Volume 10, Issue 2, Summer 2010
Responses to Dignitas personae - Part II of II
Lawrence Masek
Pages 257-264
On Some Proposals for Producing Human Stem Cells
The author argues that an action is morally wrong if any of its steps serves no purpose apart from preventing the existence of a human being. This principle entails that contraception and some proposed techniques for altered nuclear transfer are morally wrong, but it does not preclude producing stem cells through parthenogenesis. His argument depends on the premise that human life always is a good, including human life produced through immoral actions. The immoral action, not the life caused by the action, is the evil that should be prevented. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.2 (Summer 2010): 257–264.