Prenates, Postmorts, and Bell-Curve Dignity

摘要

Scientists should feel free to keep blood flowing and systems operating so that the "neomort," in Willard Gaylihs term, can be a training ground for surgery, test subject for drugs, source of transplantable organs, incubator of antibodies, and surrogate womb for prenates. The state's highest court, in an opinion by Judge (and future Supreme Court Justice) Benjamin Cardozo, ordered "the searching scrutiny of a trial," which would consider all pertinent factors, including the wishes of each decedent, dieir religious devotion, dieir relationship to the survivor, and the rules of the church. A Cardozo-like balancing test would probably permit the use of stem cells in medical research intended to prolong lives and reduce suffering, but bar their use for, in Leon Kass's gruesome hypothetical, concocting "a great delicacy, a 'human caviar.'" Likewise, the standard might respect the donor's wish to have her cadaver used in anatomy classes in medical schools, but not her wish to be plastinated and displayed for profitable entertainment, on the ground that even with fully informed consent, certain actions collide with human dignity.