Perhaps because we live in a time when rights are the most favored vocabularies in negotiating issues and constructing institutions, at least in the West, it is easy to miss limits on the powers of rights to do any of the things expected in their use. There are two such limits. In the simplest sense rights can conflict with each other. But rights, like all terms, also require a set of conditions within which they are intelligible (have a coherent sense and reference), outside of which they are not. These are limits of scope, not those resulting from conflicts among rights all of which are valid. The complex phenomena presented in bioethics are perhaps the most vivid demonstrations of limits in scope. In this paper I argue that rights vocabularies do not refer successfully to inchoate forms of life and that attempts to assign rights to human embryos create a false conflict between the rights of embryonic life and the human rights of sentient life to secure the benefits of stem cell research. In these areas the epistemic dominance of human rights shifts the playing field. The source of moral guidance in stem cell research is the set of needs in the human community, arguable the oldest moral map in history. This map is adequately delineated in the language of human rights. I conclude that stem cell research should proceed in order to provide the spectacular benefits to humanity that the scientific community anticipates.

Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University

Fred M. Frohock, Ph.D. is a professor of political science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Frohock has academic concentrations in political philosophy, law and bioethics. He is the author of nine books including Public Reason: Mediated Authority in the Liberal State, Special Care: Medical Decisions at the Beginning of Life, Healing Powers: Alternative Medicine, Spiritual Communities, and the State, and Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies .