Desire Utilitarianism: Contents | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26 |

Chapter 24: Cloning

This is the easiest chapter for me to write, because I wrote it a few years ago.

The creation of Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult host cell, came as such a surprise, the scientific community found itself in a realm that moral debate had not yet touched in any detail. People had not discussed the ethics of cloning, because there is no need to discuss the right and wrong of something that could not be done. Suddenly, it was being done, and a new ethical question stepped up to the spotlight.

I listened to the near unanimous criticism of cloning for about a month, then decided to write my rebuttal.

Some of the arguments I had heard against cloning were laughable, such as, “The world is crowded enough already. Though we will still allow these other people to have, 10, 15, or more children, we are going to control population growth by prohibiting others from having even 1 child of their own. I cannot imagine a person sincerely making such a grotesquely unfair proclamation.

Other arguments gave me a shock that people could actually treat these reasons as legitimate reasons for public action. Such as, “Your child may not be perfect enough for us, so we are going to make it illegal for you to have that child.”

As one of the few articles offering a defense of cloning, my article drew quite a bit of attention for a while, and became the feature article for the organization humancloning.org.

Here, I am simply going to repeat the article. It tells its own story.

Against a Prohibition on Cloning

Back when my wife, Lesley, and I thought we may be having children of our own, we had already decided on the name, if it should be a girl; Theresia.

Because of a childhood illness, the only way that Lesley can have a child that is biologically hers is through the technology associated with cloning. Doctors had told us this for a long time, but we were slow to accept it. And so we continued to hope, for a while, for a daughter, named Theresia.

The technology of cloning provides a way fulfilling those hopes, not only for us but for others in our situation. Yet, many are eager to prohibit this. If there were good reason to keep her from having her own biological child, then she would have to shrug and accept it.

But none of the reasons offered against cloning are very good. And some of the reasons we hear for prohibiting Lesley from having her own child are far more frightening than cloning itself could ever become. Because they tell us that our daughter should not exist because she may not be perfect enough for them, or to protect her from discrimination.

These reasons can be divided into nine families:

  1. Defective Child Objections
  2. Guinea Pig Objections
  3. Technological Terror Objections
  4. Slavery and Spare Parts Objections
  5. Objection of Potential Discrimination
  6. Religious Objections
  7. Identity and Sanctity of Life Objections
  8. Selfishness Objections
  9. Funny Feeling Objections

I. Defective Child Objections

A. Prohibitions on the Conception of Potentially Imperfect Children

These objections are grounded on the fact that the cloned child could be imperfect, suffering from defects as a result of the cloning technique, or the fact that the clone will carry the same “defects” that cause Lesley to be sterile.

I wonder if people making these arguments realize what they are saying, for they are arguing for a principle of law that states that “if we hold that your child may be sufficiently less than perfect, then we may prohibit you from having a child.”

Or, even more ominous, “if your child has precisely the same defects as your wife, then your child is too defective to be allowed to exist in this world.” This implies that Lesley is also too defective to be allowed to exist but managed (unfortunately?) to be born anyway — a conclusion with which both my wife and I most violently disagree.

However frightening cloning may be, it pales in comparison to the implications of living in a society whose members believe that they may prohibit the conception of a child that they judge may be inferior to the “normal” population.

However unsuccessful cloning may be, there are certain people who, through natural reproduction, are even more likely to generate defective offspring than through cloning. So, if the government assumes the authority to ban Process X whenever Process X has a sufficiently low chance of begetting offspring considered perfect enough for the government, then in some cases natural reproduction should also be outlawed.

And where the government assumes the right to decide who can have a child and what kind of child they may have based on government standards of perfection, we have stepped far closer to Aldus Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD than the technology of cloning could ever take us.

B. Medical Safety

A similar form of the argument is to view cloning as a medical procedure, and to argue that safety reasons prohibit human cloning — again substantially based on the idea that a defective offspring may result.

Here, it is important to look at the criteria for approving such things as new drugs, and what those principles imply about human cloning.

Let us assume that there is a Disease X (DX for short). Sufferers of DX typically survive about 2 years. But researchers investigate a new drug, and determine that this drug extends life expectancy to 4 years — with some moderately severe side effects (e.g., nausea).

The drug fails to provide DX sufferers with a normal human life span, and even the extra years it provides are not as high in quality as is typical for those who do not suffer from DX. Yet, we do not call the drug a failure. It is sufficient to call the drug a success that it provides DX sufferers with something of value (two additional years of life) that they can not obtain in any other way.

There are many who would like to think of cloning as a failure, but in doing so stack the deck by insisting on an unreasonable standard of success. Standards comparable to those use for drugs would hold that cloning is a success if can provide certain people with something of value that they can not obtain any other way — a child that is biologically their own. Which cloning can do.

Yet, we must also consider whether cloning, in some way, will fail in the sense that it harms Theresia, our potential daughter. Here, some speak as if bringing a clone into the world that has any defects in any way is a harm against her.

But what if the defect were as minor as one finger being 0.1 inches shorter than its counterpart on the other hand? We would not consider this to be a harm.

To see of Theresia is harmed in any way, the only reasonable question to ask is whether the defects are so severe that it is reasonable to expect that Theresia would rather not exist at all than to exist with the defect. For these truly are the only options available to her.

Let us assume an extreme case, that Theresia ages quickly and has a life expectancy of only 30 years. This is 30 years more than Theresia would otherwise have had. Far from making cloning “unsafe” and a failure, cloning becomes 15 times more successful (for Theresia) than the drug discussed above (for DX sufferers).

If cloning can not benefit Lesley (e.g., by giving her a child of her own), or can do so only by causing Theresia harm (e.g., by giving her a life which is sufficiently poor in quality that nonexistence would be preferred), then it should not be permitted. But preliminary evidence suggests that cloning will far surpass these safety criteria.

Which means that anybody who argues for a prohibition of cloning for reasons of safety, are really just using the term “safety” as doublespeak for “eugenics,” the way that Hitler used the term “euthanasia” to defend some of his practices of extermination. In fact, the speaker is simply hijacking the term to make a policy of preventing the conception of people falling short of their ideas of perfection from entering the world.

To those who still say that, in the name of safety, we should ban human cloning, there is another aspect to consider.

What will be your decision if, after a few years of research, cloning should become safer than traditional reproduction — that it should produce fewer defects and be a more reliable way of guaranteeing a healthy child?

If this should happen, would your concern with the types of defects that occur in traditional reproduction translate into a demand for a law that prohibits it, and that calls instead for anybody who seeks to have a child of their own to use the cloning procedure instead?

Or would you argue, as I do here, that the concept of ‘safety’ is being abused — that it does not provide the government with the authority to dictate who may have children and the types of children they may have?

II. Guinea Pig Objections

“Humans are not guinea pigs” is a common claim made by those who oppose cloning. However, in all morally relevant respects, this is not true.

Every one of us is an experiment; a result of a couple of people getting together in the back of a car, a hotel room, or some dark and secluded part of the house, throwing together the ingredients that created us under less than ideal conditions and with no real way of predicting what would result.

In many cases, the people who created us might not have even wanted to form a person by their actions. Though they did.

In this respect, clones will be far further from being guinea pigs than most people who are conceived through traditional methods. Which means that if the cry “humans are not guinea pigs” really has some sort of moral force, it would argue for prohibiting traditional reproduction long before it will have any applicability to cloning.

III. Technological Terror Objections

This can also be called the 10,000 Hitler objection, since it is most commonly stated as fear that someone would use the technology that gave us Theresia to create an army of Hitlers. It’s a fear generated from too much bad science fiction.

Cloned soldiers would still have to be carried to maturity by an army of mothers, and raised by an army of nannies and teachers. It would still take about two decades to come up with the first batch of useful soldiers or slaves.

Even then, getting the clones to all believe the same thing would be impossible. Neither knowledge nor experience can be cloned, and knowledge and experience heavily influences what type of person we become. To hear some people speak, one would think that Hitler’s clones would all grow up speaking German regardless of the language spoken by those around them. Just as the clone may learn a different language, he is certainly going to have different experiences, and is likely to draw different lessons from those experiences.

Another reason that cloning is a very poor tool for the creation of such an army is because a clone can never be better than the person cloned. Whereas, through selective breeding, a dictator can constantly improve its stock of slaves and soldiers.

Not surprisingly, selective breeding is exactly what you get when the government assumes the authority to dictate to its citizens who may and who may not have children based on criteria such as whether those children are likely enough to meet the government’s standards of perfection.

IV. Slavery and Spare Parts Objections

These objections hold that cloning should be prohibited on the grounds that clones will be treated as slaves or, worse, chopped up and sold as spare parts.

Both slavery and chopping up people for spare parts are possible today, without cloning. And, in fact, there have been instances of couples having a child through traditional methods in the hopes of creating a suitable donor for others who are in need of a transplant. So allowing or prohibiting cloning has nothing to do with what we need to decide about these issues. Whatever decisions we make apply to clones and traditionally conceived humans alike.

And it is simply absurd to hold that legalized cloning will lead to an irresistible force demanding that we repeal the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and a return to slavery.

Should our daughter Theresia come to be, I do not fear that she will end up a slave or harvested for spare parts. She will be our child, a fully human child — as human as my wife Lesley, with all of the rights and responsibilities due her as a member of the human race. And those who claim to be seeking to protect her from slavery really have some other motive at the core of their statements.

And should a society come into existence that is less concerned about abusing humans in this way, then those born through normal methods are in just as much danger as clones. No scientist in a laboratory has the power to create the property of “second class citizens.” Only politicians can do that.

In protecting ourselves from the possibility that some people may be given that property, it is the politician that we must keep our eye on. We must not be distracted when he points away and says “look at what the scientist is doing.”

V. Objections of Potential Discrimination

Some people have argued that we should prohibit cloning because of the possibility that clones may be subject to discrimination and prejudice. That, in the name of protecting children from these harms, cloning should not be permitted.

Let us apply this form of reasoning to other groups. What would we say to the person who came before us and said that, to protect children from the harms of prejudice and discrimination, no black person should be allowed to be conceived? Or that no more Jewish children should come into existence. We have the right to insist on this, and to pass penalties against those who would bring blacks and Jews into this world, all in the name of protecting the children.

In these cases, we instantly see the claim for what it is. These people are not putting into play some totally new weapon to be used against bigotry. They are announcing an unconditional surrender to prejudice, granting the bigots the unconditional surrender they seek by giving them a world free of the targets of their hatred.

VI. Religious Objections

These include arguments ranging from “my god does not want people to clone,” to “cloning is playing god,” to “clones will not have souls.”

A. Religious Prohibitions

First, to those who claim that their god does not want Theresia coming into this world, I say that this is between you and your god. We are not a part of your religion. You may preach, implore, and attempt to convert us, but you have no right to use the law to drag Lesley in front of your priests so that they may refuse her permission to have her own child.

Your religion may prohibit the eating of pork, but you may not prohibit grocery stores from selling it. Your religion may prohibit the use of contraceptives, but the Supreme Court ruled (Griswold v. Connecticut) that you may not prohibit the sale of birth control to those not of that religion. And your religion may prohibit the use of medical technology for anything other than broken bones, but does not grant you the right to close down all hospitals.

Cloning is just another medical technology. Your religion may deny you permission to make use of it, but not to sacrifice somebody else’s potential child on the alter of your God and prohibit others the use of that technology.

B. “Playing God”

Cloning no more involves “playing God” than other forms of reproduction, including sex. All of it, equally, creates life from life.

And where the objection is that cloning is “unnatural;” artificial insemination, surgery, and the use of antibiotics are equally unnatural, yet still permitted.

Lesley and I both live today because of the use of medical technology to defy nature. Lesley had a cancer when she was 11 years old that would have otherwise killed her — quite slowly. And my mother had a number of miscarriages before using medical technology to carry a child successfully to term. In this regard, Theresia would be carrying on a family tradition, if she comes into existence. For she, like Lesley and I, would live because advances in medical technology made it possible for her to join us.

C. No soul

I can find few claims so despicable as to hold that, should Theresia come into existence, she would be a person without a human soul or be something less than a fully human person. “Theresia has no soul” is an assertion that belongs back in the age where people sought to rationalize genocide and slavery as activities that did not victimize real people.

Theresia would be, and would be entitled to the treatment that is due anybody who is, fully human. I can well imagine playmates and adults telling Theresia that she has no soul, and I would teach Theresia that these people are as worthy of contempt as any bigot.

I would tell her of relatives who told me, when I was young, that marrying somebody of a different race and having a “half breed” child would be selfish, because it showed disregard to the suffering and rejection that the child would experience at the hands of others.

I hope that Theresia would quickly be able to understand that the moral fault lies, not with those who bring this child into the world, but with those others who refuse to accept her.

VII. Identity and Sanctity of Life Objections

Some have objected that cloning threatens their sense of identity, and assert that they find it easier to get out of bed in the morning knowing that they are unique. Others assert that cloning, by making it possible to duplicate people, will cheapen individual lives.

Both make false assumptions about what is possible through cloning.

Those who find it easier to get out of bed knowing they are unique must be grateful that they do not have an identical twin. For identical twins have much more in common than Lesley would have with Theresia. Identical twins are usually raised in the same household by the same parents, in the same culture, facing the same trends and pressures at the same times in their lives.

Yet, identical twins tend to express no misgivings about living in a world that also contains a clone.

Lesley, who underwent surgery for cancer at a young age, married me, and who (hypothetically) had herself cloned so as to have the daughter that the cancer otherwise would have prevented her from having, will still be a unique person — importantly different from any clone that might come into existence. She simply can not be duplicated by cloning.

Theresia would live in a different time, spend part of her childhood logged onto personal computers, serf the Internet, and live in a society that has the capacity to clone humans and with the understanding that she is a clone. She will be raised by a different set of parents than Lesley was.

