineered biological artifacts, placed within new media, media that rework pathways, are given a form that substantially alters the function of these artifacts. In this reconstructed form, the artifacts have been made to contribute the amelioration of biological systems that otherwise would have remained relatively degraded. By refashioning cells—isolating, associating, and reconnecting them—human embryonic stem cell research has demonstrated once again the remediative character and capacity of the evolutionary natural world.

This point of ontological significance bears on the ethical figuration of stem cell research. The remediation of zygotic cells demonstrated, once again, that the function and significance of living organisms is not dependent on pre-given natural forms, with pre-given capacities and telê. Thomson and subsequent researchers have shown that zygotic cells, under specified conditions, do in fact have capacities other than developing into fetuses, i.e., they can be made to become embryonic stem cells. That these conditions are cultivated, and not simply given, does not mean stem cells are unnatural. HES cells do not violate nature. Rather, they exemplify its flexibility, context-dependence, and the mutually constitutive relation among pathways, forms, and functions. The question of whether or not these remediated forms contribute to flourishing, however, remains unclear. In any case, the extent to which such a question can be satisfactorily resolved—the question of the significance and worth of these ontological capacities—depends on figuration.

Defending the Embryo, A First Figuration

The first predominant figuration of embryonic stem cell research concerns the status and worth of the embryo, and the question of whether or not such worth calls for defense. Insofar as this way of establishing connections is made stable as a coherent ensemble, it can be thought of as a figure of embryo defense. The term defense here means both to protect and to justify. This figuration forms part of the wider problematization of human worth, bioscience, and ethics, which in our diagnostic we characterize as the figure of human dignity. As a figuration of embryonic stem cell research, however, the question of the embryo and its worth is distinct from this wider problematization in a number of salient respects, which need to be specified.

Although this figuration has been elaborated by those interested in promoting hES cell research, it is usually associated with those interested in forestalling research, most notably the Roman Catholic magisterium. Given its relatively long history of thinking about and responding to embryo research, the Catholic magisterium was one of the first organizations to publicly and coherently respond to the announcement of Jamie Thomson’s breakthrough. As such, the Vatican position was widely circulated as the “religious” position, per se, and often cited as proof of “warfare” between science and religion.

Along with the Roman Catholic magisterium, others who have contributed to and argued for the coherence and legitimation of this first figuration include certain American Protestant denominations and theologians associated with these denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, are two examples. A number of political advocacy groups such as the “Center for Bioethics and Culture” and “First Do No Harm” also take this as the uniquely legitimate figuration. The Catholic magisterium, however, has developed the most systematic and coherent form of this figuration. Given this, I have elected to focus on the Roman Catholic variation. However, other variations will be noted as well.

Ethical Object: The Embryo

This figuration, like the others, is not simple. That is to say, it consists of multiple elements whose form and connections are characterized by a significance and function not reducible to any single element. Keeping this in mind, however, this first figuration can be usefully summarized as a question of what, ontologically, is at stake in hES research, and how, ethically, practices be ordered. The object that is taken to be at stake, of course, is the embryo. Recall that in our diagnostic, we use the term object in a technical sense. An object is the anchor point for a figuration; it works as a relay point to integrate the other elements of which the figuration consists. More pragmatically, an object is that which is taken centrally to be at stake in the figuration, and is therefore that in relation to which truth claims are produced and interventions ordered.

The embryo, as an object, is not identical with the zygote taken up as an object in biology, although the biology of the zygote is certainly considered as an integral element in this figuration. Rather, as an ethical object, the embryo is that which may or may not be the exemplar of the dignity of the human. This means that in the figure of embryo defense, it is the question of the worth and the status of the embryo which counts first and foremost. The question of the therapeutic worth of the stem cells derived from the embryo, along with other questions, is secondary. In short, the question is: to what extent is the embryo constituted by, and to what extent does it exemplify and partake of, those characteristics of incomparability and inviolability associated with the figure of human dignity; and thus, to what extent must the embryo and its integrity be defended against destruction at the hand of stem cell researchers?

Mode of Veridiction: Demonstration

In 2000, the Pontifical Academy for Life published a “Declaration on the Production and the Scientific and Therapeutic Use of Human Embryonic Stem Cells.”15 In the declaration, the authors assert, “The first ethical problem, which is fundamental, can be formulated thus: Is it morally licit to produce and/or use living human embryos for the preparation of ES cells?” The Academy answers in the negative. The question is analytically interesting in that it leaves unanswered a prior question: why is it that the embryo should be taken up as an ethical object? How is it that in the Roman Catholic figuration of embryonic stem cell research the question of the status of the embryo is the “fundamental” ethical problem?

The declaration does not answer this question. It does, however, indicate where one might look for such an answer. The declaration offers three interrelated steps in justifying its rejection of hES cell research. First, it states that “biological analysis” tells us that the human embryo is, from the moment of the union of the gametes, a “human subject” with a defined genetic identity that points to its “coordinated, continuous, and gradual development.” The human subject thus has two defining characteristics. It is relational and it is a continuum of potentiality and actuality. Biology, we are told, confirms that the embryo exemplifies these characteristics. Second, it follows for the authors of the declaration that the embryo is a “human individual” with “the right to its own life.” Once relationality and potentiality have been confirmed, the individuality of the embryo is asserted, and rights, including rights to life, are claimed. Third, the declaration concludes, it is morally illicit to destroy the human embryo. The ends do not justify the means. Relationality, potentiality, individuality, and integrity are linked.16

The logic that brings these four concepts together and attaches them to the embryo can be traced across three documents: Gaudium et spes, Communion and Stewardship, and Donum Vitae. These texts are not only thematically interrelated, but they are also veridictionally interconnected. That is to say, in addition to addressing questions concerning the embryo, the documents are connected and function together by way of a shared mode of veridiction. The shared mode of veridiction is demonstration.

What is demonstration as a mode of veridiction? Demonstration, as I am using it here, distinguishes the way in which, in embryo defense figuration, certain speech acts are taken to count in the register of true and false and are thereby authorized. Those speech acts count that are an elaboration of, or that follow from, foundational theological or philosophical principles. For this reason, the embryo defense figuration has a particular relation to the findings of the natural sciences. The claims of the biological sciences do not directly inform a demonstrative mode of veridiction. Rather, these claims are interpreted in such a way as to demonstrate that they follow from, and thereby serve to reinforce or ratify, foundational terms. In short, biological truth claims form part of this figuration only in so far as they are adjusted to demonstration as a mode of veridiction. Biology, as the Vatican’s Donum Vitae puts it, does grasp the proper meaning the human person, and therefore must be ordered to such meaning by theology and the Church.

Of the theological and philosophical first principles at work in the documents identified above, two are particularly crucial. First is the theological and ontological doctrine of the imago Dei—the idea that humans were created in the image of God. Since Vatican II, the doctrine of the image of God has been given significant prominence in magisterial teaching and theological research.17 Roman Catholic teaching and theology have focused on the challenge of discerning the proper form of human life amidst what the church takes to be the excesses and disorientations of the modern world. This focus has issued in demonstrations of the connection between the nature of God and the nature of humans. The medium of this demonstration has frequently been the doctrine of the imago Dei. It is worth noting that the term imago not only means “image,” as it is usually translated, but “perfect form.” The question taken up by the Roman Church is: what does the doctrine of the imago Dei tell us about the true or perfect form of human life in the modern world?

