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An adaptation of Martin Luther's morning prayer. Let us pray. I give thanks unto you, Heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, your dear Son, that you have protected us through the night from all danger and harm. And we beseech you to preserve and keep us this day also from all sin and evil.

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that in all our thoughts, words, and deeds we may serve and please you. Into your hands we commend our bodies and souls and all that is ours. Let your holy angel have charge concerning us, that the wicked one have no power over us. Through Christ our Lord, amen.

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It's my privilege to welcome you to the third and final lecture of Professor James Childress from University of Virginia, the medical school, and Professor of Religious Studies. The title of his lecture this morning is as follows, Religion, Bioethics, and Public Policy: Resolving Conflicts in a Democracy. Professor Childress, thank you very much.

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Marsha and I would like to take the opportunity, this last lecture, to thank the Austin Seminary community, faculty, administrators, staff, students, for their warm hospitality during these days. And I would also like to thank those of you who have attended the lectures and who have been attentive during the lectures as well for your participation and particularly for the opportunity we had yesterday in the conversation period and the informal times to discuss these issues. So thank you very much.

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What is the proper role, if any, for religious convictions in the formulation of bioethical public policy in a society such as ours, which is a liberal, pluralistic democracy? Now, this question arises in at least two contexts. First, it may arise when adherents to a particular religious tradition claim exemption from some legally mandated conduct, such as providing conventional medical care to children. For instance, a Jehovah's Witness parent may refuse a blood transfusion on behalf of his or her child, even though that transfusion appears to be necessary to save that child's life.

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It may also arise when there's a religious objection, for example, by some Native Americans or Orthodox Jews, to the application of the legal standards of brain death. And there are many other examples as well, where adherence to a particular religious community claim exemption from legal duties. And that's an important context, but the context I'm going to focus on involves a different question, and that is, When we're trying, as a society, to formulate public policy involving some of these bioethical questions, what role should religious convictions play in the content and direction of those policies?

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Now, in addressing this second question, what role, if any, religious conviction should have in shaping public policy, I want to focus on a controversy, or two controversies. One about cloning human beings, a controversy that erupted in late February 1997 after the announcement of the birth of Dolly, a cloned sheep, a birth that occurred several months before. And the controversy about human embryonic stem cell research, controversy over the last two years that developed after some researchers discovered that they could isolate stem cells from fetal tissue following deliberate abortions, or from embryos left over following in vitro fertilization, and could use those stem cells, perhaps, to develop various treatments, cellular treatments that could help people with various diseases.

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I've had a longstanding interest in this question about what role religious convictions should play in thinking about public policy. These experiences on the National Biosis Advisory Commission, a commission on which I serve, a commission that was asked to look into these two questions, those experiences have now sharpened some of my thoughts about this question, though what I have to say is still in process. I would also note that my comments about technological developments are certainly borne out in this particular area, too. The National Bias Advisory Commission first met just over four years ago in October 1996, and we were asked...

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to look into 18 members coming from various professional and disciplinary backgrounds, were asked to look into issues dealing with the use and application of genetic information and research involving human subjects. So we were at work on those topics when these two developments occurred at different times. And so we had to stop what we were doing and address those. Those are two major developments.

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in a four-year period. And that, I think, is only the beginning of what we can expect over the next few decades. And the question I'm sort of back of what I'm addressing today is how we as a society can be prepared to address those questions and the role of religious communities and moral discourse in preparing us to do so. Now, the debate about appropriate public policies toward human cloning and toward

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And I'll use a shorthand expression, stem cell research, but I'm really focusing there on human research and involving tissue from fetuses or embryos. I think the debates, both within NVAC, and that's the abbreviation I'll use for the National Bias Advisory Commission, and the society at large, offer us one way to examine the role of religious convictions, how they might contribute to the formation of public policy in our kind of society. I'm not going to address constitutional questions. They're important.

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I'm rather going to focus on social ethics or public morality of speaking in and listening to religious voices in public reasoning about public policies. Now, the reflections I'm going to offer in part grow out of my experience on the National Bias Advisory Commission or NBAC, but I don't profess to speak for the Commission. Indeed, it would be impossible to do so. After we issued our cloning report in 1997 and had to respond to some critics, we discovered that as a matter of fact, we as commissioners did not agree on why we had said what we said.

