The ghost in the machine is the elephant in the room: souls, death, and harm at the end of life.

The idea that we human beings have souls that can continue to have conscious experiences after the deaths of our bodies is controversial in contemporary academic bioethics; this idea is obviously present whenever questions about harm at the end of life are discussed, but this idea is often ignored or avoided because it is more comfortable to do so. After briefly discussing certain types of experiences that lead some people to believe in souls that can survive the deaths of their bodies, I begin to answer the question, "If personal postmortem survival of some sort is real, then how should this alter the way we approach our bioethical discussions about death, the harm of death, and harming the dead?" The bioethics issues I briefly discuss in the remaining two sections are the debate about defining death and the decision whether to forego life-prolonging treatments.

Reproductive autonomy, the non-identity problem, and the non-person problem.

The Non-Identity Problem is the problem of explaining the apparent wrongness of a decision that does not harm people, especially since some of the people affected by the decision would not exist at all were it not for the decision. One approach to this problem, in the context of reproductive decisions, is to focus on wronging, rather than harming, one's offspring. But a Non-Person Problem emerges for any view that claims (1) that only persons can be wronged and (2) that the person-making properties allow for there to be human non-persons. Consider an individual human organism that is prevented from ever possessing the person-making properties. On person-only accounts of the victims of wronging, this organism cannot be wronged by anyone. Hence even individuals whose decisions prevent it from ever possessing the person-making properties cannot wrong it. But this is counter-intuitive. We can think of examples where a human organism is wronged by precisely those decisions that prevent it from possessing the person-making properties. The best solution to this problem, in the case where the person-making property is rational self-governance in pursuit of a meaningful life, is to adjust the concept of a person so that it refers, not merely to those with the immediate capacity for rational self-governance in pursuit of a meaningful life, but also to those with a higher-order capacity for such self-governance. Any solution to the Non-Identity Problem that focuses on wronging rather than harming should incorporate this sort of solution to the Non-Person Problem.

Not every cell is sacred: a reply to Charo.

Massimo Reichlin, in an earlier article in this journal, defended a version of the 'argument from potential' (AFP), which concludes that the human embryo should be protected from the moment of conception. But R. Alto Charo, in her essay entitled 'Every Cell is Sacred: Logical Consequences of the Argument from Potential in the Age of Cloning', claims that versions of the AFP like Reichlin's are vulnerable to a rather embarrassing problem: with the advent of human cloning, such versions of the AFP entail that every somatic cell in the human body ought to be protected. Since this entailment is clearly absurd, Charo argues, these versions of AFP should be rejected. I argue that the reasons Charo cites for believing in this entailment are inconclusive. For example, the four reasons she gives for doubting any differences between the nature of skin cells and zygotes are ultimately unconvincing. Against Charo, I maintain that there is a relevant distinction between the sort of potential possessed by the somatic cell and the sort of potential possessed by the early human embryo. Since only the latter sort of potential falls within the scope of the AFP, the alleged absurd entailment Charo invites us to consider is no entailment at all. Hence the AFP cannot be rejected on the grounds Charo advances. Even in an age of cloning, the claim that some cells are 'sacred' because of their potential does not entail the claim that every cell is sacred.

Human embryos in the original position?

Two different discussions in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice lead naturally to a rather conservative position on the moral status of the human embryo. When discussing paternalism, he claims that the parties in the original position would seek to protect themselves in case they end up as incapacitated or undeveloped human beings when the veil of ignorance is lifted. Since human embryos are examples of such beings, the parties in the original position would seek to protect themselves from their embryonic stages onward. When discussing the basis of equality, Rawls claims that the parties in the original position would guarantee basic rights for all those with the capacity to take part in this original position. To guarantee the basic rights of infants and young children, he goes on to interpret this capacity as a "potentiality that is ordinarily realized in due course." Since human embryos have this potentiality, they too should have basic rights.