The second principle at work in these documents is the Thomistic notion of the “unified totality” of the human person as a corporeal body and as a substantive soul. This principle of “natural moral law,” as Donum Vitae puts it, “lays down the purposes, rights and duties which are based upon the bodily and spiritual nature of the human person.”18 The principle functions to position the church’s teachings in two important ways. First, it functions as warrant for the claim that the norms of human life cannot be determined at the biological level, but only at the level of the rational soul. Human life is defined “as a rational order whereby man is called by the Creator to direct and regulate his life and actions and in particular to make use of his own body.”19 Second, given that the rational soul is ordered by nature to a divine telos (beatific communion with God), the terms of that telos not only hold across human life in all its dimensions, but constitute the intent of the Creator. The telos of the rational soul, which is natural and proper to it, can also be taken as a mandate specifying the proper form of human life. Once discerned, such a form must be taken as normative. This means, among other things, that both the origin and goal of the human are genetically united, in the broad sense of genetic as the unfolding of potentialities. This also means that the potentialities of the rational soul as the first principle of life have the same moral worth as actualization of those potentialities.

The veridictional challenge for the magisterium is to show how developments in biology generally, and in stem cell research specifically, either follow or diverge from the doctrine of imago Dei, or the principles of natural moral law.

Metric: Dignity

Of the possible demonstrative truth claims that might be produced, only those will form part of the figure of embryo defense which can be ordered and made to operate according to a specific metric or standard: dignity. Given that the ethical object of this figuration is the embryo, those truth claims will form part of the figure that can be ordered according to the metric of dignity as it concerns the embryo. The metric thus functions as a structural joint between the embryo defense figuration and the broader contemporary problematization of human dignity. A crucial distinction here is that in the broader problematization the figure of human dignity operates according to a declamatory mode of veridiction. That is to say, according to the figure developed in our diagnostic, dignity is simply declaimed—forcefully declared without explicit appeal to grounds. By contrast, the dignity of the embryo in the figure of embryo defense must be demonstrated.

Dignity became an authoritative standard for contemporary Roman Catholic thought, in part, through the 1965 Vatican II “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Contemporary World,” or “Gaudium et spes.”20 In the Constitution, the Roman Church is described as the “hope of the modern world,” in that the church discerns the ends to which technological and political powers in the contemporary world should be ordered. The Council writes: “Though mankind is stricken with wonder at its own discoveries and its power, it often raises anxious questions about the current trend of the world, about the place and role of man in the universe, about the meaning of its individual and collective strivings, and about the ultimate destiny of reality and of humanity.”21 Technological “mankind” on its own is incapable of answering such questions.

The proper meaning of these individual and collective strivings is communion with God. Such communion is anticipated and oriented by human nature itself. What is this nature, the Constitution asks? It is the image of God. Such a “noble destiny” as communion with God is given form as a “Godlike seed” that must be respected as invaluable, inviolable, sacrosanct. The Council argues that this Godlike seed can be discerned in the social character of human nature. The image of God, from the beginning, is “male and female,” for when God created the human, “he created them.” Interpersonal communion is taken to be the “innermost nature” of the human, and “unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential.”22 It bears underscoring that this “innermost nature” is taken to be natural, that is, of human nature. This means, among other things, that it is a principle not only of human “persons” but of human “life.” Or, put the other way round, human life is qualified by that nature that makes human persons sacrosanct. Thus, of course, the dignity of persons can be taken up as the sanctity of life.

Since the publication of Gaudium et spes, these themes have been elaborated in a number of directions. Most relevant here is that they have been taken up and extended in the context of Roman Catholic reflection on contemporary science and experimentation with the early embryo. The international commission, Communion and Stewardship (subtitled Human Persons Created in the Image of God) spells this out.23 The commission starts by reinforcing the connection of the dignity of humans to the imago Dei. It then specifies that God’s true nature is Trinitarian, and thus, that the human, as the image of God, is by nature a communal being. The commission draws a striking conclusion from this: children are the exemplars of the dignity inherent in the imago insofar as children are the biological-spiritual expression of “a man joining with a woman” in a love created by God. Put simply, a child should be thought of as a Trinitarian creation.

This formulation and its connection to the notion of intrinsic dignity have, for several decades, been connected to Catholic thinking on the nature and status of the embryo. This connection was given definitive articulation in the instruction Donum Vitae, the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation. In the instruction, the relational dignity of human life is directly connected with the ontology of the embryo. The embryo is figured as not only participating in human dignity, but as its original and perfect form and thus the initial site of its genetic unfolding —both figuratively and literally.

Donum Vitae asserts that human life is sacrosanct from the event of the joining of the gametes. If the human finds its dignity in the Trinitarian relationality of man-woman-God, that dignity first takes form as the embryo. The embryo, Donum Vitae argues, consists of the three contributing elements of human nature—a mother, a father, and a divinely created soul. It further argues that such a view is ratified by contemporary developmental biology. The embryo is produced by the joining of the father’s gamete, the mother’s gamete, and the soul. Of course, the biological sciences could never confirm the presence of the soul, per se. But what is the soul? It is, in the first place, a matter of self- identity. In the second place, it is a matter of rational self-ordering. Taken together, these two constitute principles of subjectivity, the locus of a subject. The authors of Donum Vitae note that when the mother’s and father’s gametes come together, a novel genome is created. This novel genome can be taken as a marker of what John Paul II referred to as the “absolutely unique singularity” of the human person.24 What’s more, this genome will provide the instructions for the organization of the body of the developing embryo-fetus-child. That is to say, the genome inscribes a continuum of being by way of a principle of self-ordering. The authors of Donum Vitae note that the genome cannot be identified with the soul. However, they ask: how can we have such novel identity and an inner principle of self-ordering and not have a human subject? And if we have a human subject how can we not have a potential human person?

A note should be made at this point concerning the biology at play in the Vatican’s formations. The first is that since the publication of Donum Vitae, somatic cell nuclear transfer— cloning—has become a more or less refined technique for activating an egg such that it functions like a zygote. This technique indicates that it is possible to initiate the embryonic process without the contribution of gametes from a father. This means, among other things, that genomic novelty cannot reasonably be taken as an indication of the presence of a subject (although the fact of identical twins already indicated this). This also means that ordering factors characteristic of a genome are not simply intrinsic per se. Rather, they depend entirely on the cytoplasmic context in which the genome is situated. Second, this insight has not only been reaffirmed and nuanced by post-genomic biology, but is clear in the simple fact that the potential of an embryo to become a baby depends in no small part on being located in a womb. Living organisms, including the embryo, have multiple potentialities, the actualization of which is highly context-dependent. Biologically speaking, there are no natural forms that will genetically unfold according to a pre-given or necessary telos. Genetics simply do not work in the determinative fashion suggested by John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae. Nor do the genetic sciences demonstrate “that from the first instant there is established the structure or genetic program of what this living being will be: a man, and indeed this individual man.”25 Rather, post- genomic biology suggests that there are organisms whose pathways are ordered and whose forms are produced by a series of relational factors. The question would thus seem to be not which natural forms need to be defended in the name of what’s naturally given, but rather which forms should be favored given the kinds of relations which are worthwhile. This point bears on the second figuration as well.

In any case, the Vatican figuration takes dignity to be inherent and given in the early embryo, a given that can be theologically demonstrated and biologically confirmed. Dignity in this way functions as a metric for specifying which things at play in stem cell research (from biology to public policy) will be picked out as elements in the figure of embryo defense. Following our diagnostic, we can say that those elements that are picked out can then be associated, connected, and coordinated as part of the overall figuration. The kinds of elements included in the figure of embryo defense are, of course, those that are taken to bear on the question of the dignity of the embryo.

Ontological Mode: Genetic

As described in the diagnostic, the elements selected and arranged by a metric in a figure are characterized by a given ontological mode. The elements of a figuration form a single relational field, in part, because they are taken up according to a shared ontology. The modal aspects of this ontology include a particular temporality. The figuration of embryo defense is characterized by a genetic ontological.