I have no doubt that I will find it easy to tell Lesley and Theresia apart, as will our neighbors, Lesley’s co-workers, and Theresia’s classmates. And I expect Lesley and Theresia will have even less trouble knowing who is who. In short, the existence of either will in no way lessen the importance, or the uniqueness, of the other.

If you, the reader, still cannot imagine being comfortable in a world that you shared with a clone, then I suggest that you not be cloned.

VIII. Selfishness Objections

In discussing this issue, a lot of people assert that Lesley and I are selfish for wanting Theresia, particularly since so many children are waiting to be adopted.

In this, we admit that we are precisely as selfish — no more and no less — than the hundreds of millions of people each year who plan a pregnancy (whether successful or not). They, too, are faced with the choice of adopting or having a child of their own. And they choose to have a child of their own. If we are selfish, then so are they.

I challenge those who raise this objection to first go to their parents, and to those friends who have decided to have their own child, and to the parents of their friends who brought their friends into this world, and tell all of them, “You are all selfish, for you should have been required to adopt rather than bring a child into this world.”

Those who would not do this simply can be dismissed as being insincere in their criticism of us.

The same objection applies to those who assert that there are already too many people coming into the world, and we do not need another way to have children. Even if this were a sound reason for a mandatory reduction in births, it does not argue for legislation that still permits most couples to have as many children as they want, while prohibiting others from having any. It would be as fair as a tax law that states to one person “you may keep all of the money that you earn no matter how much you earn,” while saying to his neighbor “you must give up all of your money to the state no matter how little you earn.”

And it would compound the unfairness to say to one couple that “you can not have a single child because somebody else has had 15 or more and thus has crowded the Earth.”

IX. Funny Feeling Objections

Here, the arguer raises no specific objection to cloning. He simply asserts that the thought of cloning bothers him.

However, I find this “funny feeling” some have very much like the “funny feeling” certain racists get at the thought of a white person and a black person having a mixed-race child.

The feelings are a symptom of a prejudice, and history gives many examples of sentiments such as these dominating a society, affecting even otherwise good people.

In the case of cloning, this prejudice is probably acquired by too much exposure the bad science fiction, the way prejudice against mixed-race couples may be learned by too much exposure to racism.

When it comes to stating that Lesley and I should be punished if we should try to bring a child which is biologically Lesley’s own into this world, it is not unreasonable to insist on hearing a more substantive objection than “the thought of your having that child bothers me.”

X. Summary

None of this argues that we should begin cloning humans tomorrow. There is an established set of guidelines for testing new medical procedures, which restrict trials on humans pending the results of preliminary studies. Cloning should be subject to these guidelines.

Holding the science of cloning to these restrictions requires no additional legislation; rules are already in place. If lawmakers are going to make new laws that effectively prohibit certain people from procreating, they must have good reason to do so.

None of the reasons presented against cloning stand up to this weight.

  1. To argue that we may not bring Theresia into this world because she may fall short of somebody’s idea of the government’s criteria of perfection creates precisely the type of distopia cloning opponents claim to want to avoid.
  2. The claim that it is wrong to treat humans as guinea pigs applies far more strongly to the act of throwing random pieces of genetic material together through traditional reproduction than it does to cloning.
  3. Cloning is an imperfect tool for creating an army of soldiers or slaves; a far better tool is selective breeding directed by a government who holds that it may decide for its people who may have a child and the type of child they may have.
  4. There is no more of a chance that Theresia will be a slave or sold off for spare parts than there is for children conceived through traditional means.
  5. To say that a child who may suffer prejudice should not be brought into this world does not help us to fight prejudice, it grants the forces of prejudice the “final solution” they desire.
  6. “Your Theresia is offensive to our God, therefore she must not be allowed to come into this world” is a dangerous principle to accept for restricting who may have children and who may not.
  7. Having a clone will not confuse people as to their own identity, nor will it allow us to create duplicates of people in a way that puts at risk the uniqueness or the value of the person cloned.
  8. In wanting a child of our own, we are no more selfish and no more guilty of contributing to an overpopulation problem than every one of the hundreds of millions of parents planning to have their next child.
  9. “Funny feelings” certainly are not good enough reasons to make it illegal for Lesley to have her own biological child.

Some of these objections to cloning simply arise from a misunderstanding of cloning. Some are frightening in their own right.

Imagine living in a society where the people find it acceptable to tell you, “your child would be less than perfect, so you may not have that child,” or “some in society may be prejudiced against your child so to protect your child from their bigotry you may not conceive,” or ” our god is offended by your procreation, therefore you may not procreate.

“It should not be difficult to imagine such a society at all.

Surprisingly, it is here, right now, and can be heard wherever people gather to insist that cloning be banned.