  A third kind of stance taken regarding identity and abortion is that  there just is no relation of significance between them. Earl Conee argues in this way, insisting that the four main attempts to  bolster some view about abortion with metaphysical conclusions fail,  and thus that the metaphysics simply makes no moral difference, a  conclusion “indicative of a general epistemic irrelevance of  metaphysics to the moral issue” (Conee 1999, 619). But just  because the various arguments fail (and Conee seems right about  that), it does not yet follow that metaphysics generally makes no  moral difference to questions about fetuses and embryos; indeed, we  have just discussed two cases in which it clearly does. As Timothy  Chappell puts it, Conee “does nothing to show that the  right metaphysical doctrines – combined of course with the right moral doctrines – could not give us genuine reason to turn one way rather than the other in debates about abortion, or  other similar debates about the extent of the moral community”  (Chappell 2000, 279). And so it is to one of those “similar  debates,” this time regarding the other end of life, that we  now turn.