The term genetic is, of course, most immediately associated with the idea of the gene, or with that part of the biological sciences that study the genetic characteristics of an organism. The term, however, has an older and broader meaning. The term refers in the first place to genesis—origin or generative source. Second, the term means “arising from a common origin.” A genetic mode of ontology is a mode in which an object’s being and significance are taken to be explainable in terms of the unfolding of potentialities latent in its origin.

A genetic mode of ontology is closely related to an archonic mode of ontology, which characterizes the second figuration, and which I will explain in more detail there. Ted Peters has distinguished two different and incompatible ontological modes in thinking about the natural world: an unfolding view and an epigenetic view. The unfolding view he terms the archonic view. As Peters defines it, the archonic view is characterized by a conception of things in which “everything is in one way or another given at the beginning. The universe consists in an unfolding or realization of potentialities already present at the starting point.”26 Peters adds that the archonic is thus an ontological mode in which origins both define and govern. I would like to add a distinction to Peters’ analytic categories. Analytically, it is useful to distinguish between an ontological mode in which potentialities present in the origin unfold over time, and an ontological mode in which an unchanging archon, as a first or defining principle of things, which may not in fact unfold over time, is definitive. Following this distinction, I want to use the term genetic to designate an ontological mode in which a potentiality comes to actuality through historical unfolding, and I want to use archonic to define an ontological mode in which an unchanging and defining “nature of things” is determinative. To use a rather imprecise philosophical distinction, the genetic refers to the unfolding of a telos, whereas the archonic refers to the ideal form of a thing. In both cases there are pre-given and normative forms. However, the temporality of the two is quite distinctive. Borrowing from Peters’ definition of the archonic, we might say that in a genetic mode of ontology, “The present and future have been predetermined or at least delimited by the past. All fresh initiative, novelty, or creativeness are effectively banned from the universe.”27

The kinds of elements that can be made to appear in a genetic mode are those that can be taken as defined by potentialities inherent in their origins. A genetic mode of ontology brings together the elements of demonstrative philosophy and theology, the metric of dignity, and embryonic stem cell research, and interfaces them such that they become connectable into and as a single genetic object. The object is, of course, the dignified embryo.

Mode of Jurisdiction: Defense

When the embryo as an object is figured through demonstration as a mode of veridiction, aligned by dignity as a metric, and characterized by a genetic mode of ontology, a specific mode of jurisdiction is taken to be both appropriate and necessary. This mode of jurisdiction is defense.

Defense, as a mode of jurisdiction, specifies that the activities appropriate to the ordering of embryonic stem cell research are those that protect the embryo from destruction or even manipulation. Given that dignity of the embryo is taken to be identical with its nature and potentiality, it can be neither established nor cultivated. Scientific practices that would destroy the embryo or otherwise disrupt the course of its “natural” development must be blocked. As the Pontifical Academy for Life puts it, regardless of the therapeutic worth of the artifacts derived from the early embryo, destruction of the embryo is morally illicit. Its sacrosanct dignity must be defended. As Donum Vitae expresses it: “The inviolability of the innocent human being’s right to life ‘from the moment of conception until death’ is a sign and requirement of the very inviolability of the person to whom the Creator has given the gift of life.”28 Such inviolability is morally ordaining. It orders a mode of defense.

Note: Figural Variation

As noted above, there are several variations of the embryo defense figuration. A good number of these are produced by Roman Catholic theologians who share the demonstrative mode of veridiction and the metric of dignity, but who adjust these to the elements of stem cell research differently. Several Roman Catholic theologians, such as Australian theologian Norman Ford and American Catholic theologian Thomas Shannon, argue that the early embryo does not exhibit the kind of unique individuation asserted in the Vatican figuration. Shannon, for example, argues from Scotus that the early embryo exhibits a human nature but is not yet a human person. Natures have value, persons have dignity. Shannon, following others, argues that the early embryo is not yet individuated and thus does not yet have dignity.29 Shannon’s position recommends a different mode of jurisdiction.

A prominent variation outside of the Catholic church forms the element of the figure of embryo defense according to the so- called “14-day rule.” This variation, rather than genetic in its mode of ontology, is developmentalist. That is to say, it asserts that the moral status of the embryo changes as it develops. As with Shannon, the 14-day rule suggests that the rights associated with human dignity cannot be asserted unless one has a human individual; a general human nature is insufficient. At fourteen days, the developing embryo can no longer undergo twinning. Thus, this is taken to represent a threshold at which individuation can be asserted. Note that the 14- day rule also relies on the adjustment of the findings of biology to a demonstrative mode of veridiction. In this case individuation is taken to be a marker of dignity. The task then is to put biology in the service of clarifying individuation. This variation is most prominently associated with the Warnock Report, a report produced to establish oversight rules of embryo research in England.30

Note that in the case of both of these variations, a kind of respect or value is extended to the embryo. It is not taken up as a sheer biological artifact per se. However, in both cases, value is not identical with dignity, and certainly not with inherent dignity. Both variations cohere with reasoning put forward by Karen Lebacqz, namely that value and dignity should not be confused or conflated: “First, the embryo or tissue must be valued…. To respect the embryo is to affirm that the value of the embryo or tissue is not dependent on its value for us or its usefulness to us. Respect sees a value in itself beyond usefulness. […] Second, such an entity can be used in research and can even be killed. To do so is not in itself disrespectful.”31 Given the archonic logic at work in much of the embryo defense figuration, it is not surprising that Lebacqz’s conclusions have been contested.

Protecting Human Nature, A Second Figuration

The second predominant figuration of embryonic stem cell research concerns the relations between human nature and the nature of biotechnology. In so far as this way of establishing connections is made stable as a coherent ensemble, it can be thought of as a figure of human nature protection or human protection. Like the first figuration, the human nature protection figuration forms part of the wider problematization of human worth, bioscience, and ethics that has taken form as the problem of human dignity. However, unlike the embryo defense figuration, the figure of human protection includes elements of the figure of biopower.

Like the first, forms of this second figuration have been elaborated by those interested in promoting as well as those interested in forestalling hES cell research. Though like the first, it is usually associated with the later. On August 9, 2001, George W. Bush gave his first public policy address as the U.S. President. The address focused on stem cells. Of the notable elements of his address, three are relevant here. First, President Bush rhetorically framed human life as fundamentally vulnerable. Second, he linked hES research to the “hatcheries” of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. Third, he announced the formation of the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE), which would be developed and chaired by University of Chicago Professor Leon Kass. The PCBE’s elaborate a figuration of stem cell research that can be characterized as human nature protection. The PCBE’s figuration of stem cell research is the most coherent and robust articulation of the second figuration. As such I have selected it as an exemplary case for my analysis.32

Ethical Object: Human Nature

This second figuration can be usefully summarized as a question of what, ontologically, is at stake, and how, ethically, practices be ordered in response to such stakes. The question does not center on the nature and moral status of the embryo, although the question of the embryo certainly appear as an element in this figuration. Rather, the question centers on the “nature” of what it means to be human, or “truly human” (as Kass has consistently put it), and the extent to which biotechnology generally, and hES cell research specifically, supports or degrades the truly human. Put as a question: if the human is inherently dignified, what is the nature of that dignity such that, as stem cell research develops it can be evaluated as either coherent with or dangerous to that dignity? In order to respond to the question, obviously, one must suppose that the human is inherently dignified and that this dignity is susceptible to verification in such a way that biotechnological developments could be evaluated and aligned in view of it. Such a supposition of verifiability has been difficult for this figuration maintain.

