More on Ethics, Human Cloning and the Distraction of What Is Natural
Although I can appreciate the complexity of the issue, I have to say that I honestly find most of the arguments on both sides of the cloning issue to be uncompelling and uninspiring. I think that most of the arguments against run afoul of arguing what is “natural” is equal to what is “ethical,” which is a logical fallacy as we’ve already discussed in previous modules. And most of the arguments for cloning seems to come down to this idea that, “because we can, we should.”
Reasons in Favor of Cloning-for-Producing-Children:
As outlined in the lecture, it’s fairly obvious why cloning so as to “reproduce individuals of great genius, talent, or beauty” is patently unethical, as is trying “to replace a loved one”, as much as it is unfair that a star athlete expect his/her non-genetically-modified offspring to grow up to be just like them, as well as the point that quite frankly, that’s not how cloning works anyway. I likewise think that the use of cloning “to obtain ‘rejection proof’ transplants” violates Kant’s requirement that people not be used as a means to an end-and no matter how much good you argue you are producing or that the parents intended to have another child anyway, the creation of a specific human, specifically for their genetic material is DEFINITELY using them as a means to an end. To grow up knowing that the main reason you-your specific you-ness and not just any child that your parents could have had-came into existence was so that you could donate a kidney to your older brother, seems to me like a horrible life-sentence.
But I also take issue with the idea that the desire for biologically related offspring is a good justification for cloning, because I see no inherent moral good to be gained from raising children that share your genetic material as opposed to those who do not. This same argument works both for couples with fertility problems as well as couples seeking to avoid genetic diseases. Why is it so f’ing important that your children’s genetic material matches your own? Does this somehow magically make them not your children? Don’t parents of adopted children, of blended families, of children created through donor-sperm or donor-eggs, etc., love and cherish those children just as much as the parents of “traditional” nuclear families love their “naturally begotten” children?
I have to point out that I generally take issue with the suggestion, both in the discussion of cloning as well as abortion and last week’s discussion of anencephalic infants, that arguments against them somehow pave the way to intolerance towards existing disabled individuals. I understand that disabled rights activists have real fears about their hard-won rights, but I believe that this constitutes a slippery slope fallacy, not a legitimate argument. To say that the termination of a potential life, or the prevention of a potential life, or the termination of an organism that never had a chance for human life, is the same as denying rights to or stealing rights from already existing peoples is not convincing to me. (If someone can articulate how the one leads to the other, I’m all ears.)
On that note, I find “The Goodness of Existence” argument to be flawed, because there is a marked and significant difference between saying to an existing being, “you ought not to have been born,” and saying that a theoretical situation ought not to be brought to fruition because it would unethical to impose such a life on anyone.
As the reading states, “Yes, existence is a primary good, but that does not diminish the ethical significance of knowingly and willfully putting a child in grave physical danger in the very act of giving that child existence. It is certainly true that a life with even severe disability may well be judged worth living by its bearer: ‘It is better to have been born as I am than not to be here at all.’”-Though, it is worth noting, that if such an individual never had existed, they would not have had any such thought in the first place.-“But if his or her disability was caused by behavior that could have been avoided by parents (for example, by not drinking or using drugs during pregnancy, or, arguably, by not cloning), many would argue that they should have avoided it. A post-facto affirmation of existence by the harmed child would not retroactively excuse the parental misconduct that caused the child’s disability, nor would it justify their failure to think of the child’s well-being…” (Emphasis mine.)
Furthermore, I would invoke the primary and only ethically justifiable limitation that can be imposed on individual liberties: when it imposes on the liberties of others, to argue against the idea that cloning is a human freedom that should not be limited. The authors argue that procreation is perhaps the one human behavior that cannot be categorized solely as an act of human freedom, in that it is the only one wherein the “free acts” of the person or persons produces by default a situation that is imposed on the unconsenting “victim” (the child) specifically because the act was pursued with that intent, rather than an unintended consequence. However, I acknowledge that this argument does have further implications that spread beyond the question of cloning, to the question of whether one ought to have children at all, that has the potential for dramatic misuse.
Arguments Against Cloning for Producing Children
However much I find many of the arguments in favor of cloning to be insufficient, many of the arguments against cloning, in fact, even my own gut response of “ugh!” and images of “A Brave New World” or various Sci-Fi scenes parading the failed science experiments of cloning through my head, seem to hinge on this idea that cloning escapes a “natural” human process and therefore shouldn’t be allowed. Although it is true that human reproduction is normally produced through sexual exchange of genetic material, I will point out that nature has created all sorts of ways to reproduce. Some of which are sexual, such as flowers that exchange genetic material through pollination to create new and distinct offspring, and others that are asexual, such as bacteria and other single-celled organisms. And even some that are somehow asexually-sexual? For example the banana slug, as a true hermaphrodite, is capable of having sex and spawning offspring with itself (although this is not its primary/preferred method of reproduction.)
