When did con­ser­v­a­tives become moral rel­a­tivists? It was always a pet­ty slan­der when they placed that label on lib­er­als, but it seems so odd that the tor­ture debate of the last month result­ed in such unam­bigu­ous moral rel­a­tivism from staunch conservatives.

For instance, Pat­teri­co respond­ed to peo­ple’s qualms about tor­ture by writ­ing “Admit­ting any ambi­gu­i­ty kills the sweet, sweet high of self-right­eous­ness.” And liked the line so much that he repeat­ed it. Repeat­ed it in the course of offer­ing a cir­cum­stance which he claims makes tor­ture acceptable.

Of course, the beef is that TORTURE IS WRONG. There is no ambi­gu­i­ty. Tor­ture is wrong, and it does­n’t mat­ter what name you give it, and it does­n’t mat­ter whether there’s a tick­ing bomb. The rea­son we are fight­ing al Qae­da – the rea­son that even skep­tics of mil­i­tary force did­n’t raise a ruckus about invad­ing Afghanistan and hunt­ing al Qae­da down wher­ev­er else it hides – is that they engage in activ­i­ties like tor­ture which are sim­ply and objec­tive­ly wrong. When we lose our focus on sim­ple moral truths, we lose a pow­er­ful tool in the fight against al Qae­da. (Tor­ture is wrong even if you accept Pat­teri­co’s wishy-washy moral rel­a­tivism, as Sebas­t­ian points out.)

This has prac­ti­cal con­se­quences. Sudan and Myan­mar (née Bur­ma) have used inci­dents like Abu Ghraib and Repub­li­can moral rel­a­tivism on tor­ture to jus­ti­fy their own geno­ci­dal actions. Our abil­i­ty to get oth­er coun­tries not to tor­ture (some­thing that even con­ser­v­a­tives agree is a good thing) is ham­pered by the hip­py-dip­py moral rel­a­tivism of the President.

The same rel­a­tivism is on dis­play in dis­cus­sions of stem cells. Last week’s announce­ment of a new way of pro­duc­ing embry­on­ic stem cells could only be seen as resolv­ing a moral conun­drum if the under­ly­ing moral issue is hope­less­ly trivial.

Pro­po­nents of stem cell research point­ed out that con­duct­ing research on a blas­tu­la which would oth­er­wise be destroyed could save lives, and that sav­ing lives is a Good Thing™. Anti-sci­ence activists, includ­ing the Pres­i­dent, replied that destroy­ing embryos for research was bad (unless they were destroyed before some arbi­trary dead­line, in which case it was no problem). 

Then sci­en­tists found that using a virus to insert cer­tain genes into fore­skin cells seem to turn those cells into the func­tion­al equiv­a­lent of those from a blas­tu­la. In order to be func­tion­al­ly equiv­a­lent, they would have to be capa­ble of being grown into a func­tion­al human being (if not, then there are dif­fer­ences between these cells and actu­al embry­on­ic stem cells, and this tech­nique could not sup­plant exist­ing means of deriv­ing stem cell lines). 

Thus, anti-research con­ser­v­a­tives are claim­ing some moral dis­tinc­tion between cells with no dif­fer­ence in their abil­i­ty to pro­duce an inde­pen­dent human being (sim­i­lar cells derived from mice have been grown into embry­on­ic mice; the same exper­i­ment would be uneth­i­cal if con­duct­ed with human cells, and was­n’t attempt­ed). There is only one moral dis­tinc­tion I can iden­ti­fy between these cells and stem cells derived by any oth­er means: these cells don’t work as well or do as much, plus they have a ten­den­cy to turn can­cer­ous. At best, we can assume that the moral objec­tion raised by anti-researchers is to the ini­tial destruc­tion of an embryo. Were that the case though, we should have expect­ed a ban on fed­er­al fund­ing for that spe­cif­ic process, with no objec­tion to the sub­se­quent use of any stem cells so cre­at­ed (or a ban on cells so pro­duced regard­less of when the embryo was destroyed). As a com­pro­mise, the Bush pol­i­cy nev­er had moral coher­ence, and this lat­est dis­cov­ery only empha­sizes the under­ly­ing moral relativism.