In this figuration the ethical object is the “naturally given” nature of the human. “Naturally given” here means both “gifted” by nature and free from cultivation. Human nature as “naturally given” functions as an anchor point and relay point which integrates the other elements of which the figuration consists. Human nature (used by the President’s Council as more or less synonymous with human dignity) is that which is taken centrally to be at stake in biotechnology; it is that in relation to which moral understanding should be oriented and ethical interventions ordered. This figuration has two secondary objects: “biotechnology” and “liberal society.” These two are taken to be forces in response to which the question of human nature must be posed. This figuration is not concerned in the first place with the status of the embryo. This figuration is concerned with the question of the extent to which embryonic stem cell research, driven by the interests of “liberal society,” might degrade human nature and thereby compromise human dignity.

The most synthetic and concise formulation of the concerns at play in this figuration was offered by Kass at the inaugural meeting of the President’s Council. Kass reminded the members that the Council’s work would proceed by way of a core mandate: “fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance in developments in biomedical and behavioral science and technology.” The task was to bring things together in such a way as to discern the “fundamentally human” in biotechnical science. He also argued that bio- ethics conducted in a post-9/11 world should recognize “security” as the principle challenge of biotechnology. Something fundamental has been made insecure; and thus something fundamental must be secured: human nature. Ethics must take seriously not only the question of the extent to which biotechnology contributes to the enhancement of life medically, but whether or not biotechnology enriches us “humanly.” In Kass’ view, biotechnology risks being a tragic enterprise: in the name of one set of goods (e.g. freedom of inquiry, individualism, health), it may destroy other “truly human” goods, “the worth and defining features” of human life. How such a thing could even be conceivable depends entirely on how biotechnology, freedom, and human nature are figured. This is, of course, the work of the human protection figuration. The object is human nature; the stakes are whether or not biotechnology humanizes or dehumanizes.33

Mode of Veridiction: Verification

In his opening address, Kass proposed that the ethics of the PCBE consists of three inquiries. First, the Council should inquire into which features of human life are most worth defending. Second, it then must determine whether or not biotechnology threatens those features. And third, if those features are threatened, the Council must devise equipment for their protection. The first of these three inquiries is determinative of the other two. In the course of the PCBE’s work (at least under Kass’ chairmanship) this first inquiry established the veridictional mode for the Council’s subsequent efforts.

The Council’s work operates according to a verificational mode of veridiction, a mode that the Council takes to be appropriate to the objects and developments of the biological sciences. This means that unlike the mode taken up by the Vatican, the findings of the biological sciences are not positioned relative to prior philosophical principles. The fact that the Council takes its mode of reasoning to be appropriate to the biosciences can be obscured by much of the rhetoric mobilized within this figuration. In the Council’s early work they frequently articulated fear of a Brave New World, the fear that overly technologized approaches to problems of human wellbeing drive toward a future in which human nature will be traded for technological gain, as well as a feat of playing God, the fear that technological interventions are an expression of hubris, which will precipitate destructive reactions on the part of nature. In any case, bioscientific truth claims are taken to form part of the register of true and false within which the Council’s claims about the defining and worthy features of human life are produced.

Following our diagnostic, recall that as a mode of veridiction verification takes as significant and worthwhile only those truth claims “which can be verified through the reduction of particulars to predictable regularities or patterns.” Verification is characteristic of the modern human sciences, and frequently the biological sciences. Verification has two aspects, a hermeneutic aspect and a positivist aspect. First verification means “to substantiate,” to make into cases; this is the hermeneutic aspect. Second verification means to “prove the truth of something”; this is the positivist side. Truth claims in a mode of verification thus require “incessant movement between an attempt to verify truth claims through facts on the one hand, and through generalization or theory on the other.”

The Council’s inquiry into the defining and worthy features of human life is conducted through this shift from particulars to patterns of regularity. At least one of their major publications devotes considerable energy to the task of verifying “human nature” as an ethical object through a hermeneutic and positivist movement. If the attempt fails—and to a large part of the Council’s critics it does—this is in part because a verificational mode usually operates within an ever-receding horizon in which the incessant movement between, and adjustment of, accumulated facts and general theories never ends. By contrast, in the figure of human protection, the movement stops when the defining features of the “truly human” are taken to be verified. Nonetheless, the particularities and patterns of “human nature” are articulated in a verificationalist mode, and such a mode is deployed as a source of standards for ethical practice.

Metric: The “Truly Human”

Of the possible verificational claims that might be made about human nature, only those qualify for the figure of human protection that can be ordered and aligned with a specific metric: the truly human. The truly human is both a given and an obligation. It is a given in that it is that which is most “naturally” human. It is an obligation in that those forms of life should be avoided in which “we cease to be ourselves.” As the Council puts it, “there is something precious in our given human nature.”34

As a metric, the truly human is closely related to dignity or human dignity. In fact, it could be argued that dignity is the metric of this figuration, both in that the features which count as “truly human” for the Council coincide with their definition of dignity, and in that this figuration forms part of the broader contemporary problematization of human dignity. However, the “truly human” is distinct from the metric of dignity as we developed it in our diagnostic in at least one crucial respect. Dignity, as a metric in much twentieth century political and ethical thought, is characterized by a declamatory mode of veridiction. Dignity is neither demonstrated, nor is it verified. Rather, it is taken as immanent and self-referential. The figure of human protection, however, attempts to substantiate and verify the truth of human dignity, the truly human.

The “truly human” is thus the standard by which verificational claims are selected and ordered. Only those speech acts that can be verified and that bear on the question of the truth of human nature are taken seriously. Of the elements that are specified, associated, and connected by “truly human” as a metric, two are particularly important. The first concerns what the President’s Council refers to as “finitude” or “limitation.” The second concerns “freedom” or “striving.”35

The Council orients its verification of the truly human with what it takes to be an anthropological constant: every human life is marked by certain limitations; each life is the way it is and not some other way. Some of life’s limitations can be adjusted or even overcome. Teaching, learning, practice, and training represent techniques that humans have long used to deal with limitations. Some limitations, however, appear to be “fixed.” These fixed limitations are those that are “naturally given”: bodies suffer injuries, contract diseases, wear out and die; capacities are limited, humans fall short of ideals despite cultivation; humans experience depression and anxiety, loneliness, even despair. As Kass has put it, “Nature is fallible and her works are imperfect. Human beings are no exceptions; our bodies decay and perish and our powers are limited.”36 Limits should be respected.

But the Council rightly asks: “Why should natural limits be respected?” Two responses are given. First, nature, though “fallible and imperfect,” is also highly complex and delicately balanced, the result of “eons of gradual and exacting evolution.”37 Intervention risks triggering dangerous unintended consequences. Second and more significant, biotechnical interventions risk a temptation to what the Council refers to as “hyper-agency.” Hyper-agency is described as the “Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and to satisfy our desires.”38 This aspiration constitutes a “false understanding of” and an “improper disposition toward” the naturally given world, a failure to acknowledge the goodness and giftedness of the world. True understanding and proper disposition consists of the recognition that nature is not fully ours to master, but a gift to be accepted and served with “reverent awe.”

The Council recognizes that its appeal to the goodness of “natural gifts” may be unpersuasive. Nature’s “gifts” are frequently undesirable—disease, predation, suffering. And where nature’s gifts are more desirable—health, physical coordination, metabolic stability—the “distribution” of those gifts appears unequal. Some “naturally given” human limits, it would seem, ought to be opposed by human innovation. Certainly the Council does not think all striving to overcome disease and suffering should be curtailed. The question is: “Which natural limits are good and which ones are not?”

The Council suggests that in order to answer this questions we need to look not to the limits of nature generally, but to those limits characteristic of given human nature. Only if there is a given human nature, the PCB argues, a “given humanness, that is also good and worth respecting, either as we find it or as it could be perfected without ceasing to be itself, will the ‘given’ serve as a positive guide for choosing what to alter and what to leave alone.” So is there a given human nature? Yes, suggests the Council, it is “limitation.” Which limitations? Those on which human goods depend. A key to the Council’s position is that limitations serve as the condition for the possibility of the greatest goods of life. Our greatest achievements in life consist in our striving for excellence. Our age and disease-prone bodies limit our life span, thereby encouraging us to form deep attachments and to pursue “the best things in human life.” We strive for happiness and joy, according to the Council, because we know pain and loss.39 The goods of life are inseparably tied to limitations.

It follows, then, for the Council, that if human nature is characterized by limitations, it is equally characterized by “deep dissatisfaction” with those limits and a drive to overcome them. The Council writes that humans have “extraordinary powers, unique among the earth’s creatures, to shape our environment and even ourselves according to our wills.”40 This capacity allows us to alter the human estate, relieve suffering, guard against the violence of non-human nature, and so on. However, according to the Council, this impulse toward transcending limitation tends toward the desire for perfection. Our capacity for freedom becomes a tragic flaw built into our very constitution. Whereas limitations are “naturally given” and thereby good, the drive to overcome these limitations is described by the Council as a “native human desire,” a native desire in tension with the “wisdom” of nature. This rhetorical shift from nature to native is significant. The desire to overcome limitation can push us to self-destruction.

Humans are finite. Yet humans dream of perfection. Desire to change limitations becomes a drive to escape all limits. This drive to relieve ourselves of our own finitude is nothing less than our desire to relieve ourselves of our own humanity. In the Council’s words, not only do we strive to “kill the creature made in God’s image,” but we seek to “remake ourselves after images of our own devising.”41 The conditions for the possibility of dehumanization are built into our very nature.

In sum, truly human life is one in which limitations are balanced against the drive to overcome these limitations. “Full human flourishing” involves recognizing that the human is a creature whose “limitations are the source of its—our—loftiest aspirations, whose weaknesses are the source of its—our—keenest attachments.”42 This claim is central to the kinds of evaluations of biotechnology that can be made within this figuration. It is also crucial, as I will discuss below, to the modes of intervention that the Council recommends. Limitations are good, insofar as without them humans would not aspire to “lofty” things. Likewise, weaknesses are good insofar as they are the condition for the necessity of forming the “keenest” attachments. Forms of life that cultivate and maintain a balance of limitations and striving can be described as truly human, and thus as humanizing. By contrast, the suppression, disruption, or elimination of either limitation or freedom—the throwing out of balance the relationships between them—would constitute a violation of the truly human and thus would be dehumanizing.

Two notes need to be added here on the nature of “biotechnology” and “liberal society” in relation to the metric of the truly human. First, if the goods of human life are found in balancing naturally given limits against the desire to transcend those limits, contemporary science risks destroying those goods by upsetting that balance. On the Council’s account, humans have always been marked by an impulse toward perfectionism. For most of human history, the techniques by which this impulse could make itself felt were limited to “indirect” means of self-transformation: “Until only yesterday, teaching and learning or practice and training exhausted the alternatives for acquiring human excellence, perfecting our natural gifts through our own efforts. But perhaps no longer: biotechnology may be able to do nature one better, even to the point of requiring less teaching, training, or practice to permit an improved nature to shine forth.”43 Through “direct” intervention, advancing biotechnology gives us an increasing capacity to overcome limitations that in the past would have seemed inescapably “given.” This capacity not only inflames our appetite to transcend our limitations, it gives us the ability to do so. Such is the Council’s concern: biotechnology appears to give us the ability to tip the scales of human nature in favor of freedom over finitude. In doing so, the Council worries, we may sever the necessary connection between limitations and goods and thereby destroy our own humanity.

A second note concerns what the Council refers to as “liberal society.” Biotechnology stands in an ambiguous relationship with “liberal society.” On the one hand biotechnology appears to cohere with the ideals of liberalism, providing opportunity for the exercise and expansion of individual liberties. On the other hand, biotechnology risks contributing to a “Tragedy of the Commons,” a leveling effect wherein the forces of “popular culture” bring about a set of practices that cater only to the most common desires. Through the medium of aggregate pressure, individual desires are shaped, until “uncoerced” private choices produce homogenization. If biotechnology is transformed such that common desires are seen as basic needs which one is entitled to fulfill, the benefits gained by any one individual become outweighed by the aggregate harm of common debasement.

How this all applies to hES cell research has been most forcefully articulated by Kass himself. As Kass explains it, all research on embryos is potentially dangerous. Kass understands sexual reproduction to be a quintessential verification of the tensions characteristic of the “truly human.” In sexual reproduction, Kass argues, humans both long to transcend themselves in union with another and also demonstrate their own finitude in that the continuity of the species can only be accomplished by passing life on to another generation. The embryo, in some sense, is thus the production and embodiment of human finitude and striving. Any “society” which is willing to sacrifice the life of the embryo, at the scale of a platform technology, for the sake of medical advance, is a society characterized by a willingness to violate the truly human.44

Ontological Mode: The Archonic

The “truly human” as part of the figuration of human nature protection is characterized by an archonic mode of ontology. The term archonic combines the Greek arche and archon. Arche means “beginning,” “origin,” or “first principle.” Archon means “ruler” or “governor.” Taken together, the archonic refers an ontological mode in which the origin of a thing governs its present and future. In this figuration, the archonic characterizes the way in which the “naturally given” elements of the truly human exist and are taken up. Given the distinction I introduced between the genetic and the archonic, I want to underscore the element of “first principle” in the meaning of archonic. The archonic as I am using it here is an ontological mode in which an unchanging ideal, or essential principle, of being governs the significance and true form of the elements in a figure.

The figure of human protection does not involve the unfolding of a potentiality. The nature of truly human life is figured by the PCBE as a basically unchanging way of being. The balance of limitation and striving may be precarious, but it is nevertheless a first principle of who the human is and must continue to be. For this reason, the fact that biotechnology increases capacities means that biotechnology also intensifies the danger of dehumanization. To inflect slightly the quote used above to define the genetic mode of ontology, the PCBE’s figuration of embryonic stem cell research is characterized by an archonic ontology in which the present and future are determined and delimited by a natural order of things. All fresh initiative, novelty, or creativeness that moves beyond the “naturally given,” are effectively banned as dangerous and potentially dehumanizing.

Mode of Jurisdiction: Protection

The Council asks: “Does our ability to flourish as human beings depend on our ability to improve the human form or function? Or might the contrary be true: does our flourishing depend on accepting—even celebrating—our natural limitations?”45 When human nature as an ethical object is figured through verification, aligned by the truly human as a metric, and characterized by an archonic mode of ontology, a specific mode of jurisdiction can be taken as necessary and even urgent: protection.

Protection, as a mode of jurisdiction, specifies that the activities appropriate to the ordering of embryonic stem cell research are those that function to vigilantly guard against biotechnological practices that, in the name of amelioration or freedom, might, through compounded effects, tip the human toward a non-human future. Given that the truly human is archonic and thus cannot be cultivated per se (though it can compromised or lost) practices that would upset the balance of limitation and striving must be blocked. Insofar as embryonic stem cell research is taken to indicate a willingness to instrumentalize nascent human life in the name of increasing other goods, and insofar as such instrumentalization might easily be made widespread in a liberal society, hES cell research is taken as dangerous. Stem cell research does not contribute to humanizing work of balancing limitations and striving.