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And that if some viewed some reasons as primary and others as secondary, and others thought, no, that's just not the way we went about it. You can often come to an agreement about a policy or recommendation about a policy, without having full agreement about the reasons for the recommendation. Now, in our cloning report, we recommended that our society continue the moratorium on the use of federal funds in research related to cloning humans to create children and continuing the call for a voluntary moratorium in the private arena.

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But we went beyond that, and we recommended that federal legislation be passed to prohibit, and the technical jargon here is somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning to create children. So when I say cloning, that's what I'm referring to. That's the technique that Ian Wilmot and his colleagues used to create Dolly.

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Now we rested our argument to a great extent, again, with differences in views among the commissioners about exactly what extent, but to a great extent on the following argument. We said, At this time, it is morally unacceptable for anyone to attempt to create a child using this cloning technique, because current scientific information indicates that this technique is not safe to use in humans at this time. Why?

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Well, Dolly was the only birth out of 277 attempts, and the only one out of 28 that reached the blastocyst stage to end up in live birth. And there are various kinds of reasons to worry about the mutations, for example, that may be accumulated in aging cells that then may, in the process of cloning, be passed on to the offspring so created, perhaps leading to cancer and other diseases. Now, some of the critics of our report said that we really copped out. We were a bioethics commission, and there we were basing our argument on scientific conclusions

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and premises rather than on ethical issues and principles. Now, I think that charge is misdirected. I think it represents an inadequate understanding of ethics. Because what we did was reach a conclusion that it's unethical to proceed with attempts to clone human beings at this time because of an ethical obligation not to harm or

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impose undue risk of harm on children, children who will be brought into the world. Now, that's an ethical argument. It recognizes an obligation not to harm children who are being brought into the world. And it builds on scientific evidence about the risk involved.

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But it is an ethical argument. Any activity that creates a substantial risk of harm to children is morally problematic. But now, these safety issues aren't going to endure forever. Indeed, progress has already been made.

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made in the few years since Dolly was cloned. And so it's important for the society to address other ethical issues that arise from the prospect of human cloning, such as the impact, psychosocial impact, on children brought in the world this way, the impact on the family, et cetera. And those issues require thoughtful, careful, imaginative reflection over time so that we can really respond appropriately to human cloning if and when the techniques appear to be safe.

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So we recommended prohibition of three to five years, sunset clause that would look at this again, and continuing public deliberation. We tried to sketch out some of the issues relating to the psychosocial effects and the like, but we did not attempt to resolve them. That's something that really requires public deliberation. Now a word about the content of the other report that we issued in September 1999 on stem cell research.

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We concluded that it would be ethically justifiable for the federal government to fund the derivation and use of stem cells from fetal tissue after deliberate abortions, as long as there were important safeguards that would separate the decision to abort from a decision to donate fetal tissue. And similarly, the use of embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, again, assuming certain kinds of safeguards that would make sure that pregnant women are not choosing to abort, in part because of the possibility of this research, or that couples aren't choosing to destroy leftover embryos, in part because of the possibility of the research. So we recommended certain kinds of barriers. Now, I'm not going to focus on

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the arguments for or the conclusions about those policy recommendations. What I want to focus on is the way religious convictions did play a role in the recommendations that we came up with and to reflect on what role religious convictions should play in those debates, similar debates that will occur over time. Now, when President Clinton asked INBAC to examine the ethical and other issues surrounding the possibility of cloning human beings, he commented as follows.

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Any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry. It is a matter of morality and spirituality as well. And shortly after that, when we had our first meeting on the topic of cloning, we began with, obviously, the scientific issues involved in efforts to clone, and then turned to religious and philosophical perspectives.

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Well, why religious perspectives? Some were surprised that INBAC, a presidentially appointed commission, and thus a quasi-public body, solicited religious perspectives along with the customary philosophical and secular perspectives. we recognize that public policy in the U.S. cannot be based purely on religious considerations.

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That the reasons we would have to offer for any recommendations we made could not and should not be religious. But we believe that it was very important to listen to religious voices, along with philosophical ones, in the process of analyzing and assessing moral arguments. Now, in two places in our report on cloning, we listed several different reasons in slightly different language for attending to religious perspectives. And let me just give you those and then come back and develop a few of them more systematically.

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We said, Religious perspectives influence and shape the moral views of many U.S. citizens, and religious teachings over the centuries have provided an important source of ideas and inspiration. And I might note parenthetically, That it's certainly true if you look at a discussion of cloning, for instance, that theological discourse from a few decades ago is much richer than anything that's occurred in philosophical discourse.

