He may be right... but

Yuval Levin writes in today's Washington Post:

What you think of [Obama's] policy depends on what you think of the moral status of embryos. If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections, government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems. But if you think an embryo is not quite a person, or that its immaturity or inability to suffer pain or its other qualities mean that destroying an embryo does not amount to taking a life, the promise of stem cell science might well outweigh any doubts.

Mr Levin is begging the question in the classic, petitio principi, sense of the phrase. Did you catch it?If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, he writes. But that's not what modern biology says. If it were, the human race would have to be in sackcloth and ashes permanently, for the thousands of "human lives" lost to early miscarriages on a daily (well, maybe weekly) basis, most of which were not even suspected by their "mothers". Conception creates a possibility of a human life, not a human life. To argue otherwise is a hell of first step down the slippery slope to monthly checkups of all fertile women and forced child-bearing. Over the top? No further than Levin's statement, just in the other direction.

Levin's article is condemning the "technocratic temptation" and calling for politics to weigh the "questions of priorities and worldviews, just like other difficult policy judgments". In the end, he says, "politics ought to govern, with science merely its handmaiden. Science is a glorious thing, but it is no substitute for wisdom, prudence or democracy," he says. He may be right, in that science tells if we can, not if we should, do something. But on this topic, his mind is already - and obviously - made up.

On the overall thesis, he'd be more believable if he argued less unfairly on the specific points.