Certainly. But utilitarian arguments are not intrinsically improper. Indeed, I would suggest that they are a necessity.
It is not a particularly easy task to draw a scientific "off limits" line when dealing with pre-implantation reproductive cycles. For example, artificial implantation of blastocysts has some considerable success in generating term pregnancies, which would not occur if manipulation of blastocysts (with the concomitant percentage loss of blastocysts generated and used in artificial settings) was forbidden.
I think we have to realistically recognize the ubiquity of pre-implantation reproductive cell generation as a utilitarian matter, or otherwise consign to the dustbin a great many reproductive advances in both viability and health.
Utilitarian in this context implies that a decision is made by some people with power over other people without power with respect to the human dignity and worth of the latter.
Either all human beings have rights, or only some human beings have rights. Is there such a thing as a human being without human rights?
If all human beings have rights, then either all human beings have rights simply because they are human beings, because such rights are intrinsic in human nature, in the human essence, in the human being, or all human beings have rights because some other human beings say so. There is no other logical possiblity. If the Preamble of the Declaration is any guide, the wrongness of the utilitarian approach lies in the arrogant and false presumption that human wills determine human rights. Human nature does not change, but human wills do. There is no security for any rights at all based on a conceit of some human wills saying today that all humans have rights saying tomorrow that only some have rights. History is filled with the sordid misery of that ethos.
Cordially,
Such advances make me uneasy, I will confess. But, at the end of the day, people are using technology to mimic what happens naturally. The many of the blastocysts formed the "old fashioned" way fail to implant and are lost. So there is a certain logic to that.
But I don't think that it is proper to extend that logic to medical experimentation. Creating life in the interest of creating life is one thing. Creating life in the interest of medical experimentation is another.
It is a different utilitarian argument. In one case, a woman is doing something to maximize her own utility by becoming pregnant. Whether she does this in bed or a lab does not make that much difference, really. In the case of medical experimentation, the whatever-it-is is being destroyed in the interests of societal utility. So, whereas in the first case the issue centers around indivudual freedom, in the second, the issue centers around trading off one unknowably valuable life to serve another, or perhaps many others.