Morality of Human Cloning

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Recommended: Arguments against the cloning

The novel Brave New World presents us with a vision of a future where human beings are no longer born the “natural” way but are rather manufactured in identical batches to certain specifications. Where concepts like “mother” and “father” are scatological and children are taught only to keep the order and complete their predetermined occupations. By the end of the novel Mr. Huxley has us thankful that such a world is beyond our grasp. However, with the successful cloning of a Scottish sheep named Dolly, images of a Brave New World became so much closer to reality. Even just the word clone can summon dark images of lines of identical individuals with bar codes tattooed on their necks walking in lock-step fashion and it is due in no small part to the creative minds behind works of science fiction that cloning is imagined as being a harbinger of a copacetic and unfeeling society where people are manufactured and common morals have been replaced with machine interpreted laws. It is no surprise then that cloning, having been realized in the present, has been met with fear, discrimination, and repugnance.

Leon Kass argues that our initial repugnance at cloning is due to an intrinsic want to preserve natural law. Kass explains that repugnance and fear are the natural reactions to transgression of the natural order and contain wisdom beyond our immediate understanding. Kass even goes so far as to conclude that only children born from sex could be considered fully human as any other genesis for a human being is wholly unnatural and wrong. According to Kass all children are born from a loving couple who have no motivations in having a child other than the joy of children though merely the fact that children have been born from rape or bec...

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...ssue of cloning and thus it is a preprogrammed prejudice which highlights the real problem with cloning, society.

Cloning offers not only a chance for abuse but also for great advances. Even just the knowledge gained from cloning so advances our understanding of genetic information that in the future diseases such as Alzheimer's could become as polio is today. Many of the advances in science which have seen their abuses have also had their glorious triumphs; where IVF can be abused it also has allowed couples to bear children when they could not in the usual way. In conclusion I feel that cloning as it matures will have the potential to let people, who can not otherwise, reproduce as well as many other yet to be seen applications so long as we as society can come to terms with our own prejudices and learn to accept that genetics do not wholly determine our futures.

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