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CarlShulman comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
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This is a good summary of the bioethicists' argument; but I find their argument unconvincing. My suspicion is that the values of "comparably informed people" would inevitably tend to resemble those of scientists -- at least for practical purposes.
Concretely, for instance, it seems that much if not most of the opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is based on a failure to grasp the empirical fact that personhood resides in brain structure: no neurons, no person.
Maybe in principle there could still be moral arguments worth having that don't directly depend on the science; and maybe scientists would be biased toward certain stances in such arguments. But I don't think that's what's really going on here.
Bryan Caplan's research on differences of opinion between expert economists and others finds (in his datasets) that there are big effects of education and IQ, bigger than liberal or conservative ideological effects, but the latter still remain: people with graduate degrees agree more with economists, but conservative PhDs in industry and liberal PhDs in academia tend to disagree with each other.
"a failure to grasp the empirical fact that personhood resides in brain structure: no neurons, no person."
Do you think that personhood is really an 'empirical fact'? How would you empirically measure when a developing fetus or infant's (or toddler's, depending on your view of personhood) brain becomes a person without a value-laden definition? Likewise for temporary or permanent brain damage.
I wouldn't claim that current science easily resolves all questions about personhood; but it does locate the phenomenon within the brain as opposed to anywhere else. Neurons (or, more broadly, things with a similar function) are a necessary condition that may or may not be sufficient. The extent to which a fetus, toddler, or Alzheimer's patient possesses personhood may be legitimately debatable -- but the question of whether or not an embryo is a person is surely settled: it isn't.
I think you have a different concept of 'person' in mind than needed. We can define 'person' as "that which can think, reason, and has personality" or something similar (this is roughly what I think you mean by 'person'), but that isn't really relevant to the question. Like Carl said, we are looking for a value laden definition here - something to tell us whether we should use those embryos or not.
Honestly, all of this definition nonsense is misleading. We don't really care about the definition of 'person.' What we want is to sort out our values. Embryo's certainly aren't in my utility function, and that's all that matters. Defining 'person' is superfluous.
Is personhood really a binary proposition at all, or a matter of degree?
Of course, for almost any non-incoherent definition of personhood, the degree of personhood during the first trimester is roughly nil.
We need laws that incorporate continuous functions.