Ramesh, I quoted your own line in your own text stating that moral certainty of a person making an argument exists in relation to the validity of the argument. I hardly see how quoting you is an act of caricature.

And I don’t quite know what you mean when you say that say that public opinion running, say, 40 percent against a thing should be taken into account when a policy is bruited about. Such a fact goes without saying, because our system is a representative one.

The way we make such decisions, in a representative republic-democracy, is through the votes of our elected officials. And they naturally take the views and feelings of their constituents into account. In that sense, of course public support is part and parcel of any serious legislative or executive decision-making.

But as you yourself say, a polling/PR approach really has no bearing on the intrinsic morality of the policy. And the deepest problem here is that this is a very hard case — and hard cases, as we know, make bad law. The stem-cell debate is a rare circumstance in which people can have genuine moral differences about how best to pursue the furtherance of and respect for life. (This is as opposed to abortion, where the moral argument against abortion is really only challenged by an instrumentalist-pragmatist-convenience argument.)

You take offense at the idea that I “insinuated” you haven’t talked to people who are for stem-cell research. I meant no offense, honestly. When I have spoken in favor of President Bush’s August 2001 compromise, I have nearly been assaulted on almost every occasion by someone who is sure a family member might have been saved or will be saved by the research that is not being done — and it seems to be that the argument you made, which suggested rightness has some relation to passionate feeling, could be made just as easily about such people.

Since you abjure that argument now, I won’t hold you to it. But better go back and read what you wrote, because I didn’t misquote you.

Of course it is the case, as you say, that “if the opponents of the policy are right that embryonic stem-cell research is an evil, then having the state encourage and subsidize it is an additional evil.” Btu then you go on to add that “to make people complicit in something they mistakenly think is an evil is not as bad as to make them complicit in something that is actually an evil.” And again, I can only ask you: Who is to make such a determination?

And I’m sorry, but you’re far too highbrow for me, Ramesh, when you write that “a full evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of subsidizing embryonic stem-cell research cannot prescind from the question of whether that research is morally licit.” I’m afraid I can’t argue with you about this because you lost me somewhere there in the five-dollar-word section.