Human Dignity and Bioethics

98 | Alfonso Gómez-Lobo
is strictly totipotent. There is no gradualism here of the sort found in
the emergence of a new species nor a process analogous to the “coming
of age.” The empirical evidence shows that the gametes cease to
exist and a zygote, the first stage in a new organism, begins to exist
within a short period of time.
There is much more in the embryology literature that could be
quoted, but this suffices to make Plato’s good butcher happy: here we
have uncovered an arthron, an “articulation” or “joint,” that allows
him to make an elegant cut.
What this entails for the defense of values that deserve the respect
of all is this: no scientific progress is sufficient to make us abandon
the rational moral conviction that it would be wrong intentionally
to kill an innocent adult human being. If we reject dualism as part
of the old myths and accept the basic, commonsense conviction that
we are unified human animals, then we should accept that as long as
we are alive we are the same being, 4 and if an adult is endowed with
dignity then it follows that he or she also was endowed with dignity
in earlier phases of his or her life, back to the beginning. I submit
that this conception of the acknowledgement of dignity deserves the
respect of all because in principle no human being is excluded.
Notes
1
From Dennett’s essay in this volume, p. 40.
2
Phaedrus 265e.
3
Cf. Neil A. Campbell and Jane B. Reece, Biology, 6th ed. (San Francisco, California:
Benjamin Cummings, 2002); William J. Larsen, Essentials of Human Embryology
(New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1998); Keith L. Moore and Trivedi V. N.
Persaud, Before We Were Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects, 6th ed.
(Philadelphia: Saunders, 2003).
4
Some people reject the trans-temporal identity of an adult and the zygote he
or she once was on the basis of the possibility of twinning. A critique of this view
is offered in Gregor Damschen, Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, and Dieter Schoenecker,
“Sixteen days? A reply to B. Smith and B. Brogaard on the beginning of human
individuals,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (2006): 165-175.