LOVE AND STEM CELLS

In my ethics course we read a small book entitled Law, Love, and Language by Herbert McCabe. He provided interesting reflections on some of the limitations that are present in basing ethical decisions on love. Ethics as love seems like a great approach. Laws are inflexible unable to address the needs of particular situations. To make loving decisions is analogous to a great painting. There exist norms that need to be followed but the person who has mastered the art will know when to break the rules. McCabe using the metaphor of a painting illustrates two challenges to the use of love as a model for ethics. The first weakness is how one determines whether a painting is beautiful or ugly. When people use love as a model for ethics there are many difficulties in determining what exactly is a loving action. Furthermore, if there is no concrete correlation between love and behavior then the same act might be loving or it might not. One could never say anything about a person’s behavior as an indication of whether something was loving whether it was ethical. While love may be many things it cannot be anything. A related difficulty is the fact that love is an expanding word. As people mature they learn new facets of what it is to love, thus to know how to use the word is autobiographical. What may have at one time been thought to be loving may come to be recognized as not loving. Using the metaphor of the painting, another limitation for love to be the controlling factor in ethical decision making is determining the border. It is one thing to think about a loving act in reference to a face-to-face personal interaction, but human beings exist in larger contexts. If one only focuses on face-to-face interactions, one might miss the proverbial forest for the trees. One might love those who they have a personal face-to-face interaction with and yet be completely without love to wider societal problems. What happens when to be loving to the individual is to be oblivious to the wider societal problems? The decision about who to love becomes an arbitrary decision with this model. Why should a person be loving to one person as opposed to another? Who decides who is going to get hurt? People live in overlapping situations, love as an ethical model fails to give direction concerning how one should prioritize their ethical responsibilities. Ethics as love is not sufficient to sustain moral direction in the world of conflicting claims.