‘And if it’s going to die, that little foetus, then it doesn’t matter to me at what stage.’(Patient on the use of foetal neural cells versus the use of embryonic stem cells)

This quote neatly captures a central difference between patients and non-affected respondentsin a focus group study of attitudes towards foetal neural cell research and therapy forParkinson’s disease. The patients of the study displayed a pragmatism verging on unconcernin the ethical issues concerning the foetus and its human status; this to a considerably higherdegree than the non-affected respondents, who, on the contrary, seemed quite preoccupied bysuch issues.Parkinson’s disease is a severe neurological disease with symptoms such as rigidity, slowmovement, tremors and sometimes depression and dementia. The aim of this essay is toinvestigate how patients with this disease and non-affected individuals reason about researchthat uses foetal neural cells. The focus is on their thoughts about what is ethically defensible inthe search for treatments for Parkinson’s disease.As such, it falls within the framework of focus group interviews conducted in Sweden as partof the EU project TRANSEURO (<http://www.transeuro.org.uk/>).1 One of the key findingsof the Swedish focus group study is that the participants’ ethical attitudes closely correlate totheir relation to the disease. This means that whether you are afflicted or in other respectsaffected by the disease or not will be highly relevant for your ethical stance. I will argue herethat individual circumstances also largely determine the motives and effects of ethicalreflection. I also elaborate on the role of gut feeling in ethics (see Lakoff & Johnson 1999;Lundin, this volume) and how it relates to what I would term anthropocentric concerns.Ulrich Beck’s concept of individual ethical reflexivity in late modernity (1992) serves herenot only as a theoretical point of departure, but also as a point of discussion itself. This latteris a consequence of the results of the study confirming some general trends that Beck pointsto, but also revising some of them in addressing the issue that individual reflexivity needs tobe related to one’s experiences of, in this case, Parkinson’s disease. My argument that one’srelation to the disease fundamentally affects one’s motives and effects of ethical reflectionserves to nuance the generalizability of Beck’s theory.