The argument of what is natural only holds water if we are concerned about the risks of being completely ignorant of the repercussions of genetic manipulation, or, the social risks of producing superior vs. inferior humans (see, again: A Brave New World.)
There is a whole argument about the difference between “making” a child and “begetting” one that suffers from this flaw. “Yet a child results, arriving on its own, mysterious, independent, yet the fruit of the embrace.” This is, to put it mildly, complete hogwash. The creation of life via pregnancy is scientifically not very mysterious at all, and is entirely dependent on (technological advances not withstanding) copulation between two fertile individuals, but is not at ALL dependent on there being any love OR consent involved. Nor, point of fact, is the statement that “Even were the child wished for, and consciously so, he or she is the issue of their love, not the product of their wills” remotely accurate. Children are created all the time (the U.S. has one of the highest teen pregnancies of the developed world) without being intended, but conversely, children are created quite often specifically through the intent and exercise of wills by very, ah, determined parents.
Look, I think there is a great danger in over-emphasizing the “importance” of “natural” procreation, especially as a central keystone to our whole society-this is the argument that is used against gay marriage, against divorce, against contraception, etc., and it’s as wrong in those arguments as it is here. Life may be wonderful and we would all (generally) prefer having our lives than not, but to be fair, the whole act of procreation really is just not that “wonderous.”
For starters, we have already separated procreation from (hetero)-sexual coupling in a number of fundamental ways. Through contraception we have de-emphasized procreation as a primary purpose and function of sex. And through IVF we have further disconnected the idea that babies have to come out of sexual intercourse. (And even if we question the ethics behind the practice of IVF in general, and determine that it IS unethical, it is not likely to be because IVF makes non-lab-based procreation pointless.)
The Council doesn’t limit it’s reasoning to the actual creation point, however, but also supposes a sort of, grandiose image of parenting and childrearing that is simply unrealistic. “In natural procreation, two individuals give life to a new human being whose endowments are not shaped deliberately by human will, whose being remains mysterious, and the open-endedness of whose future is ratified and embraced.”-anybody who’s had parents, met parents, or been parents, knows this is patently false-“Parents beget a child who enters the world exactly as they did-as an unmade gift, not as a product. Children born of this process stand equally beside their progenitors as fellow human beings, not beneath them as made objects.” This is a beautiful sentiment, one that may even be a good ideal to hold, but any honest review of human history can see that we have not, as a rule, universally given future generations the “dignity and freedom” to stand as equals with past generations without, as they say, strings attached. The authors further illustrate their delusion with this: “We would learn to receive the next generation less with gratitude and surprise than with control and mastery.” The “control and mastery” of our children to mold them most appropriately into continuations of ourselves, is a fairly time-honored tradition amongst human societies. So this is just pure naiveté.
There is a fundamental difference between saying, “look, I think a widespread use of cloning for reproduction may in fact imperil our species due to genetic drift and homogenization,” and the argument that cloning will somehow completely dismantle our society because it will break all the “natural bonds” between parents and children. These so-called “natural bonds” between parents and children, nay, between husband and wife or between shopkeeper and worker, have changed many times throughout history, and to fear continued change is neither rational nor really good ethical discourse.
The only logically sound argument against cloning for reproduction hinges on potential harm:
· Immediate harm to the human-subjects of cloning experiments, surrogate mothers as well as any possible resulting infants,
· And, long-term harm to the species through genetic tampering
The second is a hypothetical, and hinges itself on a number of points, like cloning ever becoming a viable means of reproduction in the first place, and then it’s becoming a widespread practice which is itself unrealistic due to the probable expense involved. But the first emphasizes how likely impossible it will ever be to reduce the risk of harm to the child-that-would-be to the necessary levels to make such experiments ethical to begin with.
And it’s on this point, and only this point, that I am comfortable taking the position that cloning for reproduction is unethical.
(There is a third point, about the potential for eugenics which cloning technology may enable that the authors raise, to which I would also consider a potential harm by way of potentially creating a new order of “racism” that becomes unethical. But the fact is that cloning itself, is not the same thing as genetic manipulation, which is why I do not include it in harms that cloning itself poses.)