First thoughts on the "burning lab" objection to Christian life ethics

(NB This is not, and doesn't claim to be, an exhaustive discussion of this issue, merely some notes towards a response. Also - I've used 'Christian life ethics' here to describe the orthodox and historical Christian moral teaching about early human life, i.e. that it is inviolable. I'm aware some modern Christians don't hold to that teaching but they are wrong to have abandoned it and I'm not willing to include incessant qualifications to accommodate their wrongness.) 

A few weeks ago I had a short exchange with someone on Twitter about a thought experiment employed by opponents of the Christian idea that early human embryos should be regarded as inviolable. A building is burning down. Inside the building is an IVF laboratory where there are five human embryos. In another room a baby is trapped. You have enough time to rescue either the baby or the embryos. Which do you choose?

Most people, including most adherents to Christian life ethics, say that they would rescue the baby. “Aha!” says the interlocutor, “that means you don’t really believe that an embryo and a baby are equally valuable!”

This is a neat little trick, and I’ve seen Christians struggle to respond to it more than once. They appear to be caught in a trap; choose the embryos, and you appear cold and clinical, willing to condemn a baby to an awful death to uphold an abstract ideal. Choose the baby, and you appear to be conceding that embryos aren’t really equally valuable as babies after all.

It has a kind of superficial persuasiveness, in that it appears to pitch pro-lifers’ moral intuitions against their professed principles. But “appears” is the key word here. The trap is apparent, not real, because the thought experiment only strikes a blow against Christian life ethics if it is actually true that rescuing the baby rather than the embryos is indefensible in Christian life ethics. But it isn’t. 

Rescuing the baby is entirely defensible granting the Christian premise that all human lives should be inviolate from the moment of their creation. There are a number of ways of thinking about the dilemma that illuminate why this is the case (I leave to one side for now the point that if it were up to Christians, those embryos frozen in a lab would not exist in the first place).

Firstly, we need to reflect on the exact nature of the moral choice that is being forced upon us in this situation. We are confronted not with a good choice and a bad choice, but with a choice between evils, one of which we must choose. In the burning lab we are ameliorating fatal damage which cannot be avoided, in a situation which has been forced upon us. So in our assessment of the damage to be avoided, we necessarily and reasonably consider factors like the amount of suffering which would be caused by, or during, death by the fire. 

A baby already has relationships; it has entered into a very important component of humanity – that is to say, it has begun to know and be known. Christian ethics does not require us to say that all human beings are always fully and equally partaking in every possible aspect of a fulfilled human life. Christians are permitted to recognise that some losses of human life are more tragic than others, and permitted to take this into account when choosing between two evils. This does not entail any diminution of the absolute rule against destruction of early human life in a situation where we have the option not to destroy any life at all.  

Our argument is not that a baby is no more important, and no closer to the fulfilment of its human nature, than an embryo, but rather that the intentional destruction of a human embryo is wrong. The baby is more fully human in an important sense, but it does not follow from this that the embryos lack any of the intrinsic value attaching to human life such that it is permissible to intentionally destroy them in another scenario. 

Think of it this way: most people would also rescue a baby from a burning building ahead of three handcuffed convicts, in a situation where there is desperate danger and limited time; that does not mean that in a different scenario they would agree that the convicts ought to be killed. 

The key here is that there are different forms of moral obligation. In terms of the demands it makes on us and the requirements of particular situations, the negative moral obligation “Do not kill” is not identical with the positive moral obligation “Do all you can to keep people alive”. The burning lab scenario is a test of comparative positive moral obligations; whereas, “are abortion or embryo research permissible?” is about absolute negative moral obligations – what must we not do to humans under any circumstances.

Our positive moral obligations to a baby can exceed those to embryos without affecting our negative moral obligations towards embryos (for clarity, by positive moral obligations I mean the set of things which morality requires us to do – to rescue people, for example – as distinct from negative obligations, the set of things which we are required not to do – murder, theft, etc).

The comparison between the choice over which human being(s) to rescue in a desperate situation, and the choice of whether or not to destroy a human being, in abortion or embryo research, simply doesn’t bear the weight that the sceptic of the internal logic of the Christian position needs it to bear. 

It also ignores the fact that for Christians the opposition to the destruction of early human life is not simply rooted in moral calculation about the rights borne by the destroyed entities. We also believe that certain actions, through their inherent viciousness, have a bad effect on the person who performs them. Unjust destruction of life is one such action. A rescue, even an incomplete rescue, is not. 

Now you may not be a virtue theorist, you may think Christians are mistaken that part of the impermissibility of vicious actions lies in their being damaging to the actor who takes them; but that is not the point here, since we are not considering the question of whether Christian life ethics are correct, but whether they are internally coherent in light of the difficulties of the “burning lab” thought experiment.