Ethical Object: Persons

This figuration, like the others, can be usefully summarized as a question of what, ontologically, is at stake, and how, ethically, practices should be ordered. The question is: to what extent does embryonic stem cell research in its current and future forms contribute to or degrade human abundance or flourishing? In order to respond to the question, obviously, one must suppose that the terms of human flourishing are susceptible to being distinguished and specified, that human flourishing is such that it can be ameliorated or degraded, and that embryonic stem cell research is such that it can affect such amelioration or degradation. The ontological-ethical question is: to what extent is stem cell research likely to enrich the lives of persons whose opportunities for abundance have been affected by degenerative disease and what should be done in light of this?

The ethical object in this figuration is persons whose opportunities for abundance have been affected, directly or indirectly, by degenerative diseases. The terms abundance, degenerative diseases, and persons have quite specific and integrally connected meanings in this figuration of hES cell research, which I will attend to. As the anchor point for this figuration, persons function as a relay point through which the other elements of the figuration are integrated.

How it is that the term person is defined by this figuration, and how the relation of degenerative disease and abundance is framed, requires specification. Recall that an object is not just a thing in the world, per se. Rather, an object is produced, in part, by the fashioning of the elements at work in the figuration. Elements are aspects of things—events, actors, discourses, etc.—that are specified, associated, coordinated, and connected according to a given metric. It follows that the terms “person” and “degenerative disease” do not refer to things in the world, per se, though they cannot be dissociated from such things. Rather, together they constitute an object that is produced, in part, by the way in which the elements are composed. That is to say, of all the things in the world that could be specified and connected as elements within the figure of future abundance, only specific elements qualify. These elements contribute to the fashioning of the figuration’s anchor point.

The term person is freighted with a long and contested history of meanings. In the case of this third figuration, two relevant aspects are relevant. The first aspect is drawn from recent efforts to rework Kantian suppositions about persons as autonomous subjects. This reworking asserts that personhood is produced through the dynamic interaction, individuation, and participation within a social-cultural venue. Personhood is thus not a property attached to the capacity for reasoning, although the fostering of such capacities might be an aim of the work of personalization. Personhood, rather, is a form of life produced through the vector of individuation and participation within a social-cultural venue.47 One example of this rethinking of personhood is Ted Peters’ reconsideration of Paul Tillich’s definition of persons. In this example, the vector of individuation and participation must be fostered as a responsibility of ethical subjectivity. Tillich expressed this responsibility in the Christian notion of caritas. Caritas demands that those who are otherwise excluded from the dynamics of personalization—i.e., excluded from the processes of individuation and participation—must be included and thereby cared for. Such responsibility for individuation and participation thus requires work on one’s own subjectivity as part of the dynamic of working on and caring for persons.

The second relevant aspect of the term person is connected to the first. The venues within which the productive dynamics of individuation and participation take form are connected to and constituted by an ethos. Ethos, like personhood, is a complex term. Two aspects, which have been highlighted in Paul Rabinow’s work, are relevant here. First, ethos refers both to a “place of habits” or “an accustomed or cultivated venue.” Second, ethos refers to “ethical competence” or “capable ethical practices.” Taken together, ethos is “a space of practice at the interface of ethics and a cultural venue.”48 Persons are produced in a space at the interface of ethics and a cultural venue. Thus, in addition to work on and care for the self and others, the fostering of personhood requires work on and care for an ethical venue.

As with the term “person,” a word needs to be offered about the term “degenerative disease” and its relation to the notion of abundance in this figuration. I note here that the metric at work in a figuration of medical benefits is abundant or flourishing life, which will be examined in a moment. A significant aspect of an ethos is that it is a space of practice within which difficulties and blockages can be identified as problems. That is to say, as the interface of ethics and a venue, ethos informs the way in which problematic situations are specified as concrete problems, and thus made available to intervention. This means that the concrete terms of what does, and what does not, constitute an abundant or flourishing life are, in part, informed by an ethos. Conversely, this also means that an ethos is a space of practice in which the concrete terms of what blocks or facilitates an abundant form of life are also determined.

The figuration of future abundance forms part of, and is constituted by, an ethos wherein degenerative diseases are taken to constitute a problem relative to the notion of an abundant life. Degenerative, after all, denotes a trajectory of deterioration. Put another way, in this figuration degenerative diseases are taken to negatively affect opportunities for flourishing. No doubt, such a determination could also be made in other spaces of ethical practice. And it is certainly the case that many with degenerative diseases live abundant lives despite or even in consonance with their medical situation. The determination that degenerative disease is a problem relative to abundance, however, is figured in light of the hope of regenerative medicine through stem cell research. In relation to stem cell research, degenerative diseases can be conceived not only as conditions susceptible to therapeutic retardation or management, but amenable to amelioration and possible eradication. A persistent and often overlooked challenge of the figuration of future abundance is to specify the conditions under which hES cell research can be made part of an abundant life.

In sum, persons whose opportunities for abundance are affected by degenerative disease constitute the ethical object of the figure of future abundance. Such persons are the anchor point, functioning to integrate the other elements of the figuration. Given this, those who elaborate this figuration often raise the question of the moral culpability of others attempting to block stem cell research; such impediment constitutes a failure to take persons affected by degenerative disease as a principle object of ethical concern.

It bears noting that the question of how stem cell research might contribute to the abundance of persons affected by degenerative disease is open. It is not at all obvious that mere medical intervention would constitute an abundant life, as others have pointed out. The concrete terms of how such abundance might be realized cannot be known in advance, though a vision of an abundant future certainly can be anticipated. This means that for those working with this figuration, the terms of abundance cannot be settled in either a universal or relativistic manner. Rather, the terms of abundance can only be specified and worked on under specific arrangements. In short, the ethical practices called for in this figuration consist, in part, of the formulation of what Peters, working from Ricoeur, refers to as middle axioms: sites of conceptual mediation.

Mode of Veridiction: Reconstruction

In our diagnostic, we propose that, within particular emergent zones, the biosciences, the human sciences, and ethics are beginning to operate together in a reconstructive mode of veridiction. Reconstruction is the mode of veridiction at work in the future abundance figuration.

Reconstruction, following the diagnostic, has a specific technical meaning, similar to that put forward by John Dewey. Dewey wrote: “Reconstruction can be nothing less than the work of developing, of forming, of producing (in the literal sense of that word) the intellectual instrumentalities which will progressively direct inquiry into the deeply and inclusively human—that is to say moral—facts of the present scene and situation.”49 The conception of the relation of thinking, ethics, and a scene or situation put forward by Dewey here indicates a metric or standard by which veridiction (“intellectual instrumentalities”) is ordered. Such a metric entails a specific ethical mode and temporality. In Dewey the ethical mode is indicated as “the deeply and inclusively human” and the temporality is “the present.” However, as I will show, other ethics and temporalities can equally interface with a reconstructive mode.

Quoting from the diagnostic, we can say that reconstruction, in a figuration of hES cell research, distinguishes a mode of veridiction in which those speech acts are taken to count in the register of true and false that can be “put to the test in problematic, experimental, and pragmatic situations and subsequently can be reused in reworked form.” What is crucial about this mode is that the factors which condition and constitute these situations as problematic, experimental, and pragmatic are more than technical or bioscientific, per se, although such technical expertise is included. Rather, these situations are constituted by complex extra-scientific problems, problems taken by researchers, investors, ethicists, or other participants in bioscientific enterprises to be of primary significance. In other words, the parameters that define what counts as a serious speech act in this mode of veridiction are constituted by an ethos. As such, it is reasonable to conclude that a reconstructive mode of veridiction is appropriate to the ethical object in play in the figure of future abundance.