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Policymakers should understand and show respect for diverse moral ideas regarding the acceptability of cloning of human beings in this new manner. Often, religious ideas can be stated forcefully in terms understandable and persuasive to all persons. irrespective of specific religious beliefs. INBAC wanted to determine whether various religious traditions, despite their distinctive sources of authority and argumentation, reach similar conclusions about this type of human cloning, since the convergence among them, as well as among secular traditions, would be instructive for public policy.

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We also said all voices should be welcome to the conversation. And finally, a range of moral views needs to be considered in determining the feasibility and the social cost of different policies, which might be affected, for example, by... vigorous moral opposition. So those were several reasons given in the report for why, to the surprise of many, we were attending to religious perspectives.

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Now, I want to develop more systematically four reasons that build on some of the ones we presented in the report, along with some others that did not appear. And the basic clusters, four clusters of ideas I want to deal with are the following. The first has to do with the role of emotion and imagination in reasoning about public policy. The second has to do with an overlapping consensus and the significance of that in public policy, even when people are coming from very different backgrounds, including different religious backgrounds.

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Third, I want to think about some of the issues that arise when we are looking at debates about public policy in particular contexts. the context I'm obviously focusing on, is our particular democracy. So not talking about democracy in general, but our particular democracy with a past, a history, a set of traditions, and so forth. And then finally, I want to raise the question about how we test our religious views when they're presented in debates about public policy, because as I will argue, even

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Though religious views-- or just because religious views need to be considered in the context of public policy, we also have to ask how we test them. Because just as they should not be excluded, so they should not be privileged. But then, how do we conduct discourse about religious convictions in public policy? So those are the four clusters of ideas.

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First, then, emotion and imaginative deliberation. When Dolly made human cloning a realistic prospect, passionate outcries were heard everywhere, repugnant, offensive, revolting. Even in Wilmot, Dolly's creator, found the prospect of cloning humans offensive. According to one analysis of Inbak's work, analysis appeared in the Washington Post, Inbak, for what everyone does understand, the sources of this repugnance and revulsion

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and so turned to religious traditions in order to understand the repugnance. So we started with religion, so the report indicated. But I think that greatly oversimplifies why religious perspectives were important to us and why they should be important. It's certainly true that some religious spokespersons responded passionately, emotionally, in condemning human cloning, and their response is,

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in part, explains some of the public response. But religious perspectives not only help to explain emotional and passionate responses. In public discourse, they may inform and instruct emotions and passions. Let me give an example that Martha Minow, a Harvard Law professor, presents.

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In reflecting on the Becker case in California several years ago, she notes that a trial court judge approved a couple's petition to become the legal guardians of a child with Down syndrome when the biological parents refused to authorize needed medical treatments, treatments that were considered necessary to save the child's life. She notes that Judge Fernandez granted their petition against the biological parents' objection. And the judge cited in a footnote the Holy Bible, 26, which I referred to yesterday in another setting.

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This tells the story of King Solomon's threat to cut a child in two when he couldn't determine which of two women who claimed to be the mother actually was the mother. She notes, Martha Minow notes, that this biblical story instructed the judge's emotions, as the judge noted. And it offered a way for him to reflect on his own anguish as a decision maker in a most difficult case. Now, the biblical story or stories of creation in Genesis, which I referred to also, may have functioned in a similar way for some commissioners on NBAC, even if they were themselves personally, in Max Weber's language, religiously unmusical.

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And even though religious thinkers used those passages, the same passages, to reach quite different conclusions. And of particular importance in the discussion of the possibility of cloning is, of course, the passage in Genesis 1:27-28 about God's creation of human beings in His image. Now, such stories, whether they are religious or secular stories, may also be important in public imagination as part of public reasoning closely connected with the emotions. I think many who are critical of religious perspectives and voices in public reasoning about public policy tend to work with what I would call a very rationalistic view of the way we think about public policy.

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They tend to suppose that we have a set of shared premises, and then we rationally deduce a conclusion about what ought to be done from those premises. That's not the way it works. Public reasoning is much more complicated than that and has, I think, a very important place for the imagination.

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Now, let me give you an example from Inback's deliberations. One INBAC member, and this was reported again in the Washington Post, reported that she had been especially moved by theologian Gilbert Mylander's description of children as a gift, which I also referred to in discussion of reproductive technologies. But this is now in reference to his presentation before INBAC of a theological perspective on human cloning. His description of children as a gift came in the context of his discussion of the biblical story of creation.

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And it also came in the context of his distinction, drawing explicitly on the Nicene Creed, between begetting and making. Now, those are heady religious concepts for public discourse about human cloning. As I remember our conversation when I called Gil to invite him on behalf of NBAC to testify, he asked me whether his theological approach would be appropriate. And I assured him that it would.

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That's what we wanted to hear. But then some individual commissioners asked Mylander and others to translate their theological views into secular language. With one commissioner wondering whether it was really necessary to express principled views, such as a distinction between making babies and begetting them, in such religious language.

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Couldn't that be stated in secular terms? Well, if public reasoning involves imagination, and not only some rational deduction from shared secular premises, then religious stories, as well as secular stories, and theological concepts, as well as philosophical ones, may enable us to imagine and reimagine in ways that are fruitful for public policy. And here I would just mention Martha Nisbound's book on poetic justice, where she shows how the use of Dickens can be quite important, for example, in thinking about cost-benefit analysis and public policy. What are the, in our context, what does human cloning mean?

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What are the potential negative and positive effects? How are we to understand human embryonic stem cell research and its significance? How are we to think about the status of the frozen embryo.

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So rather than excluding religious views, we should consider them on their own terms to see what we might learn from them. They may yield insights, and they may do so through a process of imagination and re-imagination, enabling us, for example, to see from different perspectives the technology for cloning humans or the extracorporeal embryo, the embryo existing outside in a freezer, for example, as a possible source of stem cells. And this revisioning may be important for public policy, even if, in the end, the policymakers or advisors reject the positions that the religious stories and concepts support or shape or justify their policy recommendations on secular grounds.

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It's also important to note that religious This kind of reasoning, in terms of public imagination, may occur even when religious positions diverge, maybe perhaps especially when religious positions diverge, as they did in much of the testimony we heard on cloning, but especially the testimony on the use of embryos left over after in vitro fertilization for stem cell research. Now, in concluding this first cluster of ideas, I would just note that many of us on the commission wanted to hear religious positions on their own terms, in part, again, because they might help us imagine or reimagine.

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And yet we also wanted to learn whether there might be secular equivalents. Now, if we ask theologians whether there might be secular equivalents, this does not, I think, impose an unfair burden on religious thinkers and traditions. Listening fairly and attentively to religious positions in their own integrity does not preclude also seeking to determine whether there are secular equivalents or whether translation

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might be possible. But it doesn't mean that we should put the full burden of translation on those who are speaking, though we should certainly invite them to participate in that. But it may be important for those who are hearing these views to try to think through, in an imaginative way, what kinds of secular equivalents there might be. The second cluster of ideas really involves a number of facets of an overlapping consensus.

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Religious communities and traditions often present moral positions and arguments that are not merely or exclusively religious in nature. Their conclusions may rest on premises that are not religious or not specifically religious or not purely religious, even if they fit within a larger religious framework. For example, if we say that cloning is wrong and in doing so we appeal to nature, to basic human values, to family values, those are all categories that may not be reducible to particular faith commitments, and that may be accessible in a conversation to citizens of different or no faith commitments.

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Some may even serve as a kind of shared set of mid-range values that cut across different traditions. I mean, I think a good example appears in the presumptive moral requirement not to do harm, one that we appeal to in our recommendation that there be a federal prohibition ban on efforts to clone human beings for at least a set period of time. In any particular religious tradition, that presumption, which appears in all the traditions, is obviously connected to particular theological views.

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But it has some meaning and significance in conversation that may not be reducible to those views. And it provides a basis for holding that human cloning is wrong and should be severely restricted or even prohibited, at least for the time being, because of the potential harm to children so created. Now, any particular religious tradition is obviously going to have a much richer conception of harm that's involved in a principle or a presumption that we do no harm.

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But there may be enough of an overlap, again, to make the conversation possible and to lead to certain conclusions. Lisa Cahill wrote a piece after this NBAC discussion, and she had been a participant in our discussion about cloning, and she said that those Christian ethicists who hold that we can only identify scattered moral fragments of past traditions in our society simply overlook the fact, the fact of intercultural and interreligious understanding and social cooperation, however halting or partial or ambivalent. And she says that fact challenges the claim that universal human experiences, values, and virtues are simply illusory.

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And one of the examples she gives is the way in which a consensus emerged in INBAC's recommendations that there be a ban, at least for a certain period of time, of human cloning. And this was reached after fairly inclusive hearings and debates, listening to representatives from various religious communities and political traditions. Well, even if that example in her discussion may be pressed too far, Still, it does point to the way.