The Stem-Cell Slide: Be alert to the beginnings of evil.

I wish I could say that the president's speech to the nation on stem cells was as good as I had hoped. It was in many ways a wonderful speech: deeper and more philosophical than I have ever heard a president deliver, unusually balanced and fair in presenting opposing arguments, and clear in delineating both his own decision and the reasons for it. It was, in addition, heartfelt and compassionate toward all families who have members suffering from awful diseases or disabilities. I can even see how the president convinced himself, at the end, that he had found a ray of daylight through the opposing arguments, and arrived at a moral decision that seemed to him sound, and also politically defensible. During the last few months, I have heard many persons who think they are very smart lay out their arguments on this question. Not one of them did as thorough, many- sided, fair, and clear a job as President Bush did in his speech.

At the end, though, my heart sank. The president tried to maintain a position of principle, but what he ended up doing, despite his best effort, was giving away the principle. He put the Full Faith and Credit of the U.S. government behind the principle of using human beings as a means, albeit for noble ends. He offered a reason for doing this: The stem cells for whose use in experimentation he commits federal resources come from embryos already destroyed. Why not bring good out of evil, he argues, by now using these stem cells, which will otherwise be wasted, to search for cures for awful diseases? The outcome is not certain, but at least it's noble to try. This is a lovely and tempting thought. The problem is that when this source of stem cells runs out- soon-then those on the other side will demand more stem cells from more embryos. The demand for usable stem cells will swell enormously. This is particularly true if good experimental results are obtained. But it will even be true if they aren't: Look, partisans will say, you were too stingy, too narrow. You have ceded the principle, so now give up more of the specifics. The glittering utopia of science beckons just ahead.

Be alert to the beginnings of evil. It never comes under the appearance of evil, but always under the appearance of the beautiful, the promising, the idealistic, the pleasant. "Stop it in its beginnings," the ancient principle runs: the sooner, the easier.

Politically, the decision may play very well among a substantial majority. It is already clear that those on the left who you hope will attack it are attacking it, which will only reinforce those among right-to-lifers who accept the president's obvious good will, often deeply moving words, clearly articulated argument, and patent depth of feeling. But I deeply fear the immense battles that lie ahead, and the gathering of heartened foes, who will very quickly sniff out the weak point and pry its own inner logic with all their force. It will take almost superhuman strength now for the president to hold the new position he has moved into, having surrendered the strongest ground.

That ground was a philosophical one, not a theological one, a ground born of reason rather than of faith. One of its classic articulators was Immanuel Kant. The president himself alluded to it in his speech, in the line about not using human beings as means for even the noblest of ends. You must never use a human being as a means, only as an end. To use stem cells obtained by killing living human beings in their embryonic stage is still using them as a means. It is not enough to say that the wicked deed has already been done-that the embryos have already been killed. The purpose of that killing was to obtain the stem cells. One ought not to implicate oneself in that process, not even for the noblest and most beautiful ends.

One especially ought not to implicate the United States, which Hannah Arendt once called humankind's noblest experiment. For this nation began its embryonic existence by declaring that it held to a fundamental truth about a right to life endowed in us by our Creator. The whole world depends on our upholding that principle.

We human beings very easily reason ourselves into taking positions that end up having the most tragic of consequences, positions of which we would never have approved had we seen those consequences at the time. For the fruit of the tree of knowledge over yonder appears to be very sweet, and we feel sure that if we eat of it, then happy endings (fit for a god) will result. Those endings have always turned to sulphur in our cheeks.

The fatal mistake often comes as a result of unexamined moral sentiments: affects and feelings that serve as moral guideposts without submitting to interrogation by reason. "I feel comfortable with that," President Bush-like President Clinton, indeed like just about everybody else in this fair land-is wont to say. It is as if Americans were ashamed to say that they reached a considered intellectual judgment, independently of their feelings. "I feel comfortable with that" seems itself to be more comfortable than "That's what I've reasoned to."

And this should cause us great uneasiness, because very often in the moral life, our feelings and sentiments are horrible guides to right action. It sometimes feels like sheer Hell to have to do the right thing, and most terribly uncomfortable. For instance: When individuals in Nazi Europe made the personal decision to join the Resistance, they often did so feeling the most awful dread, sick in their stomachs about the prospect of being hunted out like animals, tortured, and killed in barbaric ways (on meat hooks, say). They could not afford to listen to their feelings. (Considerations of just this sort led Karol Wojtyla to abandon the philosophy of the moral sentiments he learned from Max Scheler, and to search for a philosophy that drove deeper to intellectual principle and a strong moral will.)

One thing this debate is showing the nation is the difference between those who can grasp, and be swayed by, intellectual principles and those who need warmer, fuzzier comforts for their senses, imaginations, and sentiments. Thus, when Senator Hatch finds it easier to imagine life in the womb than in a clump of cells in a petri dish, he is not wrong about what is occurring in his imagination and sentiments. But those means of perception do not dig deep enough into the what-IS-it? of those cells. To do that, cold intellect must go to work, beyond the comfort zone of imagination and sentiments.

And those cells are a living human being-at a very early stage, to be sure, but unmistakably human: not a rat, or a cocker spaniel, or a fish. That's precisely what makes them so desirable to researchers.

Desirable: There's a key word. It is transparent, now, how hungry researchers are to get their hands on these embryos. And perhaps on the money and the fame that beckon just ahead. As Mr. Dooley reminded us, when a fella says, 'tain't the money, it's the principle-it's the money. Suddenly, even great scientists are forgetting the basic biology still being taught in the latest textbooks: that the first appearance of human beings is in the fertilized egg turned embryo. Suddenly, scientists are fudging: "Well, really, the human being comes later." Let us show no respect for the human being in embryo, not now. Postpone respect until later-not for this class of human beings.

The role of desire is palpable. Researchers want this research. The political class wants this research. People are making themselves believe, without evidence, and despite many warning signs to the contrary, that there will be glitteringly good results from these experiments, and only good results. Desire is getting miles ahead of cool judgment. The extremely plausible horrors of the future are being systematically kept out of the imagination.

I have enormous sympathy for Christopher Reeve, and profoundly hope that, by some miracle of medicine or grace, he is suddenly healed. Yet I am also disappointed by how earnestly one whom I still think of as Superman wants to have other human beings killed, so that he might be cured. He has also plaintively mentioned that some who now don't want embryos destroyed never said a word on their behalf earlier. But in fact, some 15 years ago, the Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger took a lot of heat for their principled opposition to in vitro fertilization-that is, to the very techniques of "clumps of cells in a petri dish" and "cells in refrigerators," followed by the wanton destruction of faulty or unwanted embryos, that so many now deplore as less than human. Disagree with their moral conclusions, then or now, if your own mind leads you to. But do not say that they did not grasp, earlier than most, the intellectual principles that are now unfolding before our sentient eyes, and our recoiling imaginations, and our resistant sentiments. Do not say that everyone was silent.

We are testing a great political principle: whether a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people can form great public decisions through open public argument, reflection, and considered choice-or must forever form them by passion and bias and desire and emotional herding.

The president, though he stumbled in his moral reasoning, conceived and executed a shrewd enough political stroke to have temporarily disarmed his foes, won some time, and earned sufficient public standing to lead the nation through a great new era in our history. There was once, in the late 18th century, a "new science of politics" and, later, a "new science of economics," to both of which our Founders contributed their share of innovations. We are now engaged in learning a "new science of morals," or more exactly a new science of public moral argument.

This is the worthiest of tasks for a free society, because what is public freedom for, if not for well-argued and wise moral action? What is the point of political liberty and economic liberty, if we are to live like less-than-human animals?