Again, following the diagnostic: reconstructive thinking operates within a problem-space in which work on the problem-space depends not only on an understanding of prior conditions and results, but equally on an orientation to the near future. Indeed, as will be discussed below, the near future constitutes a principal site of ethical work. In addition, within this figuration, the problem-space within which thinking takes place is also oriented by an anticipated eschatological future, although it bears underscoring that such an eschatological orientation may not be characteristic of a reconstructive mode of veridiction in other figures. An eschatological orientation is a key element of this figuration in part because the figuration has been articulated through both Christian and Jewish moral theologies. The role of the eschatological, however, is complex, and does not consist of a simple appeal to familiar biblical or secular views of history. In any case, the point here is that the orientation of thinking in the figure of future abundance requires more than technical virtuosity, verifications of nature, or demonstration of first principles. Rather, orientation requires a mode of veridiction in which the technical and the ethical are brought together, interfaced, and synthesized in view of the recent past and near future. Such a view provides an ordering insofar as it is structured by a specific metric, which, in the case of the figure of medical benefits, is a metric of abundance.

Metric: Abundance

Claims of an imminent medical revolution accompanied announcements of the successful derivation of human embryonic stem cells. On one level the claims were not surprising or unfamiliar, as they have formed part of other announcements of biotechnical breakthroughs. Given these claims about the promise of regenerative medicine, one might suppose that only those reconstructive speech acts would qualify for the future abundance figuration that could be ordered by a metric of medical therapeutics. The therapeutic potential of stem cell research, of course, is a prominent element within this figuration. Medical therapeutics, however, is not the metric, and the spokespersons for the revolution of regenerative medicine do not determine the terms of this figuration. If anything, these spokespersons have contributed to the embryo protection figuration, in so far as they have operated in a largely reactive mode, countering claims about the inherent dignity of the embryo with arguments favoring developmentalist theories of the embryo’s worth.

As I have already noted, in this third figuration the metric is abundance, or abundant life. This metric is often connected to other terms such as flourishing and wholeness. I am focusing on abundance because it appears explicitly in the variation of the figuration I will be considering below. Abundance designates the standard by which reconstructive speech acts within this figuration are ordered. This standard operates within a specific ethos. It bears repeating what was explained above, namely that, concretely speaking, the terms of abundance are neither universal, nor are they relativistic. Although, in the figuration of human abundance, what counts as abundance is, in fact, connected to, and to a certain extent oriented by, universals. (It is also the case, as I will explain, that universals are oriented to the concrete terms of abundance.) This means that, within this figure, the conditions of abundance must be specified in a form that is amenable to intervention and amelioration under concrete arrangements.

In this figuration, the metric of abundance applies in the first place to the amelioration of degenerative diseases. Abundance, however, does not simply consist of technical therapeutic advance, though such advances are clearly vital to this figuration. Rather, abundance is a metric that takes up degenerative diseases and interventions into them as part of a broader concern for and commitment to both an anticipated far-future of wholeness on the one hand, and a near-future of ameliorated flourishing on the other. The intricate relation between these two temporalities, as they’ve been connected in this figuration, will be spelled out in more detail below when the question of ontological mode is considered.

Abundance functions as a metric of the future abundance figuration in the work of Peters, Lebacqz, and Bennett. This draws on New Testament notions of future abundance and interfaces them with developments in stem cell research. Peters et al cite several New Testament passages which assert that “God intends ‘abundance’ or ‘fullness’ of life for all.” Johannine passages are given particular attention. As mentioned above, John 3:16, for example, is often translated using the phrase “eternal life.” Peters et al argue that it would be better translated “abundant life,” a translation that emphasizes fullness of life within a historical and not just extra-historical register. Such an emphasis operates in the figuration of future abundance to select out and connect those aspects of things that potentially contribute to the amelioration of degenerative diseases as one means of actualizing future abundance. As Peters et al put it: “If science in the form of regenerative medical research can give expression to our compassion for those who suffer and can serve human well-being and flourishing, then it ought to do so.”50

Abundant life in this figuration has an eschatological dimension. Topically speaking, eschatology is that aspect of philosophy or theology which deals with ultimate or final things. Thematically, eschatology concerns such matters as the fulfillment of things, notions of wholeness or completion, and the sunnum bonum or the highest good. The eschatological aspect of abundance in this figuration of stem cell research has two aspects. The first aspect is temporal, but not historical. Eschatological wholeness stands as a kind of permanent future horizon, which functions as a point of critical judgment on present conditions and as a reorienting norm. As a critical horizon, the eschatological throws into relief a spectrum of differences between the abundant and the degraded. Framing the eschatological in ethical-political terms, Peters writes, “the future kingdom of God” functions to remind us of present “limits and responsibilities.”51 Working in connection with the critical and orienting vision of a future wholeness, present degeneration is framed as unacceptable. “The biomedical sciences become a means by which one strives to realize that future vision during the present era.”52

The eschatological aspect of abundance has a second aspect. Where the first is temporal, this aspect is, more strictly speaking, historical. Following Wolfhart Pannenberg, Peters argues that the eschatological wholeness anticipated in Christian theology is nothing other than the wholeness, completion, or full abundance of the concrete arrangements of history. Peters suggests that this transformation of the concrete flux of history is entailed in the biblical concept of New Creation. Ontologically and ethically, such an argument brings into view a nonlinear and a mutually determinative pathway between the future and the present. If the eschatological future is renewal of the concrete arrangements of history, and if this history is contingent and emergent (as Peters argues), then the form and significance of a perfected or completed future is directly dependent on the form of the present. Ethical practice that consists of intervention into, and reformation of, the present bears on the form of the eschaton. On the other hand, if the eschatological future constitutes the wholeness and integration of an otherwise fragmented history, and if it is the case that such an integrated whole will be definitive of the elements that make that whole, then the eschaton also functions as a point of ontological signification for the present. What things truly are in the present is what they will be in an abundant future.

It bears mentioning that eschatology in this figuration, though at base biblical, is taken up in a way that adjusts the biblical precedence. In the case of both Protestant and Jewish thinkers, for example, the theological notion of eschatology is taken up as an ethical mandate. Eschatology as ethics has resonance with a kind of modern eschatology of human achievement, although unlike many modern philosophies of history, such an ethic does not postulate that an eschaton will be actualized through human achievement.53 In any case, this way of figuring and of using eschatology in connection to stem cell research both is, and is not, otherworldly. It is not otherworldly in that such figuring makes reference to no other world than the concrete arrangements of history. It is otherworldly, however, in that it calls for work on the concrete arrangements of history such that, where appropriate according to the metric of abundance, the world is made to be other than it is. It follows that a principle ethical challenge is to both work on the present such that it is oriented to an abundant future, and to find ways of making the abundant future a constitutive part of the present.

In the future abundance figuration, this retroactive ontology, as it were, is taken up as normative. Abundance as a metric designates which aspects of things count as significant and of concern. For those whose lives are affected by degenerative diseases, the diseases and their affects count as significant. Degenerative disease, however, is not definitive. Rather, persons affected by degenerative diseases are defined according to a possible future abundance, and cared for in the name of such a future. It is important to note that, according to this figuration, the form of such a future is constituted by work done in the present. Such work, in turn, must be continually recalibrated and the demands of the metric of abundance reassessed.

Such a figuration of embryonic stem cell research could not be appropriately characterized by a genetic or an archonic mode of ontology. Abundance, as understood here, is not characterized by pre- given or fixed forms, by pre-given or fixed ends. Rather, the terms of abundance are emergent.

Ontological Mode: Emergence

The logic and form of the future abundance figuration as developed by Peters et al includes and draws on Peters’ previous work on “proleptic ethics.” Proleptic ethics, in turn, is the correlative of Peters’ conception of eschatology as retroactive ontology. As such, the mode of ontology that works to connect and consolidate the ensemble elements of the figure of medical benefits is complex and non-obvious. It is complex in that it involves relations among multiple elements; it is non-obvious in that it constructs unfamiliar and unexpected pathways.

