cloning

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Recommended: ethical issues about human cloning

cloning

Abstract

As bioethics Leon R. Kass points out in his essay The Wisdom of Repugnance, those who defend human cloning regard themselves mainly as friends of freedom: the freedom of individuals to reproduce, the freedom of scientists and inventors to discover and devise and to foster ‘progress’ in genetic knowledge and technique."

Kass goes on to stress that in fact, a "right to reproduce" has always been a peculiar and problematic notion. Rights generally belong to individuals, but this is a right which (before cloning) no one can exercise alone. Does the right then inhere only in couples? Only in married couples? Is it a (woman’s) right to carry or deliver or a right (of one or more parents) to nurture and rear? Is it a right to have your own biological child? Is it a right only to attempt reproduction, or a right also to succeed? Is it a right to acquire the baby of one’s choice?

Critical analysis

Kass debate on human cloning has brought to the surface a glaring deficiency of bioethics. It has few if any good methods for dealing with new and novel technologies.

By that I mean those technologies where there seem to be no relevant historical precedents and where the potential benefits and harms are speculative only, not yet available for empirical testing. How might we best try to assess such technologies, and what counts as a good or bad argument for ethics and for public policy? Nor is it reasonable to insist on "empirical evidence" of benefit or harm when the scientific outcomes are still in the future and wholly speculative in nature. Such evidence could become available only when human cloning was a reality; and then it could take years or decades after that to determine whether it had been a wise move to allow the research to go forward in the first place.

The key issue here is not genetic determinism or genetic identity but the preservation of individuality — by no means the same as genetic identity. Even so-called "identical" twins are not wholly identical genetically; that is well known. More to the point here is the issue of parents trying to use children for parental ends, procreating them with traits chosen by the parents for the purr-poses of the parents, not the welfare of the children. We happily accept twins when they are born, but no parents I have heard of go out of their way to procreate twins, or turn to assisted reproduction specialists to procreate twins.

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