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13 Cambridge Q. Healthcare Ethics 283 (2004)
Response to "The Creation Lottery" by Julian Savulescu and John Harris (CQ Vol 13, No 1): The Creation Lottery and Method in Bioethics: A Comment on Savulescu and Harris

handle is hein.journals/cqhe13 and id is 290 raw text is: Responses and Dialogue Response to The Creation Savulescu and John Harris Lottery (CQ Vol by Julian 13, No 1) The Creation Lottery and Method in Bioethics: A Com- ment on Savulescu and Harris Soren Holm I am in general a great admirer of the work of Savulescu and Harris (S&H), not because I think their conclusions are often right but because they state these conclusions and their arguments very clearly. In their joint paper The Creation Lottery, they do, neverthe- less, tendentiously overstate their case both with regard to the conclusions that flow from identifying natural reproduction as a creation lottery (CL) and in seeing their exchange1 as an example of good method in bioethics. In the following short comment I want to point to some of the problematic areas in S&H's arguments. The structure of the argument that S&H put forward is ostensibly based on granting the embryo rightist the premise that killing embryos is wrong and then showing that even with this premise certain liberal conclusions fol- low concerning IVF, embryo experi- mentation, and cloning.2 The purpose is to convince, or perhaps just to embar- rass, the opponents. From S&H's other writings we know that they only grant this premise for the sake of argument. They do not believe that embryos have any moral status and find nothing in- herently wrong in creating and destroy- ing embryos. Outside this particular argument, they therefore have other, and in their view more direct and better,3 arguments for the same, or very similar, liberal conclusions. It is important to note that the suc- cess of S&H's argument will have different effects with regard to two different kinds of embryo rightists that S&H do not distinguish between in their paper. For the embryo rightist who holds that it is never right to kill embryos, that the value of embryos can never be traded against any other moral considerations, and that the life of one embryo cannot be traded off the life of another embryo-let us call him or her the absolute embryo rightist-S&H's argument is devastat- ing if it goes through, because it shows that even the absolute embryo rightist accepts trade-offs involving embryos in natural reproduction. For the nonabsolute embryo rightist who holds that the lives of embryos have value but that this value is not always overriding or absolute, the effects of S&H's argument are much less serious. To use an analogy, that I accept war and the loss of human life in a case where the enemy is bent on enslaving my whole community does not show that I do not hold human Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2004), 13, 283-287. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 2004 Cambridge University Press 0963-1801/04 $16.00

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