Recall that in figuration as a way of establishing connections, the temporal aspect of the mode of ontology is crucial to the way in which the elements are integrated. Given the emphasis on the eschatological in Peters’ ethic, it would seem to follow that the elements in the medical benefits figuration would be connected up in part by an eschatological temporality. This is true, but only in a very specific sense. Abundance in Peters’ ethic is characterized by and oriented to a future abundance. That abundance, however, is conceived as proleptically present.

Peters’ ethic not only emphasizes future wholeness; it also emphasizes the contingent and open character of history. The concrete arrangements and forms of history can be characterized, in his words, as “new, as self-organizing, as opening up new paths and rendering possible new choices, as creating freedom for the future, and in a very real sense as breaking the bondage of the past and its fixed predeterminations.”54 This contingency and openness have significant implications for the kinds of problem-spaces within which ethical work is conducted and the kinds of conceptual tools one needs to conduct ethical work. Given that situations are concrete, specific, contingent, and sometimes new, ethical equipment must be designed to make concrete solutions available to concrete problems. Such equipment cannot be based on “some immutable set of precepts or rules. Because of the continuing creation, the rules must change too.”55

The site of ethical work that Peters’ describes, and which functions as the concrete site of work within the human abundance figuration, can accurately be characterized as the contemporary. As described in the orientation to our diagnostic, the conception of the contemporary has been developed by Paul Rabinow for inquiry into emergent and contingent problem-spaces, such as the figurations of stem cell research. Rabinow reminds us that in familiar usage the contemporary has two meanings. The first is: “existing at the same time as something else.” This first meaning is less significant for an analysis of figuration. Temporal coincidence does not connect elements as a single figure; at most it makes them available for connection. The second meaning is “distinctively modern in style.” This second meaning carries both temporal and historical connotations that are useful for connecting the contemporary to, and distinguishing it from, the modern. Rabinow argues that the modern is not just a period but an ethos, an ethos which pairs tradition and modernity as a moving ratio. Similarly, the contemporary can be thought of not just as a period but as an ethos as well. As an ethos, the contemporary is a moving ratio of the recent past and the near future.56 The ethical work-space for the future abundance figuration is not, in fact, eschatological. Rather, the temporality is the contemporary. In the name of opening up the possibility of future abundance in response to degenerative diseases, the recent past needs to be analyzed and diagnosed such that the near future can be remedied.

If the temporality ethical work-space of the future abundance framework is the contemporary, it is the contemporary constituted in such a way that it incorporates the eschatological. Peters writes that his ethical mode “begins with the future and works back to the present… begins with eschatology and works back to ethics.”57 If the future here is eschatological and the work-space of ethics is the contemporary, we can ask: how are these two connected such that they both function as part of the same figuration? The answer is twofold. The first concerns a mode of ontology. The second concerns a method. The mode of ontology is emergence. The method is prolepsis.

The term emergence designates an ensemble of elements composed of both old and new elements and their interactions. While some of these elements are familiar, the specific form of the composition, its function and its significance, can only be determined when it emerges and thus cannot be reduced to prior states or relations. The elements certainly play a constraining role. However, emergence characterizes a way in which ensembles exist and are taken up such that the history of the significance of the ensemble can only be sufficiently specified retroactively. For this reason, an emergent mode of ontology can be made to cohere with and is correlative of both the eschatological (as understood in this figuration) and the contemporary.

As a concept in the future abundance figuration, prolepsis designates a method of establishing a relation between a possible future and the recent past such that the possible future is made actual in and to the present. In Peters’ theology and ethics, the concept of prolepsis as a way of establishing relations is central. In the first place, the concept is used to describe the resurrection of Jesus. By way of bodily resurrection, Jesus constitutes a breaking in of a future reality in the present world. This is signified by the fact that such a resurrection could not have been caused by a prior set of conditions. In this figuration of stem cell research, the concept of prolepsis is taken up in a more general way to designate the way in which through ethical practice an anticipated future is made present. The anticipated future is connected to the contemporary as a defining and orienting element within present arrangements. Although the concrete terms of abundance can only be formulated as part of a given situation and a given ethos, one of the normative factors of such an ethos for this figuration is the possibility of an abundant and flourishing future.

Mode of Jurisdiction: Remediation

A mode of jurisdiction functions to discriminate what kind of activities are appropriate to the ethical ordering of an object, and functions as the basis for the organization of such. The ethical object in the medical benefits figuration is the person whose life is degraded by degenerative diseases. The kind of truth claims by which this object is understood are reconstructive—capable of operating within problematic and pragmatic parameters set by an ethos. Of these truth claims, those qualify for the figure of medical benefits that can contribute to abundance, not as genetic unfolding or an archonic essence, but as emergent. Given all this, the kind of jurisdictional activities appropriate to the future abundance figuration are neither those that defend nor those that protect. Rather, they are those that contribute to abundance by working to produce its conditions of actuality. Remediation as a mode of jurisdiction functions to discriminate and organize such activities.

If the remediation means both a change of medium and to make things better, the question is: what changes of medium and what remedies are called for within the future abundance figuration? In terms of a change of medium, the anticipated future must be taken up and constituted in such a way that it can become a functional and orienting part of a contemporary ethos. That is to say, the mediating work of prolepsis must be undertaken. In terms of remedy, present conditions that affect persons with degenerative diseases must be worked over and ameliorated according to the metric of abundance. The site for both this mediatory and remedying work is the near future. In the figure of future abundance, the challenge is to render the near future as a site of ethical work in which such remediation can become possible.

Conceptually, such remediatory work requires something like Peters’ notion of middle axioms. An axiom is a speech act that is taken to be true. The speech acts needed for remediation in the future abundance figuration are not only those that are consonant with an abundant future, but also pragmatically useful under the problematic and experimental conditions of an ethos. Such consonant and pragmatic conceptual renderings might be thought of as mediating conceptions—concepts that facilitate the work of mediation.

Such concepts cannot be constituted by a fixed or pre-given form. If they were, they would neither be appropriate to the emergent nor would they be useful in the work of remedying. These conceptions must be dynamic and adjustable, calibrated to actual conditions under which the terms of abundance can be concretely specified. This means that they must be produced through incessant interaction with, and reworking of, the problem-space within which an ethical object is situated. Put substantively, in this third figuration of stem cell research, forms of abundant life must be produced through ongoing technical work on degenerative diseases, the careful work of personalizing those whose lives can be made more abundant by such work, and through work on oneself and on an ethos as factors contributing to the form of the near future. Needless to say, such remediation could never be ordered according to a programmed genetic unfolding or by appeal to a fixed archon.

Note: Figural Variation

Multiple Jewish thinkers and organizations have produced variations of the future abundance figuration. Given the significance of these variations in contemporary discourse, a short note is in order. While there is obviously no unified authority mandated to speak for the entire tradition, Jewish thinkers have widely agreed that the most critical consideration when responding to biomedical research generally, stem cell research in particular, is the duty to heal. In a joint statement, Rabbis of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America and the Rabbinical Council of America write, “The Torah commands us to treat and cure the ill and to defeat disease wherever possible; to do this is to be the Creator’s partner in safeguarding the created.”58 Two principles are crucial. The first is the principle of pikuach nefesh, the moral obligation to save human life whenever possible. This obligation is binding to the point that “Even biblical law is superseded by the duty to save lives, except for the three cardinal sins of adultery, idolatry, and murder.”59 The second principle is tikkun olam—the responsibility to join God in repairing and transforming an incomplete or broken world. Given that stem cell research might constitute one means of repairing the world, to not pursue the research is itself taken to be ethically suspect.